India on Foot

Singing soul-stirring songs that speak in simple language of love and human bondage, this 29-year-old Baul has really broken free from what we all struggle to — the self.

YOUNG REBEL Parvathy Baul: `City people are scared to talk to me because I have a spiritual inclination. But in our whole nation, everything is spiritual’.

Sixteen. A very mutinous and seditious age. Sixteen was when Mausumi became Parvathy Baul. At an age when most girls are busy hitting the salons and streaking their hair, hanging out with friends at cafes and pubs, she just knew she had to be a Baul.

There’s more to the wandering minstrels of Bengal — the Bauls — than their music, ektara, duggi, their flowing saffron robes and dreadlocks, if you ask Parvathy. “Baul is a path to search for the `moner manush’ or `person of my heart’. Music is a part of a Baul’s life, but it’s really about attitude and a way of life. Bauls have a rebellious attitude to everything and a humorous way of looking at things. It’s nice to have an insight into both worlds. You can take sanyasa or be a householder. A Baul says he’s neither. He is a traveller who travels from what he knows to one who knows.”

Loads of grit

And the 29-year-old has loads of grit and attitude, you are convinced. Sweet 16 was what she was when she first heard Baul music. A visual arts student at Santiniketan, she heard a blind Baul singer on the train. “It took me far away… and he seemed to be giving such light. I decided there must be something he’s seeing through his music,” says the cherubic Parvathy, in the city for a performance for Rthu Foundation, a network of organic farmers.

Born into a traditional Bengali Brahmin family, it wasn’t easy for her to break barriers to be a Baul. Bauls are initiated; the master chooses the disciple. The first person she approached to initiate her into the fold was a woman Baul, Phulmala Dashi. “She took one look at me and said, `You study at University, live in a hostel, and your parents send you money from home. What do you know of life?’ Then she asked me to go begging with her on the train. I went.” On the train she found her professors and fellow students who refused to recognise her. “It was a beautiful and hard process. I had to break myself. I was taught with the conditions of society. Now that I look back on it, that day was so much fun. It was like breathing good air after coming out from the AC.”

Since then, she’s studied with Baul greats like Sanatan Das Baul and Shashanko Goshai. There are many tests that students have to go through for the master to decide they are strong enough to be a Baul. (I’m not surprised then, when a cup of black ginger tea arrives during the interview, Parvathy quips: “Oh! He’s made it strong… like a Baul!”)

Ghoshai was a difficult teacher, so most students ran away from him, laughs Parvathy. “Initially he made me sleep outside in the cold, he would wake me at three in the morning and make me wash vessels; he made me sleep amidst scorpions; gave me only cold food. Finally he understood that I would not leave.” Her guru was 97 and in three years he crammed in what he would normally take 20 years to teach.

Having trained in classical music and Kathak at home since an early age, Parvathy was quite tuned in to the guru-shishya tradition. “University somehow didn’t fulfil these relationships. That’s why I found Baul to be a proper way,” she smiles. Her matted hair definitely draws attention and Parvathy tells me she hasn’t cut it for the last seven years and won’t for the next five. Why? “I can’t tell you the reason, but my master asked me to,” she says with a twinkle in her eye.

Largely an oral tradition, Rabindranath Tagore was the first to bring out the Baul lyrics in print. “In pre-independent India, the Baul never had to go out of his village; the village looked after him. But see the conditions of the farmers today… they were once the patrons but today they have no money themselves.”

Urban space

Tagore is also credited with taking this performing art beyond Bengal’s borders. But doesn’t the growing trend of folk art being usurped by the urban elite space and used as a sort of fashion statement bother her? “Even if it is a fashion statement, it is good that there is at least some communication between these two groups of people. Moreover, city people hold an important place economically and politically. It is important that they know their tradition. It is so important now to look at things in the Indian way. We need to protect our tradition. Otherwise look around… people sell cosmetics and spirituality side by side.”

Bauls are essentially storytellers. The stories are flexible, like flowing water that curves around the rocks in the path, Parvathy explains. Have stories essentially remained the same through the years? “Just as human beings don’t change over years, neither do the stories. But there are adaptations to modern life: now a story may have a mobile phone mentioned in it. But the important thing is that every story has two meanings — one for the world and one for the practitioner.”

As she performs at the Alliance Francaise she tells stories of Radha’s love for Krishna, of the temptations of the world, and of the Baul philosophy of eternal suffering at the hands of birth-death-and-rebirth, the way of the masters. Her entire face lights up as she is visibly transported to a world of her own. “We tell the audience to choose whether they want to jump off a cliff or they want to fly.”

Complex philosophy

Baul philosophy is pretty complex and spans a whole lot of issues. They believe that everyone is just human; Baul is meant for the woman to find the masculine in her and for the man to discover the feminine in himself. So it’s not a tradition one can practise alone. Parvathy herself is married to Ravi Gopalan Nair, a puppeteer and mask-maker and now lives with him in Thiruvananthapuram where they run an ashram called the Ektara Baul Sangeetha Kalari. A large part of what they earn goes to old and poor Baul masters who have no one to care for them.

Bauls also do not believe in religion. “Not having a religion makes a big difference in a world where people are fighting for communal power,” says Parvathy. Bauls believe in rebirth and that one continues to do in the present what one did in the past life. “I can’t become a Baul today just like that. I must have had that thread… that connection running through me. Someone else decided this for me. I didn’t. There are thousands of people, but few Bauls… “

by Bhumika K. in The Hindu