Modern Songs of Anjan Dutta (Kolkata): A Semantic, Discursive, and Inclusive Study

This study offers a comprehensive critical examination of the modern Bengali songs of Anjan Dutta, a seminal cultural figure from Kolkata whose musical oeuvre has significantly shaped urban Bengali popular music since the late twentieth century. Positioned at the intersection of urban folk, modern songwriting, and socio-cultural commentary, Anjan Dutta’s songs articulate the emotional, spatial, and ideological contours of metropolitan life in post-liberalization Bengal. Drawing on semantic analysis, discursive theory, and inclusive cultural studies, this paper investigates how meaning is constructed, circulated, and negotiated within Dutta’s lyrical and musical texts. Semantically, the research explores how Dutta’s songs deploy everyday language, urban imagery, memory, and affect to produce layered meanings around love, alienation, nostalgia, and existential reflection. His lyrics often transform Kolkata’s streets, neighborhoods, and social interactions into symbolic sites of belonging and loss, rendering the city both a lived reality and a metaphorical landscape. Discursively, the study situates Dutta’s music within broader conversations on modernity, youth culture, and resistance to commercialized mainstream aesthetics. His songs function as cultural narratives that challenge dominant musical norms while articulating alternative urban subjectivities rooted in personal experience and collective memory. From an inclusive perspective, this research highlights the polysemic reception of Anjan Dutta’s music across diverse audiences—spanning generations, social classes, and national boundaries within the Bengali-speaking world. The paper argues that Dutta’s songs create inclusive cultural spaces by accommodating multiple interpretations and emotional identifications, thereby fostering translocal and cross-border cultural connections between Kolkata and other Bengali cultural spheres, including Dhaka. Overall, this study positions Anjan Dutta’s modern songs as significant cultural texts that transcend entertainment, operating instead as reflective, dialogic, and inclusive artifacts of contemporary Bengali urban life. By integrating semantic depth, discursive context, and inclusive reception, the paper contributes to broader scholarship on South Asian popular music, urban cultural studies, and meaning-making in modern lyrical traditions.