I first discovered the sound of Midival Punditz, a New Delhi based electronic duo, in the summer of year 2001, when I was a fanatic ant digging tunnels through various kinds of music. At that time they were giving away mp3s from a makeshift website on the web, and were just beginning to collaborate with big name musicians on the Asian Underground scene such as Talvin Singh.

Since then, they have hit the big leagues, and have released two CDs worldwide on the Six Degrees label. Their latest CD "Midival Times" came out an year ago, and I heard it first in that giant Virgin Music store on Times Square really late one night in last summer about four times in quick succession; if you don't want to hit the bars, and are driven to insomnia by NYC, camping out at Virgin to sample music is a capital idea. I even wrote down some feverish lines on my hand on the subway back to the dive I was crashing at on the Upper Westside.

The most dangerous of the tracks on this CD were "Saathi" (on NPR!), featuring Ustad Sultan Khan on the sarangi and vocals, and "Rebirth", featuring Anoushka Shankar on the sitar - I suppose the presence of these Indian classical musicians explains my predilection for music that can seamlessly make the twain of East and West meet. You may listen to some of the Punditz’s tracks from Midival Times here, and their popular hit, "Bhangra Fever" here. Good stuff!

Indian trains have their complement of traveling buskers, who make their money by singing songs wandering from compartment to compartment. One of my enduring memories of these bauls of the rails was from a train journey some fifteen years ago. This was on a school trip to a science camp at Tarapur, a town along the Maharashtra Gujarat border, on the Arabian sea. This was also to be my first encounter with Bombay.

It was in between Pune and Bombay, where the train barrels in and out of the darkness and rainy light of the Western Ghat tunnels, a young boy and a older girl, who still was not much older than I was then, i.e., 12 years old, suddenly appeared in the compartment, with two pieces of hard slate that they used like cymbals, like clappers, singing old Hindi movie songs. I now don't remember the songs they sang or their faces but I remember being struck with some kind of a dumb pain after they got off at the next station to get into the next compartment. One of our teachers told us, in English, not to acknowledge their presence in the compartment, for otherwise we would have to give them money.

So you pretend that they are not there in the aisle, you pretend that the hill scenery outside the window is more compelling than their bird like throats bobbing up and down, their eyes bright with half-hunger, and their singing - musically not smooth but a still grenade of pain tunneling down your ear, and primed to explode anytime you recall that journey. If in the West kids lose their innocence to the flame of desire then in the East, this flame that burns away the pretense of innocence is that of a naked and helpless witnessing.

I wouldn't have remembered all this tonight, except I got to YouTubing for songs of a Indian folk-rock band "Euphoria", and ran into this music video for "Maaeri", primarily made on a train in India. If you see this, imagine those small two birds (who still exist), as they clap pieces of rock to produce a beat, and sign old Hindi film songs up and down on that Western Railway line, a funeral pyre for innocence.

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."

...

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."

...

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.