The orginal song is collected from Youtube
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tT7MKftgXAY).

Abdul Hai Dewan is a living legend. His devotion for Drunken Poet Rajjak, earned him the title Half-Matal (Half Drunken). He is also an adopted son of Matal Rajjak.

Half - Matal 2.2

Emerged as an ethnographic experiment, Kokila Rap, a hip hop collective, draws inspiration from the critical discursive and argumentative tradition of Islam and other religions in Bengal, in which music, songs and poetry work to sustain the resistance temporality of ancestrality and to witness the pain, suffering and loss of life against the structural violence and mass amnesia of the state. Kokila Rap seeks to exploit the performative space of musicality in the field of anthropology as a modality of co-evalness, conversation, communication and co-production with the Others. It is to forge a new soundscape through highlighting ordinary language, subaltern sensibilities and a different kind of politics beyond the realm of ‘civil’.

Shaiji Lalon One

This tune is adapted from a much famous song of Matal Rajjak Dewan, ‘A little wine wouldn’t get you drunk’, sung by Half-Matal Rajjak. This song examined the place of ‘alchohol’ in Islam. Although, being drunk is considred forbidden in Islam by orthodox interpretation, Rajjak polemically argued, the quest of search of prophet Mohammed and Jesus Crist is so vast and deep for human beings, which can be compared with the state of being drunk and drowned. The orginal song is collected from Youtube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmtBoO9W4rQ). 

Abdul Hai Dewan is a living legend. His devotion for Drunken Poet Rajjak, earned him the title Half-Matal (Half Drunken). He is also an adopted son of Matal Rajjak.

Half Matal Wine (click for description)

This tune is sampled from Matal Razzak’s highly philosophical song ‘The elephant of your lust has gone mad’, in which he critically examines the relation between self, desire, and destruction. The original song is collected from Youtube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KI3SJGYCuc8).

Known as Matal Kobi ‘Drunken Poet’, the late Rajjak Dewan is such a legend from the periphery of Dhaka city that working classes and urban poor will never forget him. In the 1980s, he forged a resistance through music against patriarchal ideology, religious and secular orthodoxies. However, it would be misleading to think of his resistance through the individualized notion of heroic agency. He followed a critical Islamic tradition in which the idea of ‘sovereign self’ is undermined in favor of questions of ethics, justice, equity, class, caste and gender. However, Matal Rajjak Dewan is equally renowned for experimentation with religious and cultural amalgamation in his music, philosophy and life-style.

Matal DrunkenPeot (click for description)

This tune is sampled from one of Rajib Kana's untitled songs, in which he reminds us that he has a great voice, but nobody to back him up.  The original song is collected from Youtube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKu6Ggpkjvw). 

Rajib Kana (Rajib, the Blind) is a street musician from the northern division of Bangladesh. Rajib, who is destitute, blind and crippled, uses an almunium water pot to create sound to which he sings. His songs meticulously capture the everyday struggle of his life. As anthropologist Veena Das argued, the healing of the pain works through everyday language, as when someone is given a home in the language by recognition to the pain someone undergoes. He also frequently draws on legendary holy figures and great saints in South Asia to situate himself in a living tradition.

Tribute To Rajib Kana (click for description)

What the Kokila Rap collective wants to do is to emphasize on the necessity to witness the pain and sufferings of those who are largely neglected by modern civil politics, and to uncover the link between the existing tradition of singing within the tradition of Islam, which, however, goes beyond any communal boundary to create a subalternized notion of artistry. It wants to enable the researcher, the participants of the collective, and the field interlocutors to move collectively to create a form of distinct musicality, weaving through past and present, that is futuristic in its ambitious combination of technology, affect, and a tradition.

KOKILA Rap Collective

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