Watch Tajdar Junaid’s Bengali Folk Story ‘Ekta Golpo’ Come to Life

When Kolkata-bred, Mumbai-based troubadour Tajdar Junaid’s album What Colour Is Your Raindrop was released in 2013, each song began getting its own due and even six years on, the cinematic, evocative record remains a staple.

The country-ish Bengali folk song “Ekta Golpo” from the album has just received renewed attention with a music video made by Bengaluru-based art and design firm Pigeon and Co. and chief animator Esha Agarwal. While the song itself was composed by Bengali artists Ajit Pandey and Ajitesh Bandhopadhyay for regional theater in the Seventies, it has its roots in German playwright Bertolt Brecht’s play The Good Woman of Setzuan. Junaid adds, “We’d earlier reworked it for a friend’s short film, that was a very raw version. It was six years ago, even before the album.” The one that made it to the album, however, employed lap steel guitar and glockenspiel.

The song tells a story of a king and his eight horses, among whom one is lazy. In the video, however, there’s a different narrative told through claymation and paper mâché models of a kingdom somewhere in the hills, which is suddenly faced by a volcano eruption. Around four years in the making, the collaboration between Junaid and Pigeon and Co. was clearly one based on patience. Junaid says, “It just so happened that it took much longer than we had expected. It’s a very time involving process. At the end of the day, we have something that we’re all proud of it.”

Pigeon and Co., who were working on an indie music video for the first time, were influenced by the Brecht origin, Japanese animation, Bengali folk tale and Junaid’s arrangement of the song. Co-founder Vipin Babu says, “During the day, they were doing the commercial work and poster work and whenever they had time, they had a studio where they had set up all these characters. At one point, our entire studio was filled with these models.”

Watch the video for “Ekta Golpo” below.