What is it
about the Baul singers?
These musicians, singers, spiritual minstrels of West
Bengal, whose calls move through the strains of their longing voices, their instruments
inadequate to express their need.
My sweet
friend Karuna is living with a community of Baul singers in Shantiniketan, just
outside of Calcutta, yet their passions and wildness can get too much even for
someone so spiritually attuned and she has come to seek refuge on my terrace.
She invites me to a concert where her friend, and now former landlord, is playing.
She invites me to a concert where her friend, and now former landlord, is playing.
The concert
is on at a venue just round the corner from my apartment – further than we
thought it turns out as we sweat and stumble our way across the broken paving
stones that make up AJC Bose Road, asking every third person we meet if we are
still on the right track.
We arrive
late and enter the hall – it’s full. The stage is amateur, brightly lit, school
gym style. One single microphone stands in the centre, wires snake across the
floor. A man is reading monotonously from a piece of paper, the mic squeals,
people wander on and off the stage, one man brings a random foot mat for
someone to stand on.
An old
bearded man then takes the mic and starts to sing.
Probably a fakir,
Karuna tells me, as he dressed in white, not the traditional colourful attire
of the Baul singers. The old man twists and turns to the melody of his songs then he hands over to the next.
A man with
wild white hair, dressed in a patchwork coat of multicolours. He starts to
sing. With no effort something moves through him. The sound is too loud, the
acoustics poor, but behind all of that something is alive, a serpent that
carries a formless power on its scales.
A space in the
core of my chest starts to burn with a heated pressure, the same between my
eyebrows. For two songs this continues. His high-pitched notes dissolving space
and form around the hall. The drum beats of his accompaniment, the fullness of
the rolling flute.
Karuna has
to catch a train. “But you stay,” she tells me.
“No I’ll
leave now; that is enough.”
What is it
about the Baul singers?
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