I first met Paban and the Baul singers in September 1982. He was singing at a concert at the Alliance Francaise on Boulevard Raspail in Paris. I avoided going to Indian cultural performances in Paris, but I had some idea of Baul songs from my mother, a passionate singer and music lover. I had been haunted by a song from an album called Indian Street Music, published in the US in 1970 and played often on the radio. It was sung by Lakhon Das, brother of the famous Purna Das Baul.

O mon amar,
Shajo Prakriti,
Prakritir shobhab dhoro, sadhan koro,
Dekhbi urdho hobe deher goti,
Mon amar shajo Prakriti…

(O my spirit,
Dress like nature,
Learn to be a woman, acquire spiritual knowledge,
You’ll find that the pace of your body will quicken
again,
O my spirit, dress like nature... )

Then, in 1979, a documentary film by Georges Luneau broadcast on French television, Le Chant des Fous, had given me another glimpse of these itinerant singers of Bengal. Luneau’s film showed a quasi-mythical world of mystic minstrels and ecstatic song; a pastoral world of rice fields, banyan groves and forests of teak by the sides of great river valleys, and of monasteries marked by incredible peace and harmony. Here, among a
people who tilled the soil and battled with inclement weather, these bards of rural Bengal created joyous, miraculous music. Wild and free, they raised their clamour in the mansions of the rich, and roared in gaiety in the courtyards of the poor. They travelled by foot to fairs and festivals. They sang in buses and trains. Their melodies were poignant, their texts enigmatic. Garbed in long, flowing, multicoloured robes, alkhallas, often living in pairs, they played their frenetic rhythms on strange, handmade instruments of wood and clay, miming the contradictory moods of nature and of passion.

To the poor, they offered the wealth of the human spirit, to the blind, the divine light of inner vision, to the sick and the ageing, they gave the comfort of faith and cured them with songs, natural medicine and yogic practice. The rich and the arrogant, the selfish and the mercenary, were all subject to their provocative mockery. To women, they offered parity in sexual relations, the possibility of exploring their own bodies, and of leading men to a greater knowledge of theirs. They decried the phallocratic society around them, caught in the shackles of the caste system, and exposed the fanatic parochialism of the mullah and the pundit. These were men and women after my own heart. So, when a flyer announcing a Baul concert at the Alliance Française slipped through the slat in the middle of our front door, I decided to make an exception to my rule.

Eight rooms
Nine doors
No locks.
It’s a house on three floors,
On top, courts and tribunals,
In the middle, merchants,
On the ground floor,
Clerks who meditate

—Author unknown, nineteenth century

I was born a bawling baby with a rebel heart, in 1949; in Shillong, in the crater of a long dormant volcano which rumbled under us from time to time, like a slumbering old dragon. My mother, to calm my tempestuous spirit, sent me to school at the age of three, to a Catholic convent run by Irish nuns. On weekends, she would send me to my grandmother Aasmani, who tied my ankle to a bedpost to prevent me from climbing all over her house. My grandmother called me Kathar Sagar, because of my non-stop chatter. At home, my mother groomed my restlessness by training me to sing devotional songs, and took on a Manipuri dance master to teach me Lai-Haroba, an acrobatic dance form which mingled virile Krishna tandava with lashya bhava, expressing the softer feminine emotions of Radha.

Outside of school hours, she let me run wild and free on our estate, which spanned an entire hill. She taught me to sniff the perfume of the raat ki rani, a flower which bloomed only at night, to watch a myriad stars in the clear night skies over Meghalaya once the monsoon rains were over, to read fables—she told me endless stories: the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, Oscar Wilde and Bernard Shaw. She had a circle of literary friends, and like all of them, read widely. My father, a patriarch, came from the plains of Sylhet, now in Bangladesh. He doted on me and would try to discipline me like any other girl from the Sen family but to no avail—I was a tomboy, preferred pants to dresses, and kept my hair short. I would run away, out of his earshot, into the hills and forests above our Tudor bungalow, scaling trees and launching my catapult, clambering over the rocks in the mountain stream which cascaded down to the valley below.

When I reached puberty, I ran away from home for good. However, this lasted only a day, because a Marwari family picked me up at a petrol pump on the main road out of Shillong, which was, after all, a small town, and informed the police, who had received a call from my alarmed father about his missing daughter.

In 1967, at the age of eighteen, an adult at last, I left my parents, who had moved to Kolkata. I dropped out of my English Literature course in Presidency College, finding it hard to concentrate on studying Shelley’s ‘pathetic fallacy’ in the great colonial classrooms with their groaning fans, swirling slowly high above our heads, while just next to us, crowds shouted slogans and tear gas bombs sizzled and fumed on College Street, as a massive student movement gained momentum.

I left my parents to do voluntary social work for victims of famine in the village of Kowaikala in the Barachhati block of drought-stricken Bodhgaya district in Bihar. With the exception of myself, all the social work volunteers were British and American, some of the Americans draft resisters from the war raging in Vietnam. I heard news of the world through them, and all the new music coming out of the US and UK: Otis, Janis, Creedence Clearwater Revival. I would return home on the Gaya Mail from time to time, covered in dust and soot, and tell my mother my own stories: about the lack of food and water, the shocking violence of the caste system in Bihar, the villagers shackled to this age-old system, the beauty of the Buddhist temples in Bodhgaya, the magenta and purple sunsets, the Tibetan monks who droned ‘Om Mani Padme Hoon’ in their deep bass voices, and of course stories about my new friends in Bihar. Steve Minkin of the Peace Corps who wandered the Bihari countryside like a latter-day prophet, Jill Buxton, the half-crazed English lady who carried medicine to remote villages in her Land Rover, the dying writer Mulk Raj Anand and the fervent Gandhian Dwarko Sundarani, who led the relief projects in the area from the Samanvaya Ashram where I was based. I pleaded with Mother to join me. But arthritis had pinned her to her bed, and it seemed that she was overpowered by the city. She would not come with me, and I could not drag her away from this sedentary, oppressive city life. She would listen to me in excitement and encourage me to be independent, all the while warning me of dangers which might befall me if I was on my own.

Reprinted by permission of Random House Publishers India Pvt Ltd.  
Excerpted from Baulsphere by Mimlu Sen  Rs. 395.00
Copyright © 2009; All Rights Reserved.




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