Far yet actively connected to Bangladeshi music

Chanchal Khan has been away from Bangladesh for over two decades, as his past profession with the UN took him to places, thus depriving him of contributing to the arena of Rabindra Sangeet in Bangladesh as intimately as he would have wished to. Trained by exponents of Rabindra Sangeet, such as Sanjida Khatun, Zahidur Rahim, Wahidul Haque, and Debabrata Biswas in Kolkata, Chanchal Khan has been unusually passive in promoting himself. He is a ‘self-imposed prisoner’, as Abdul Ahad remarked once. Chanchal Khan owes his music pursuits to his friend for many years, Sadi Mohammad, an accomplished Rabindra Sangeet singer and a trainer who inspired Chanchal Khan to ‘return to music’ after a long pause. That was in the late ’80s. He has been a member of ‘Rabiraag’, a front-line Rabindra Sangeet institution in Bangladesh.