Subhendu Biswas (In top picture) befriends a dog after mimicking its bark. The harbola is also adept at imitating the roar of a tiger (below) or a storm. (Arka Das)

Everything about him is fake, claims Shubhendu Biswas. A pacemaker runs his heart, all his teeth are false, his grey hair gets a coat of black every other week and he wears thick-rimmed spectacles to help his failing vision.

It is no coincidence then that his art is one that specialises in imitation. Biswas is a horbola — a mimicker of sounds, natural or otherwise. Coined by Rabindranath Tagore, “horbola” has its etymological root in the phrase “Harek rokom buli bole jey (One who speaks many languages)”.

At 68, Biswas is one of the last artistes of an art form that is perhaps on its last legs. With over a thousand sounds in his oeuvre — ranging from bird cries to a tiger’s roar to an approaching storm — Biswas has been entertaining audiences for over four decades.

Born and brought up in Kharagpur, Biswas was “good at singing”, till he shifted focus to the predictable Bengali household obsessions with the tabla and theatre. The stage made a quick local hero out of him with his penchant for playing comic characters. Picking up sounds and mimicking those was a part of his act.

With a five-year training course, the gateway to a secure job at the Cossipore Gun & Shell Factory, Biswas shifted base to north Calcutta, near Dunlop, in the late Sixties. The drudgery of routine life, though, couldn’t bog him down; he continued playing the tabla around town. One such do at Mahajati Sadan in 1970 was to change the course of his life.

“The programme for the evening comprised a children’s play and song-and-dance routines. In the break between the two acts, as the actors were busy changing make-up, I did a little stand-up comedy jig, entertaining the kids with the cries of dogs and cats,” Biswas recalls with a smile.

After the show, he was called by well-known author Swapan Buro (Akhil Neogi), who praised Biswas’s “horbola skills profusely” and asked him whether he would be interested in performing in Delhi. “Till then I had no idea what the term horbola meant. However, I did go on to perform, for only 10-15 minutes, in a series of programmes in Delhi. Surprisingly, newspapers praised my mimicry skills,” says Biswas.

Soon after his return, Biswas met and became a pupil of Jahar Roy. The legendary actor led Biswas on to another legend: ‘Horbola’ Rabin Bhattacharya, one of the pioneers of the art form in the country. “Rabinbabu was given the title horbola by Rabindranath Tagore himself in 1935. As a 10-year old boy mimicking bird cries, he caught Gurudev’s attention and had never looked back,” says Biswas.

Once under Bhattacharya’s guidance, Biswas, too, never looked back. “I can recreate almost any natural sound with my voice,” he smiles. He goes on to add: “Horbola and mime are two of the oldest forms of performing art known to man. To be a good horbola, one needs to possess good acting skills as well.”

Touring all over the country from the early Seventies, Biswas went on to perform at the Toyama International Youth Theatre Festival at Japan in 1989. His performance for the Japanese audience was translated by celebrated Tagore expert Kazuo Azuma. The same year, Biswas toured Canada as part of an artiste’s troupe drawn up by the state information and broadcasting department. He went back to Japan a couple of years later to perform in a series of shows.

Does the art form he so loves have any future? “The art of horbola primarily flourished in Bengal. I have met mimicry artistes from other countries but their forte is to recreate mechanical sounds,” explains Biswas.

To revive the art form, he had founded the West Bengal Horbola Academy in 1985, which now operates from his Tobin Road residence, and wrote a book on teaching the art form in 2001 (Horbola Shiksha O Natyashilper Prayog). Some of the better known horbola practitioners are graduates from this school: Swapan Dutta, Biswanath Chowdhury, Prashanta Roy, Jeet Mukherjee, Adhir Goswami, Ram Chattaraj. The list, though, finishes off in one hand.

Walking down the stairs from his Tobin Road apartment, we ask Biswas how does one know if the animal cries he/she has been practising are near perfect.

“Well, if the animal answers your call, your job is done,” he smiles, summoning a murder of crows in a matter of minutes.

Nuggets about his identity as a horbola are equally entertaining: in 2004, as he underwent a cardiac surgery, his doctor quietly asked him to mimic a dog barking.

Biswas did, throwing the operating theatre staff into a tizzy searching for a dog!