BENGALURU: Festival time equals food coma. While many households are dishing out various recipes, vocalist Sawan Dutta is making it easy to make those Bengali delicacies at home, with her songs. Dutta, who is known for converting various recipes into unique songs, is doing a recipes series of Durga Pujo called Pet Pujo, which is a compilation of Bengali delicacies.
Dutta recently moved to Bengaluru from Mumbai for personal reasons. Now, the singer is shuffling between two cities. The series features recipes of some evergreen items without which any Durga Pujo feast would be incomplete.
“Khichuri, labra, beguni, chutney, payesh, mangsho, maachh – ilish or other fish, shukto, lucchi-aloor dom, a whole range of sweets on Bijoya – these are all-time favourites. I’ve created recipe songs for quite a few of these - and I hope to complete the ones I haven’t featured yet over the coming years,” says Dutta, who made this series in collaboration with Londonbased Bengali restaurant, Chourangi .
She tried t o present the recipes with “quirkiness and humour” to ensure that a global audience can connect with it. The first time that Dutta created the Pet Pujo series was in the year 2018. Again, she did the same during the pandemic. Although she has a unique sense of humour and the ability to put a song together, she ment ions i t to be qui t e challenging.
It takes about a week or two to write the song, compose the melody, create the musical arrangement, record the vocals and instruments, mix and master and finish the audio soundtrack. “These are some of the most difficult songs I’ve written because it’s not enough to sing and record them, one has to make sure that the lyrics if followed, will result in a dish that is perfectly cooked,” explains Dutta, who personally loves the Beguni and Chutney songs for their compositions.
Dutta started The Metronome in 2016, as an outlet for her personal music that was meant to run parallel with her commercial musical projects. “I never dreamt that it would become this popular worldwide,” says Dutta.