आर्नोल्ड एड्रियन बेक (ए. ए. बेक)

Arnold Adriaan Bake read Sanskrit at Leiden and came to Santiniketan in 1925 with his wife Cornelia Keesje Timmers. They stayed for years. Rabindranath named them Aruni and Karuna, and Bake learnt the songs the way the ashram learnt them, by sitting and singing, before writing them down in Western staff notation. He took his Leiden doctorate in 1930 on Indian music.

He then spent three decades recording. From 1931 he carried a cylinder machine and later a camera through Bengal, Assam, Nepal, south India and what is now Bangladesh, taking down village song, Santal music, Baul singing and temple ritual — some of the earliest field recordings made anywhere in South Asia. He accompanied Rabindranath to Java in 1927.

From 1948 he taught Indian music at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. The recordings are now split between the British Library Sound Archive and the ARCE archive of the American Institute of Indian Studies in Gurgaon, and have been repatriated to the villages they came from.