Even though I don't "get" much Bengali, by the virtue of having spent some happy formative years in Bangla-land, I have been infected with a certain kind of Bangla-ness. The foremost symptom of this syndrome is an instant attraction for any music that has Bangla in it. In fact, one major reason why I particularly dig Nitin Sawhney's music is the way he integrates a certain Bangla soundscape into him music: street conversations, women in a market bargaining, boatman songs etc.

Within Bangla music, one particular strain that I find particularly attractive is that of the bauls, the wandering ministrels of Bengal. Osho, who spouted much nonsense, had this to say about bauls:

"The Bauls are called Bauls because they are mad people. The word 'Baul' comes from the Sanskrit root vatul. It means: mad, affected by wind. The Baul belongs to no religion. He is neither Hindu nor Mohammedan nor Christian nor Buddhist. He is a simple human being. His rebellion is total. He does not belong to anybody; he only belongs to himself. He lives in a no man's land: no country is his, no religion is his, no scripture is his. His rebellion goes even deeper than the rebellion of the Zen Masters--because at least formally, they belong to Buddhism; at least formally, they worship Buddha. Formally they have scriptures--scriptures denouncing scriptures, of course--but still they have. At least they have a few scriptures to burn.

Dance is his religion; singing is his worship. He does not even use the word 'God'. The Baul word for God is Adhar Manush, the essential man. He worships man. He says, inside you and me, inside everybody, there is an essential being. That essential being is all. To find that Adhar Manush, that essential man, is the whole search."

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Among the bauls, Lalon Shah (or Lalon Fakir) songs in the recent years have become particularly popular in Bagla music. This New Age BD article also indicates that Lalon was given to investigations into male-female identities, and social power structures in his songs:

"Lalon is brilliant in raising very fundamental issues relating to woman-man relationships playing on the margin between biological and the social construction of this relation. The famous song ‘mayere bhajile hoy tar baper thikana’ is based on a story known in rural Bengal. Parvati, one of the great Hindu Mother-Goddesses, the wife of Mohadeva or Shiva, was once asked by her husband about the origin of the world. ‘Is it from the masculine or the feminine principle?’ Mohadeva asked Parvati. Parvati thought for a while, but decided consciously not to reply, she went into ‘silence’. Why? Because if she said the world originated from women, implying her, she will be a sinner for being a bad wife, since patriarchal rules were dominant. On the other hand, if she said it is from the masculine principle, implying Shiva, she will become a liar. So her ‘silence’ became her words, or her words are constructed by her silence. Silence is the the feminine punctuation in the masculine discourse and it must be rewritten as a methodology known in Lalon’s philosophy as the ‘nigam bichar’. It is the task of the sadhus or the saints to read the ‘silence’ and break the dominant structure of the existing discourse."

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But since this post is supposed to be about music, check out the Bangladeshi band "Bangla"'s folk rock take on Lalon's songs in Kingkortobbobimur and Prottutponnomotitto. Their female lead singer, Anusheh's husky voice rocks! Also here is a review on these albums.

At the beginning of my sophomore year at Kharagpur, when I discovered poetry, or more precisely, when I was inflamed with what can be done with the English language, after reading Vikram Seth’s “The Golden Gate”, I took to spending quite a bit of time in the literature section of the humongous Central Library (a rare blessing in book starved India). This section, in an eloquent reflection on its usage, was banished to a dark attic like space within the library. In order to reach it, one climbed up three floors in a stairwell, which was quite often in the dark because no one could be bothered to replace fused light bulbs.

As for those fellow eccentrics, who could be occasionally found flitting about in those musty racks (Prof. Ramu of Mechanical Engineering is the most memorable of these people; he was then systematically chewing through the Harvard Classics’ Five Foot Shelf of Books), I suppose we evolved suitable responses in the low light conditions and daytime darkness in those rack in order to navigate the Dantesque steel-riveted stairs without breaking our necks. I had to put up with gaalis of my more normal friends, who had to occasionally came up there hunting for me in order to take me out carousing. I also must mention the few couples – a minor miracle in that sexless place with a 99:1 male female sex ratio - who sometimes came up there to get away from it all, i.e., to makeout, only to be startled by wild ghosts like me. I, however, always assisted Cupid by immediately moving my literary assignations elsewhere.

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It was in those laybrinthine hours in which I read, unsystematically, quite a bit of poetry ranging from Shakespeare from that Five Foot Self to the more obscure poets in selnder volumes put out by Prof. Lal’s Calcutta based Writer’s Workshop. And like a paper chewing goat, with a mouth given to Brownian motion, I finally ended up reading a yellowing edition of “The Oxford Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets”. It was in this book that I first encountered the two poets who have stayed with me every since.

The first poet is Kamala Das, with her stringent and strangely wonderful feminist poems. For a long time afterwards, I have chanted these two lines from her poem “An Introduction”:

“I speak three languages, write in Two, dream in one. … I too call myself I.”

for they seem to summarize my attempts at negotiating and bridging rifts between language and identity.

The second poet was Arun Kolatkar, and the anthology had a selection of poems from his singular “Jejuri”. As it has been often described “Jejuri” on the surface is a very fine sequence of poems on the topic of a wry urbane intellectual’s pilgrimage into the religious country. But like good poetry, it is also more than that – it is a meditation on the clash of clocks, modernity's with the timeless's; on how “irrational” faith can still pervade a “rational” human being's thought; on how gods, those that will be worshipped and those who will remaind obscure, are born and die. And among all these “Jejuri” poems, I have returned to the poem “A Scratch” quite often, with its fantastic final two lines - “scratch a rock /and a legend springs” – these succinctly sums up many phenomena including some our attempts attempts at reconstructing of memory.

Recently it has come to my attention that the New York Review of Books has reissued Kolatkar’s “Jejuri” (previously they had revived Upamanyu Chatterjee's "English, August" for us), recently for those of us who have been unable to lay our hands on this book for a while. I am going to get it, and I think everyone else who reads poetry, or even otherwise, should do the same.

what is god and what is stone the dividing line if it exists is very thin at jejuri and every other stone is god or his cousin

there is no crop other than god and god is harvested here around the year and round the clock out of the bad earth and the hard rock

that giant hunk of rock the size of a bedroom is khandoba's wife turned to stone the crack that runs right across is the scar from his broadsword he struck her down with once in a fit of rage

scratch a rock and a legend springs