Rezwana Choudhury Bannya
Rezwana Choudhury Bannya রেজওয়ানা চৌধুরী বন্যা | |
|---|---|
 Performing Rabindra Sangeet in Science City, Kolkata on 9 May 2011 | |
| Background information | |
| Born | January 13 [1] Rangpur, Bangladesh [1] |
| Origin | Dhaka |
| Genres | Rabindra Sangeet |
| Occupation(s) | singer, associate professor[2] |
| Instrument(s) | vocal, harmonium, esraj |
| Website | www |
Rezwana Choudhury Bannya (Template:Lang-bn) is a Bangladeshi Rabindrasangeet singer. She is often referred by her nickname Bannya. She is one of the protégés of Kanika Banerjee.
Early life
Bannya has been singing from a very early age and was born into a Bengali and influential aristocratic family. According to an autobiographical account published in an online journal[which?] in 2001, as long as she remembered she dreamt of learning Rabindrasangeet at Visva-Bharati University, the university founded up by Rabindranath Tagore. Bannya completed her initial training from Chhayanot in Bangladesh, she wanted to study at Visva Bharati. However, she recounts that she had no intention of making a career out of music, and rather thought she would return to Bangladesh to get a degree in Economics. In the interim she had been admitted to the Bulbul Academy but her training there was cut short in 1971 by the Bangladesh Liberation War. At Visva Bharati, exponents such as Kanika Banerjee, Nilima Sen, Ashesh Bandopadhyay and Santideb Ghosh were her mentors. In addition, she learned other forms of Bengali music such as the folk Kirtan and the classical Tappa. Among instruments, she can play the harmonium and the esraj.
Career
Bannya is currently an associate professor in the Department of Music at the University of Dhaka.[2] She also founded Shurer Dhara, a school for learning music in Dhaka. She acts as the team leader of a project named Music for Development - integration of deprived children into society - which is an initiative of Shurer Dhara. Shurer Dhara, the School of Music in Dhaka was founded in 1993 by Rezwana Choudhury Bannya who is an accomplished exponent of Rabindra Sangeet- the music of the renowned Bengali poet and the Nobel Laureate, Rabindranath Tagore. Bannya is also a senior member of the Faculty of Music and Drama at the University of Dhaka. A distinguished alumna of Visva-Bharati, the well-known Indian university founded by Tagore, she established the school and modelled it after Tagore’s vision of education. In the following 18 years, Shurer Dhara established itself as a premier music school with an ever increasing enrolment of pre-school beginners. The school applies the scientifically proven theory that early musical training helps develop faculty for learning language and thinking creatively. The core diploma is given to those who complete the full 5-year course.
Shurer Dhara, fully participates in the cultural life of the community by giving regular performances and sponsoring the production of concerts and musical soirees throughout the year. Its annual open-air programme observing the Bengali Year-End is a spectacular presentation to a gathering of over 2000 audience/spectators many of them are resident members of the international community in Dhaka. An array of Bangla music, dance, poetry and discourses are given by the students, alumni, faculty members of Shurer Dhara and other prominent cultural personalities of Bangladesh. Its students, teachers and alumni are invited to perform in major social and cultural events at home and abroad. For example, in December 2009, the Shurer Dhara student-faculty team performed in a spectacular ensemble of music with an international orchestra made up of 70 artistes from 15 different countries.
Music for Development, after eighteen years of lessons learnt from dedicated work in preparing young minds to learn the sensitivity and aptness of the disciplines of music, Shurer Dhara has recently taken on social and civil projects under a new initiative called Music for Development. As the arts have always been the means of recording human experience, it can help create thoughtful, inventive and creative citizenry. Last year, the first social project entitled Music for Development : Integration of Deprived Children into Society was launched with the sponsorship of United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and its Government of Bangladesh partner Urban Partnership for Poverty Reduction Project (UPPR). The Project recruited a cohort of children from socially deprived families of a slums area of Dhaka and placed them in an environment of cognitive development to be given lessons in music, art, language, social awareness, computes training and other subjects of a newly-designed curriculum. The students are being developed as people of character and not just people with only a set of skills to earn a livelihood. Educational institutions today put great pressure on the youth to become primarily professionals with strict specialization which narrows their horizon as complete human beings. Shurer Dhara believes while the world needs to fill the gap in human capital needs by specific skills, there is acute shortage of individuals with the breadth of knowledge and perception to attain wholeness as human beings and consensual leadership behaviour. Shurer Dhara’s extended social remit now is to apply Tagore’s philosophy of education in preparing the younger generation to become thoughtful citizens in a diverse democracy.
Awards
In 2002 Bannya was awarded the first Ananda Sangeet Puroshkar for being the best female Rabindra Sangeet artist, a feat she repeated the following year.