Nine Lives (42 page)
‘It is true,’ said Manisha. ‘It is late now – the time Ma comes. It is time to get ready for our sacrifice.’
THE SONG OF THE BLIND MINSTREL
On the feast of Makar Sakranti, the new moon night on which the sun passes through the winter solstice, from the Tropic of Cancer to the Tropic of Capricorn, a great gathering takes places on the Banks of the Ajoy River in West Bengal.
Around the middle of January, several thousand saffron-clad wandering minstrels or Bauls – the word means simply ‘mad’ or ‘possessed’ in Bengali – begin to gather at Kenduli, in the flat floodplains near Tagore’s old home of Shantiniketan. As they have done on this site for at least 500 years, the Bauls wander the huge campsite, greeting old friends, smoking ganja and exchanging gossip. Then, as the night draws in, they gather around their fires, and begin the singing and dancing that will carry on until dawn.
You approach the festival through green wetlands, past bullocks ploughing the rich mud of the rice paddy. Reed-thatched or tin-topped Bengali cottages are surrounded by clumps of young green bamboo and groves of giant banyans, through which evening clouds of parakeets whirr and screech. As you near the Baul monastery of Tamalatala, which acts as the focus of the festival, the stream of pilgrims slowly thickens along the roadsides. Bengali villagers herding their goats and ducks along the high embankments give way to
lines of lean, dark, wiry men with matted hair and straggling beards. Some travel in groups of two or three; others travel alone, carrying hand drums or the Bauls’ simple single-stringed instrument, the
ektara
.
Throughout their 500-year history, the Bauls of Bengal have refused to conform to the conventions of caste-conscious Bengali society. Subversive and seductive, wild and abandoned, they have preserved a series of esoteric spiritual teachings on breathing techniques, sex, asceticism, philosophy and mystical devotion. They have also amassed a treasury of beautifully melancholic and often enigmatic teaching songs which help map out their path to inner vision.
For the Bauls believe that God is found not in a stone or bronze idol, or in the heavens, or even in the afterlife, but in the present moment, in the body of the man or woman who seeks the truth; all that is required is that you give up your possessions, take up the life of the road, find a guru and adhere to the path of love. Each man is alone, they believe, and must find his own way. Drawing elements from Sufism, Tantra, Shakta, Sahajiya, Vaishnavism and Buddhism, they revere deities such as Krishna or Kali, and visit temples, mosques and wayside shrines – but only as helpful symbols and signposts along a road to Enlightenment, never as an end in themselves.
Their goal is to discover the divine inner knowledge: the ‘Unknown Bird’, ‘The Golden Man’ or the ‘Man of the Heart’ –
Moner Manush –
an ideal that they believe lives within the body of every man, but may take a lifetime to discover. As such they reject the authority of the Brahmins and the usefulness of religious rituals, while some – though not all – Bauls come close to a form of atheism, denying the existence of any transcendental deity, and seeking instead ultimate truth in this present physical world, in every human body and every human heart. Man is the final measure for the Bauls.
The near-atheism and humanism of these singing philosophers is not in any sense a new departure in Indian thought, and dates back at least to the sceptical and materialistic Charvaka school of the sixth century
BC
, which rejected the idea of God and professed that no living creature was immortal. Ancient India in fact has a larger atheistic and agnostic literature than any other classical civilisation, and an Indian tradition of ambiguity in the face of eternity can be traced back as far the
Rig Veda
, which enshrines at its centre the idea of uncertainty about the divine. ‘Who really knows?’ it asks. ‘Who will here proclaim it? Whence was it produced? Whence is this creation? Perhaps it formed itself, perhaps it did not. The one who looks down on it from the highest heaven, only he knows – or perhaps he does not know.’ The strange mix of spirituality and scepticism in Baul philosophy is thus rooted in a very ancient strand of Hindu agnostic thought.
In pursuit of this path, the Bauls defy distinctions of caste and religion. Bauls can be from any background, and they straddle the frontiers of Hinduism and Islam. The music of ‘God’s Troubadours’ reflects their impulsive restlessness and their love of the open road:
The Mirror of the sky,
reflects my soul.
O Baul of the road,
O Baul, my heart,
What keeps you tied,
to the corner of the room?
As the storm rampages
In your crumbling hut,
the water rises to your bed.
Your tattered quilt
Floats on the flood,
Your shelter is down.
O Baul of the road,
O Baul, my heart,
What keeps you tied,
to the corner of the room?
Travelling from village to village, owning nothing but a multicoloured patchwork robe known as an
alkhalla
, they sit in tea shops and under roadside banyan trees, in the compartments of trains and at village bus stops, busking their ballads of love and mysticism, divine madness and universal brotherhood, and the goal of
Mahasukha
, the great bliss of the void, to gatherings of ordinary Bengali farmers and villagers.
