When I was studying Bengali literature at the university town of Shantiniketan, in the arid and sunny district of Birbhum, West Bengal, I was living in the rural outskirts close to a village that is densely populated by Bauls, the so-called mystic lovers (B. Bhattacarya 1992), lonely minstrels and Tantric troubadours (A. Dasgupta 1977) of Bengal. I soon started to appreciate and learn Baul songs from the musicians who lived in the surrounding area; particularly, from a warm-hearted Baul performer whose name is Sannyasi Das Baul, with whom I first learned to play the khamak and memorize songs. Among the songs the performers were teaching me, many bore the bhanita (colophon) of Bhaba Pagla (Bhaba Pagla): a songwriter and spiritual teacher from East Bengal with a great sense of humor. The name of this composer appeared again and again, not only in the last couplets of the songs performed, but also in the Bauls' personal life stories. For instance, many Bauls used to pay regular visits, or even permanently resided, at the ashram (Ben. asram) of Kalna (Bardhaman distr.). where Bhaba Pagla spent most of his life on the Indian side of Bengal.3 Furthermore, numerous Baul singers and practitioners took initiation with the mantra Bhaba Pagla used to give, either from him directly or from his eldest disciples. Most of the Bauls respect Bhaba Pagla as a mahajan, an enlightened teacher, and publicly show their devotion by displaying Bhaba Pagla's image on the top of their ektara: the one-stringed drone instrument, held in the singer's right hand, that is so iconic of Baul music (Capwell 1986: 89-93).
Traveling around and visiting various gatherings of Bauls and Fakirs, such as the annual melas (fair or gathering) at Agradwip, Sonamukhi, Jaydev, Sriniketan, and a number of smaller performances, I soon realized that, in the oral repertoire of songs stored in the performers' memory, Bhaba Pagla's songs have a very consistent presence, and indeed constitute a central part of it. His compositions and the nature of their performance are profoundly rooted in the history of Bengal and in the history of unorthodox Hindu movements at the border between India and Bangladesh. The fortune of this music among expatriated Hindus from East Bengal and the absence of this oeuvre from previous works on Bauls and Bengali folk-songs has to do with the cultural politics of representation at play in the crossroad of music, history and power. This study aims to explore the relations that link the songs of love and ecstasy of a subversive Bengali Guru, their historical and religious context, and the dynamics of socio-cultural power at work in the composer-performer-audience- patron negotiation.
1 Why Songs, and Why Bhaba Pagla's Songs?
In Scripture in India-Towards a Typology of Word in Hindu Life, Thomas Coburn (1984) critiqued the prevailing conception of Hindu "scripture". Coburn pointed out that the definition of what constitutes Hindu scripture is Christian-biased and literary. Written texts, he argues, should really be considered as a subset of holy verbal phenomena in Hinduism, because in actual practice mystical experience and the oral transmission of religious concepts are emphasized over what is written down. To a disciple, the word of a Guru may acquire the status of fruti: instead of being fixed in a distant past, fruti "must be seen as an ongoing and experientially based feature of the Hindu religious tradition" (Coburn 1984: 45).
Written texts cannot be viewed as the only source for the understanding of religious movements in practice. For the religious movements that sprouted in Bengal out of the Sahajiýa - Sufi confluence (Cashin 1995: 17), songs rep- resent an encyclopedia of beliefs, theological doctrines and yogic practices. Being non-institutional, antinomian and "Guruist" (Brooks 1990: 128, 134) movements, these religious strands do not recognize any single founder nor a univocal written canon. If anything like a commonly shared canon exists, this would be represented by the corpus of orally transmitted songs.
Studying songs as the fundamental corpus of a religious movement in practice is particularly important in the context of Bengali language and literature. If we believe that Bengali language had its historical beginning in the 10th century (Dimock and Levertov 1967: xv, Paniker 1997: 23), then we also have to admit that, from the 10th till the 18th century, for the first eight hundred years, the history of Bengali literature is actually "a history of Bengali songs" (S. Cakrabarti 1990: 13).
A vast number of songs performed by the Bauls have been composed by a sakta saint called Bhaba Pagla (1902-1984), a witty and talented lyricist from Amta (now in Bangladesh). While most of the available literature on Baul and Fakir songs is based upon general statements and lacks specific study of individual Gurus or lineages, in this study of Bhaba Pagla's songs I am going to analyze the oral tradition of Bengali esoteric songs through the particular case of one individual composer and the community of performers, teachers and disciples surrounding him. In the importance I attribute to an in-depth analysis of a particular corpus and its contemporary context, I agree with the British anthropologist Jeanne Openshaw, who declared: "One factor hindering analysis of those called Baul was the virtual absence of detailed, contextual studies." (Openshaw 2004: 6). In order to rectify this situation, Openshaw concentrated her field-work on one particular lineage, namely the lineage of Raj Krishna, in the Bagri area of West Bengal.
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