Tradition · mendicant singing tradition
Bāul
Also known as Baul, Lalon, Kenduli, Joydeb Kenduli, Bāul — the wandering singers of Bengal
A Bengali mendicant order of singers, part Vaishnava-Sahajiya and part Sufi fakir, who reject caste, temple and mosque alike and locate the divine in the body — maner manush, the person within. They sing with ektara, duggi and ghungur, and live on what is given at the gatherings they attend.
- Function
- Arts & performance
- Confidence
- Not assessed
- Location
- 23.630, 87.450
Worth knowing
The great figure is Lalon, who died at Kushtia in 1890 having left several hundred songs, no verifiable birth religion and a settled refusal to state one. Rabindranath Tagore collected Baul songs, printed them and took the melodies into his own, which is how a wandering rural practice entered Bengali literary culture.
Connections (3)
- AnalogueSehwan Sharīf
Baul practice sits between Vaishnava Sahajiya and the Sufi fakir traditions of Bengal, and the same refusal — of caste, of scripture, of the distinction between Hindu and Muslim — turns up at Sehwan and the other Sindhi shrines, where the malangs are equally outside both communities and equally tolerated. The songs share the vocabulary of the body as the only temple, and the shrines share a clientele who would fail any religious census.
- Teaching lineageRabindranath Tagore
Tagore heard Baul singing on the Padma while managing the family estates at Shilaidaha, collected the songs, printed them and openly borrowed their tunes — a sizeable part of Rabindrasangeet is built on Baul melody, and he used the word baul of himself. It is one of the few clear cases of a modern Indian literary music taking its form directly from a rural mendicant practice rather than from a court or a temple.
- Craft tradition ofJaydev Kenduli
The Joydev Kenduli mela each Makar Sankranti, held at the site claimed as the birthplace of Jayadeva of the Gita Govinda, is the largest annual Baul gathering in Bengal — several hundred thousand people, akhras of singers, and three days of continuous music. A twelfth-century Sanskrit court poet's supposed village is now the calendar centre of a mendicant tradition that rejects Sanskrit, scripture and caste, which nobody involved appears to find strange.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Baul”. Sangeet Natak Akademi documentation; and the standard field studies of each tradition named in the entry.
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