Sorting out a year's stash of videos from the hard disk of the vidcam, I chanced upon these recordings from a December (2010) evening that was fading from memory. The occasion was the release of a book (Sailing on the Sea of Love: The Music of the Bauls of Bengal by Charles Capwell, Seagull Books) followed by presentations and an hour and half of fakiri and baul songs at the Town Hall, Calcutta. It had been a terrible week of missed deadlines and avoidable misunderstandings at office and luckily our good friend Ad (one of the organisers) had given me a pass. `Baul music is like medicine’ Ad had said and really one needed no convincing for I had long been fascinated by the music of the mystic minstrels of Bengal.
The first clip shows the performance of Golam Fakir of Murshidabad. His song is about music uniting all religions. The baul with ektara in the video below is Biswanath Das singing - `Ami jar jonye pagol, tarey pelam koi?’ in his inimitable moody style.
Tomes have been written about the syncretism of bauls and fakirs and the crowds at baul melas often outnumber audiences of rock concerts. The tenets of Dehatatya, which is the scaffolding on which the baul way of life is built, finds echoes in Tantra and other teachings at the margins of mainstream religions. In a time when there is a sharpening of the rhetoric of radicals, when the thunder of hardliners pierces our ears and our souls, the philosophy of these smiling mystics who make a sweet music with their duggis and ektaras comes like welcome rain after a parched summer's day.
I drank deep and as my friend had promised -- like magic potion it did work!
Joy guru!
Copyright: Videos, images and text copyright: RajatC, Full-length edited videos will be uploaded on Youtube soon.
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