Bauls of Bengal

← Encyclopedia

The Bauls are a heterodox community of wandering singers from the Bengal region — today divided between West Bengal in India and Bangladesh — whose religion is carried almost entirely in song rather than in doctrine or scripture. The name is usually traced to words meaning mad or windblown, and the Bauls have worn it without embarrassment: theirs is a deliberately disreputable mysticism, indifferent to caste, suspicious of temples and mosques alike, and at home on the road.

They are not a single sect but a loose current, and their songs draw on several streams at once. From Vaishnava devotion, especially its Sahajiya strand, comes the language of love and longing for the divine; from Bengali tantra comes a focus on the body as the site where the real work is done; from rural Sufism comes the figure of the wandering fakir and a vocabulary of the heart. Many Bauls are nominally Hindu, many nominally Muslim, and the tradition treats that distinction as beside the point. What is held in common is a conviction that the divine is to be found within the living body — in the breath, in the joining of bodies, in the cultivation of an inward state — and not in any external authority.

The central image is the moner manush, the “man of the heart”: an inner beloved or true self, sometimes spoken of as already present and merely hidden, sought through a discipline that practitioners hold to be secret and transmitted only from teacher to disciple. The songs say less than the practice intends; much of what is meant is understood to be deliberately veiled, sung in a “twilight language” whose plain images carry a second sense known to initiates. The best-known composer in the tradition is Lalon, a nineteenth-century figure of contested origin whose hundreds of songs remain central to the Baul repertoire and to Bengali culture more broadly.

The Bauls were lifted to wider attention by Rabindranath Tagore, who admired their songs, collected them, and acknowledged their mark on his own work; in the twentieth century they became, for many readers, an emblem of an unforced, anti-institutional spirituality. Scholarship has since complicated that picture, recovering the demanding esoteric and tantric content beneath the lyrical surface and resisting the tendency to soften the Bauls into mere folk poets. UNESCO inscribed Baul song on its list of intangible cultural heritage in 2005.

The resemblance to other traditions of mystic song — the Sufi qawwali, the verses of Kabir, the wider world of the wandering sant — is real and often noted. The Bauls share that family’s distrust of priests and books and its preference for the sung word over the written. They are not reducible to any of them: the body-centred discipline at the core is their own, and most of it was never meant to be written down at all.

→ In the library: Tagore & Underhill — Songs of Kabir (1915)

→ Related: Bhakti Movement · Bhedabheda · Gnosis