Baul
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The Bauls (বাউল) are a heterogeneous group of initiatic singer-practitioners of Bengal, spanning the Indian state of West Bengal and present-day Bangladesh, whose sādhanā (esoteric practice) makes consistent use of cannabis. Recruited from both Hindu and Muslim communities and overlapping in personnel and practice with the Bengali Fakir orbit, Bauls divide broadly into ascetic and householder lines, with the term itself denoting both a class of person and an idiom of song.[1]: 1–7
Cannabis figures in Baul life on three registers. Smoked ganja (also referred to in Bengali contexts as siddhi) is a routine accompaniment to gatherings, song sessions and conversation about practice; bhang preparations and ingested forms appear in ritual offerings; and within the internal physiology that bartamān-panthī initiates use to talk about the body, ganja is explicitly classified as "cooling" and ūrdhva-gāmī (upward-moving), in contrast to alcohol, which is "heating" and downward-moving.[1]: 209, fn. 11 This classification places cannabis on the same side of the body economy as the bodily substances Bauls seek to retain, conserve and redirect through sādhanā.
Bauls inhabit the same Ganga-Brahmaputra plains and Bengal floodplains where the regional ganja landrace populations are grown, and akhṛā (Baul ashrams) and shrines associated with figures such as Lalon continue to function as nodes of both ritual cannabis consumption and informal seed exchange.citation needed
Terminology
The etymology of bāul is contested. Derivations from Sanskrit vātula ("mad") and vyākula ("agitated") are commonly cited, alongside a proposed derivation from Arabic bāl via Sufi usage.[2] Openshaw notes that the word functions both as a noun and as an adjective, with the adjectival sense more prominent in rural Bengali usage; she argues that the standard English construction "the Bauls" obscures this and tends to reify a category whose internal diversity defeats any single definition.[1]: 1–7
The word appears in Bengali texts as early as the fifteenth century in the Chaitanya Bhagavata and the Chaitanya Charitamrita, though its modern sectarian use is later and consolidated through the writings of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century commentators including Akshay Kumar Datta, Upendranath Bhattacarya and Kshitimohan Sen.[3]
Ascetic and householder lines
Bauls divide broadly into ascetic (renouncer) and householder lines. Ascetic Bauls move between akhṛā and survive on alms, wear distinctive white or saffron robes (the colour varies by region and lineage) and carry the shoulder bag (jholā) in which donated food and cannabis are kept. Householder Bauls live with spouses and children in or near villages and follow less stringent dietary and behavioural rules.[2] Female partners (sevādāsī in some lines, sangini in others) are central to esoteric practice rather than peripheral to it, and several anthropological accounts argue that the Baul valuation of the female partner runs as high as, or higher than, the male practitioner.[4]
Cannabis in Baul practice
Daily use and gatherings
The smoking of ganja is a routine feature of Baul gatherings, song sessions and sādhanā-related conversation in the parts of central West Bengal where the anthropological literature has concentrated.[1]: 75–93 Openshaw's fieldwork, conducted between 1983 and 1990 across Birbhum, Bankura, Purulia, Murshidabad and Nadia, records cannabis as so consistently present in the social texture of practitioner life that her first research assistant left the project after succumbing to "the ever available hashish".[1]: 75–93 Field descriptions of senior practitioners speaking through "a cloud of marijuana smoke" and dragging on chillums of hashish appear across multiple chapters and lineages.[1]: 76, 100, 142
Classification within bartamān-panthī physiology
Within the internal physiology that initiates in the bartamān-panthī (literally "followers of the present" or "the existent") tradition use to discuss the body, ingested and smoked substances are classified along two cross-cutting axes: heating versus cooling, and downward-moving (nimna-gāmī) versus upward-moving (ūrdhva-gāmī). Fish is cooling. Alcohol is heating and, as a fluid, downward-moving. Ganja, smoked, is cooling and upward-moving.[1]: 209, fn. 11 The classification matters because the central preoccupation of male sādhanā is the retention and upward redirection of bodily substance (bastu), most notably semen; substances aligned with that movement are considered compatible with practice, while substances that pull substance downward and dissipate it are not.[1]: 209–211
This places cannabis on the same side of the body economy as the practice itself, and offers a coherent indigenous account of why ganja is so routinely present in practitioner contexts where alcohol is not.
Four moons and ritual offerings
The most contested area of Baul esoteric practice is the cāri candra or "four moons", a set of rites involving the ingestion or topical application of bodily substances (variously glossed as semen, menstrual blood, urine and faeces) prepared as a substance called prem bhājā or prem bhoja (love-fry or love-feast).[5][1]: 225–239 Cannabis is among the substances offered to deceased gurus in sebā (service) at some bartamān-panthī ashrams: a mosquito net is hung over the tomb every evening, with food and marijuana served to the deceased guru as they used to be served in life.[1]: 175
The four moons practice is widely contested within the Baul orbit itself, with practitioners of the Kartābhajā tradition and others rejecting it as anumān (received-on-authority) rather than bartamān (verified in one's own experience).[1]: 130–135
Geographic distribution
Bauls are concentrated in the central districts of West Bengal (Birbhum, Bankura, Purulia, Murshidabad, Nadia), in adjacent areas of Bangladesh including Kushtia District where Lalon's shrine at Cheuriya is the most-visited Baul pilgrimage site, and in scattered communities in Tripura, Assam's Barak Valley and Meghalaya.[2]
This distribution overlaps closely with the historical range of the Bengal ganja landrace populations of the Ganga-Brahmaputra plains. Field collections of regional landrace ganja material from districts including Cooch Behar and Jalpaiguri in northern West Bengal have documented active cultivation by farmers in villages whose names (for example Baulbari, "Baul's place") attest to the historical density of Baul presence in the cannabis-growing belt.citation needed
Notable figures
Lalon Shah (c. 1774–1890), the most celebrated Baul saint, is also among the figures most consistently associated in the Bangladeshi literature with daily use of siddhi (cannabis flower) and bhang as supplements to sādhanā.[5] His shrine at Cheuriya in Kushtia continues to host the annual Lalon Smaran Utshab and remains a site of ritualised cannabis consumption.citation needed
Bhaba Pagla (1902–1984), saint-composer of East Bengal, has been the subject of an extended ethnomusicological study by Carola Erika Lorea documenting both his songbook and the practical context of its performance, which includes routine cannabis use among practitioners and disciples.[6]
Relationship to Fakirs
The Bengali Fakir tradition and the Baul lines overlap to such a degree that authoritative treatments routinely use "Baul-Fakir" as a single hyphenated term, and many practitioners describe themselves with either word depending on context. The distinction, where it exists, is broadly that Fakir lines trace from Sufi initiatic genealogies and Baul lines from a mixed Hindu-Muslim-Vaishnava-Tantric inheritance, though the categories are porous: Hindu gurus take Muslim disciples and Muslim gurus take Hindu disciples, particularly in Raj Khyapa's lineage and its descendants.[1]: 1–7
For the Bengali Fakir tradition as it intersects with cannabis practice, see Fakir.
See also
References
- ↑ 1.00 1.01 1.02 1.03 1.04 1.05 1.06 1.07 1.08 1.09 1.10 1.11 Openshaw, Jeanne (2002). Seeking Bauls of Bengal. University of Cambridge Oriental Publications. Vol. 60. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-81125-5.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 Karim, Anwarul (2012). "Baul". In Islam, Sirajul; Jamal, Ahmed A. (eds.). Banglapedia: National Encyclopedia of Bangladesh (Second ed.). Dhaka: Asiatic Society of Bangladesh.
- ↑ Dasgupta, Shashibhushan (1962) [First published 1946]. Obscure Religious Cults (Second ed.). Calcutta: Firma KLM. pp. 160–162. OCLC 534995.
- ↑ Knight, Lisa I. (2011). Contradictory Lives: Baul Women in India and Bangladesh. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-977354-1.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 Karim, Anwarul (2017). Bangladesher Baul: Samaj, Sahitya o Sangeet [The Bauls of Bangladesh: Society, Literature and Songs] (in Bengali) (Second ed.). Dhaka: Kathaprakash. p. 408.
- ↑ Lorea, Carola Erika (2016). Folklore, religion and the songs of a Bengali madman: a journey between performance and the politics of cultural representation. Leiden: Brill. ISBN 978-90-04-32470-1. OCLC 950430793.
Further reading
- Capwell, Charles (1986). The Music of the Bauls of Bengal. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press. ISBN 978-0-87338-317-2.
- Dimock, Edward C. (1959). "Rabindranath Tagore — "The Greatest of the Bāuls of Bengal"". The Journal of Asian Studies. 19 (1): 33–51. doi:10.2307/2943448.
- Jha, Shaktinath (1999). Bastubādī Bāul: udbhab, samāj, saṃskṛti o darśana (in Bengali). Kolkata: Lok Saṃskṛti o Ādibāsī Saṃskṛti Kendra.
- Lorea, Carola Erika (2014). "Searching for the Divine, Handling Mobile Phones: Tales of Krishna's Avatāra in the Songs of Contemporary Bauls and Fakirs". History and Sociology of South Asia. 8 (1): 59–88. doi:10.1177/2230807513506629.