Baul
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The Bauls (বাউল) are a heterogeneous group of singer-practitioners of Bengal, spanning West Bengal and present-day Bangladesh. Recruited from Hindu and Muslim communities, they overlap with Bengali fakirs but do not form a single uniform religious organisation. The term can refer to performers and to initiates whose livelihoods do not depend on music.[1]: 1–5, 104–105
Ethnographic accounts document cannabis smoking and offerings in particular Baul settings, as well as criticism from practitioners who abstain. Openshaw describes smoked ganja as classified by bartamān-panthī practitioners as "cooling" and "upward-moving". These observations should not be generalised into a requirement of all Baul practice.[1]: 91, 104–105, 186, 208, note 11
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][3] 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 sixteenth century in the Caitanya-Bhāgavata of Vṛndāvana-dāsa and the Caitanya-Caritāmṛta of Kṛṣṇa-dāsa Kavirāja, though its modern sectarian use is later, consolidated through twentieth-century song-collection and commentary by Kshitimohan Sen (who introduced Baul songs to the Bengali literary public through Tagore's circle at Shantiniketan) and Upendranath Bhattacharya (whose Banglar Baul o Baul Gan of 1957 published more than five hundred songs and recast the tradition as fundamentally an esoteric body-centred sādhanā rather than a lyrical-mystical one).[3] The subsequent anthropological literature, including Openshaw's fieldwork, has broadly followed the Bhattacharya framing, which is also the frame within which Baul cannabis use becomes legible.
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 is kept. Householder Bauls live with spouses and children in or near villages and follow less stringent dietary and behavioural rules.[2] Female partners 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, that of the male practitioner.[4]
Cannabis in Baul practice
Daily use and gatherings
Openshaw's fieldwork in central West Bengal documents cannabis smoking among some practitioners. She describes an adept identified as D.D. smoking marijuana while discussing bodily discipline, but also records non-users criticising others called Baul as addicted to hashish. Her observations establish use and disagreement rather than a practice shared by every Baul.[1]: 91, 104–105
Classification within bartamān-panthī physiology
In Openshaw's account, bartamān-panthī practitioners classify smoked ganja as "cooling" and "upward-moving", contrasting it with alcohol as heating and downward-moving. These are classifications within the practitioners' understanding of the body.[1]: 208, note 11
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 Openshaw describes one bartamān-panthī ashram where food and marijuana were offered to an entombed teacher. Participants disagreed over the meaning and validity of those offerings.[1]: 186–187
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 and Nadia) and in adjacent areas of Bangladesh including Kushtia District, where Lalon's shrine at Cheuriya is the most-visited Baul pilgrimage site. Scattered Baul communities also exist 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.[original research?]
Notable figures
Lalon Shah is central to the Bengali Fakir song tradition.[6]: 117–119 The relationship between that tradition and Baul identities, and the evidence for varied cannabis practices, is discussed in Fakirs in Bengali culture.
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.[7]
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.[editorialising?] 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
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 1.8 Openshaw, Jeanne (2002). Seeking Bauls of Bengal. University of Cambridge Oriental Publications. Vol. 60. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521811255.
- ↑ 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.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 Dasgupta, Shashibhushan (1962) [First published 1946]. Obscure Religious Cults (Second ed.). Calcutta: Firma KLM. pp. 160–161. OCLC 534995.
- ↑ Knight, Lisa I. (2011). Contradictory Lives: Baul Women in India and Bangladesh. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-977354-1.
- ↑ 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.
- ↑ Cantú, Keith (2019). "Islamic Esotericism in the Bengali Bāul Songs of Lālan Fakir". Correspondences. 7 (1): 109–165.
- ↑ 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: Contemporary Lyrics of Baul Songs and their Osmotic Response to Globalisation". History and Sociology of South Asia. 8 (1): 59–88. doi:10.1177/2230807513506629.