:: Books Plus

The bauls of Bengal

By Pramita Bose

They are the wandering minstrels of Bengal. Clad in a foot-length guduri (saffron robe) with a single-stringed instrument in hand called ektara and ghungur (tinkling bell) on one ankle, the Bauls are the country singers of the east.

While their western counterparts swear by their vagrant, intoxicating hippie culture, the Bauls of Bengal indulge into earthy music and ethnic addictives to keep themselves kindled. One can spot these travelling troubadours in thick numbers when boarding trains running between Kolkata and North Bengal. After the trains chug out of Kolkata to pick up speed in the Baul territory of Bengal — dotted with stations like Bolpur, Shantiniketan, Sainthia, Burdwan and Rampurhat — the community strums the ektara to produce the eternally lilting strains that tug at the heartstrings of the daily commuters. Their melodies are about life and death, apart from regional folklores and religious devotion.

The trademark music of the Bauls has been made famous on the global map — especially in the West during the decade of 1960s — by reputed artiste Purna Das Baul. He had the rare fortune to find high-profile endorsers in the cult American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan and the world-renowned folk-singer Joan Baez.

Later on, joined by Subal Das Baul and fusionistic Paban Das Baul, the baulsphere gained an all-new pulsating beat and techno tempo to take the musicscape by storm. Author-cum-composer Mimlu Sen pays tribute to her association with the Baul singers, particularly Paban in Baulsphere, published by Random House India. When the book was released in Kolkata recently, Paban swayed the audience with his mesmerising chants.

The French-Bangla association goes back a long way. Little wonder then that Sen selected Paris as a perfect haven for her creative cravings to flower. It is in Paris where, after witnessing a musical performance by the three mystic minstrels of Bengal, Sen tripped back to her hometown Kolkata and discovered the itinerant life of the Bauls. Through festivals, witch-sightings and encounters with the tantrics, she could weave an intimate portrait of the Bauls living in rural pockets of Bengal.

Having written a rich and startlingly honest narrative of her jaunts with the Bauls and her own growth as a musician, Sen decided to abandon her carefree life in Paris, when one fine day, by the sheer stroke of luck, she happened to watch a performance rendered by a Baul group. "I was at once enchanted by the mysticism of the minstrels of Bengal who entertain through their soulful songs that keep lingering in one’s ears, long after their recitals are over," she says. "I bumped into Paban around 25 years ago in Paris and ever since, there was no looking back. The first meeting trailed off into several other tête-à-têtes and the bonding grew deeper and stronger by the day to buzz around Baul music and its seething possibilities to proliferate into other symphonic genres," she recollects.

Incidentally at that time, Paban was a diligent protégé of the pioneering master music-maker Purna Das. And this guru-shishya connection further coaxed the former to accompany his mentor to the French Riviera on invitation from Radio France in 1980. "The occasion was a 1979 French documentary film on the Bauls of Bengal titled Le Chant Des Fou (Songs of the Madmen), that brought Das to the country. It was then that his close attachment to Paris had started sowing its seeds in his veins and he gradually became fond of the city,’’ she says.

Sen returned to her roots in Kolkata and traversed across the heartlands of the verdant countryside of Bengal, with the maverick Baul singer for company. Both the melody-maker and his Muse then flocked to the famous Baul mela (fairground) at Kenduli, besides sauntering to Shantiniketan and Agrodwip. Living a nomadic lifestyle and learning their quintessential music and musings, the two of them soaked in the vagaries of the Baul cult as much as they could. Sen encountered the tribals and the tantrics, "sexo-yogic secrets" and strange things such as a "catfish that climbs up the trees".

In her tell-all debut, Sen unfolds a hitherto locked chapter of her life. The Bauls are the gregarious Bedouins of the East who make for a fascinating subject to every creative mind. This memoir stands out for its enriching colourful anecdotes, engrossing history and plentiful passages on the soul-stirring music of the Bauls.

Born and brought up in Shillong, Sen’s ears got attuned to all kinds of music that trickled in via records and radiowaves. "In the early 1950s, when I was too little to even understand the lyrical depths and nuances of this folksy flavour with an unassuming fragrance, my mother insisted that I should better develop a taste for my inherited culture and inculcate its historical ethnicity. I should instil a keen interest in the genre, that has been essentially drawn from the bowers of our sweet-scented desi soil. I was taught to embrace the Baul strains as affectionately as the regal, eclectic notes of Rabindra Sangeet, typical of a Bengali household. I grew up on music and the music flowed into my soul. When I met Paban and the other Baul singers, I went back to the good old golden memories I had in mind," she says.

Having travelled for ages with the Baul bards in the realm of indigenous Baul gaan as well as the macrocosmic world music, Sen feels that this intermingling of both the East and the West has possibly bridged the divide between the Bangla beats and the French euphony. "In 2005, I wanted to write on the two of us. I expressed my urge to jot down our shared experiences and escapades into delightful snippets. I used to maintain a diary in English and penned down the people I frequently met with, the vibes we exchanged, plus the pebbles of experiences I got to gather on my pathway. The world is my oyster. I feel at home wherever I’ve headed for and halted for a repose," she says.

The multi-faceted Sen doubles up as a translator, musician, music producer and composer. She has been writing and producing in music, theatre and cinema since 1983. She collaborates with Paban on all his recordings, performing with and managing his group on its concert tours around the world. She divides her time between Montreuil-sur-mer in northern France and Kolkata. But it is her extraordinary experiences that make Baulsphere a joy to read.