They break the rhythm of rural life, inviting intimacies and wooing and consoling their audience with poetry and song, rather than hectoring them with sermons or speeches. They sing of desire and devotion, ecstasy and madness; of life as a river and the body as a boat. They sing of Radha’s mad love for the elusive Krishna, of the individual as the crazed Lover, and the Divine as the unattainable Beloved. They remind their listeners of the transitory nature of this life, and encourage them to renounce the divisions and hatreds of the world, so provoking them into facing themselves. Inner knowledge, they teach, is acquired not through power over others, but over the Self.
Once a year, however, the Bauls leave their wanderings and converge on Kenduli for their biggest annual festival. It’s the largest gathering of singers and Tantrics in South Asia. To get there I flew to Calcutta and took a train north to Shantiniketan, determined to see this gathering for myself.
But first I had to find Manisha Ma’s friend, Kanai Das Baul.
Manisha had told me something of Kanai’s story when I was with her in the Tarapith cremation ground.
When he was six months old, Kanai caught smallpox and went blind. His parents – day labourers – despaired as to how their son would make a living. Then one day, when Kanai was ten, a passing Baul guru heard the boy singing as he took a bath amid the water hyacinths of the village pond, or
pukur.
In Bengal,
the
pukur
is to village life what the green was to medieval England: the centre of rural life, as well as acting as swimming pool, duck pond and communal laundromat. Kanai’s voice was high, sad and elegiac, and the Baul guru asked Kenai’s parents if they would consider letting him take Kanai as a pupil: ‘Once your parents have gone,’ he said, ‘you will able to support yourself if you let us teach you to sing.’
In due course, many years later, after a terrible family tragedy, Kanai remembered the guru’s words and set off to find him. He joined him on the road, learning the songs and becoming in time one of the Bauls’ most celebrated singers.
Then, after the death of his guru, Kanai took up residence in the cremation ground of Tarapith, where Manisha, Tapan Sadhu and some of their friends helped arrange a marriage for him, to a young widow who looked after the shoes of visitors.
Kanai, Manisha told me, had arrived at the Kenduli Mela a few days ahead of me, and had already joined up with an itinerant group of other Bauls. They were all staying in a small house off the main bazaar: to get there you had to leave the bathers washing on the banks of the Ajoy and pick your way through the usual mêlée of Indian religious festivals: street children selling balloons and marigold garlands; a contortionist and a holy man begging for alms; a group of argumentative naked Naga
sadhus; a hissing snake goddess and her attendants; lines of bullock carts loaded up with clay images of the goddess Durga; beggars and mendicants; a man selling pink candyfloss to a blare of Bollywood strings emerging from a huge pink loudspeaker attached to the flossing machine. All along the main drag of the encampment, rival
akharas,
or monasteries,
of the different Baul gurus had been erected, interspersed with tented temples full of brightly lit idols, constellations of clay lamps and camphor flames winking amid the wafts of sandalwood incense filling the warm, dusty Bengali darkness.
By the time I found the house – a simple unfurnished Bengali hut – it was dark and Kanai’s Bauls were in full song. They had scattered straw on the ground and were sitting in a circle around the fire, cross-legged on the floor, breaking their singing only to pass a chillum of ganja
from one to the other.
There were six of them: Kanai himself, a thin, delicate and self-possessed man in his fifties with a straggling grey beard and a pair of small cymbals in his hand. Beside him sat a fabulously handsome old Baul, Kanai’s great friend and travelling companion Debdas, singing with a
dugi
drum in one hand and an
ektara
in the other. His hair hung loose, as did his great fan of grey beard, while a string of copper bells was attached to the big toe of his right foot which he jingled as he sang.
Facing them was another of the most celebrated Baul singers in Bengal, Paban Das Baul, who was flanked by his
khepi
or Baul partner, Mimlu Sen, and his two younger sisters. Paban was a lithe, handsome and hyperactive figure in his late forties, with full lips, a shock of wiry pepper-and-salt hair, a short goatee and bushy sideburns. He was playing a small, two-stringed
dotara
and dominating the group as much by the sheer manic energy of his performance as by his singing: ‘Never plunge into the river of lust,’ he sang with his rich, velvety voice, ‘for you will not reach the shore.’
It is a river without banks,
where typhoons rage,
and the current is strong.
Only those who are masters,
of the five
rasas
, the juices of love,
Know the play of the tides.
Their boats do not sink.
Paddled by oars of Love,
They row strongly upstream.
The three men – Kanai, Debdas and Paban – were old friends, and as the music gathered momentum they passed verses and songs back and forth, so that when one would ask a philosophical question, the other would answer it: a symposium in song. Paban sang a verse of a traditional Bengali folksong about his wish to visit Krishna’s home:
The peacock cries –
Oh who will show me the way to Vrindavan?
He raises his tail and cries:
