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| Vol. 4, Issue 5 May 2012 |
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Reporting & Essays |
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Reportage |
For the Sake of the Song
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| A tangled tale of Bauls, Beat poets, Bob Dylan and one woman’s effort to preserve the music and stories of West Bengal’s wandering minstrels |
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COURTESY PURNA DAS BAUL |
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| The legendary Baul poet-singer Nabani Das Baul, whose songs were a principal source of inspiration for Rabindranath Tagore.
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| B |
Y SEPTEMBER 1967, the mela that
brought 100,000 flower children,
blissed-out hippies and curiosity-seekers
from all over America to San Francisco had come to a close. Someone,
however, was reluctant to admit that the ‘Summer of Love’ was over; for two
weeks storefronts in the Haight-Ashbury neighbourhood sprouted psychedelic
posters
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announcing the arrival of yet another musical sensation. The LDM Spiritual Band, a five-member troupe of folk musicians from India, commonly known as Bauls, was coming to America on a seven-month concert tour.
On 14 September 1967 the band performed at Fillmore West. They had actually
been expected a week earlier, having been billed as the opening act for
The Byrds, but they arrived three days late, and unknowingly missed their
own debut. When they didn’t show, Albert Grossman, the man who had
brought them to California, flew back to New York.
Grossman was a powerhouse on the exploding folk rock scene, spearheaded
by his star clients Bob Dylan and Peter, Paul & Mary. But he was
also a patient man where his artists were concerned (he had just signed the
very high maintenance blues singer Janis Joplin). If he was disappointed at
the band’s failure to appear as scheduled, he was still sold on the prospects
of Bengali folk music in America. Since everything Grossman touched
seemed to turn gold, it hadn’t taken too much convincing for Elektra
Records to agree to pay the plane fares from Calcutta and underwrite a
recording session.
| ELLIOT LANDY / CORBIS |
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Albert Grossman, who brought the Bauls to America, with Robbie Robertson of The Band and the concert promoter Bill Graham in 1969. |
The band included a Baul singer named Purna Das Baul, his younger
brother Luxman on the khrmack, Jiban Das on tabla, Sudhananda Das
on harmonium and Krishna Das Baul on the fretless dotara, which has
two main strings. There was also Calcutta journalist Asoke Fakir, his
wife Malati and their 18-month-old daughter. Asoke, acting as the
Bauls’ manager and general factotum, had cashed Elektra’s check, arranged
the band’s visas and booked their Pan Am tickets; he had also
delayed their arrival in San Francisco because he decided they should spend six days sightseeing in Tokyo en route.
As none of the Bauls spoke English, they were
obliged to follow his seemingly more worldly
lead. Asoke had even come up with their name,
the LDM (Lok Dharma Mahashram) Spiritual
Band, which was in turn derived from the
“World’s First Socio-Spiritual Research Institute
for the Neo-Spiritual Movement”, of which
Asoke was both the ‘International President’
and ‘Founder Director’.
On the night of their first performance Asoke,
suddenly dressed in the long, flowing gowns of a
fellow band member, took to the stage, his head
shaved clean as a baby’s bottom. Lawrence Ferlinghetti,
the poet and proprietor of the famed
City Lights bookstore, was in the audience with
a tape recorder, as was a young Bengali student
from the University of California, Berkeley,
named Dilip Basu. Asoke greeted the sold-out
auditorium as if he were addressing all of America
personally: for nearly half an hour, he invited
the largely stoned audience to open their hearts
and minds to the Baul message of peace, love and universal brotherhood through spiritual
coexistence. Or something like that. Then, turning
around with a flourish, he lifted his trident
and began to conduct the LDM Spiritual Band
in song.
| F |
IVE YEARS EARLIER, close to the end
of his nine-month stay in Calcutta, the
American Beat poet Allen Ginsberg—accompanied by his partner, Peter Orlovsky
(whom he referred to, slyly, as his “wife”),
the Bengali poet Shakti Chatterjee, and their
would-be spiritual guru, Asoke Fakir—had travelled
to Siuri, home to a large clan of Bauls, the troubadour
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poet-singers of the Bengal countryside. This was the highlight of a train and bus journey to visit various sacred sites in the Birbhum district of West Bengal.
In Shantiniketan, Ginsberg had listened patiently
as a number of scholars discussed the
spiritual genius of ‘Father’ Rabindranath Tagore.
Moving on to Tarapith, the site of a Bhakti temple
devoted to the worship of the fearsome
tantric goddess Tara, Asoke had introduced them all to a group of sadhus practicing smasana
sadhana, tantric spiritual practices of the cremation
and burial grounds. The corpse-strewn,
smoke-filled scene in Tarapith, once home to the
mad saint, Bamakhepa, was thrillingly intense,
particularly after several chillums.
Finally, after Tarapith they had arrived at
a little hamlet outside Siuri. There Ginsberg
found the aged, legendary Baul master Nabani
Das Baul living in a small mud hut, bedridden
and unable to sing. When Nabani spoke to Ginsberg
from his sick bed, reciting with difficulty
the songs he had once sung so lustily, Ginsberg
scribbled Asoke’s roughly translated words dutifully
in his notebook. He spent a week with the
Baul family. From Nabani’s wife he learnt to eat
with his hands, from Nabani he learnt to play
the single-stringed ektara and four-stringed
tanpura, the instrument that provides a background
drone to Indian classical music. He was
also schooled in the chanting of the mantra “Om
Namah Shivaya.”
Ginsberg hoped to find, in Baul spiritual teachings
and songs, a new wellspring for his own poetic work. Tagore had once sat at Nabani Das
Baul’s feet with nearly the same intention. Along
with those of Lalon Fakir, the songs of Nabani
Das were often cited as one of the Nobel laureate’s
principal sources of inspiration for his poetry,
music and philosophy of life. Tagore later
distilled what he understood of Baul beliefs in
his famed lecture in 1930 at Oxford, ‘The Religion
of Man’. Bauls were distinguished from the
usual run of men by flouting social convention,
avoiding temples and mosques and any denotation
of caste. Song and dance were their only
form of worship, and their bodies their only temple.
He translated the word baul as “madcap”.
For many years, Ginsberg had convinced himself
that poetry held the key to mystical experience
and spiritual awakening. As a young college
student in New York City, he had had a spontaneous
and beatific vision of God while reading the
poems of William Blake in his Harlem tenement
in 1948. This vision, however, was followed days
later by a terrifying hallucination. In the next
two decades, he tried to figure out how he might
summon the experience of ecstasy, compassion
and wisdom of the first vision and bypass the
horror of the latter. Addressing a Marxist literary
conference in Jamshedpur in the summer of
1962, Ginsberg allowed that experiments with
mantras, tantric practices, Zen meditation and
possibly jazz music might also elicit this higher
order of consciousness. He hadn’t entirely given
up on the promise of LSD, but when he was honest
with himself, he realised the drug had proved
unpredictable, more apt to summon his demons
than the hoped-for celestials.
But when Ginsberg returned to America from
India in the summer of 1963, he immediately saw
that it wasn’t drugs or meditation or poetry that
was now turning on American youth. Soon after
his arrival, someone had sat him down and
played Bob Dylan’s just-released second album,
The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, which opened with
‘Blowin’ in the Wind’, the song Peter, Paul &
Mary had made famous while Ginsberg was in
India. Ginsberg, who had gone to India to escape
the notoriety and public outrage that had
accompanied the publication of his scandalous
poem ‘Howl’, realised that the torch had passed
from his poetry to Dylan’s folk music. Recalling
this insight years later in Martin Scorsese’s
documentary about Dylan, No Direction Home,
Ginsberg, then in his 70s, burst into tears.
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Readers' Comments |
Total Comments
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sumanto
23 June 2011
04:08 PM
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wonderfully writen article. awesome. helps me a lot with my own research on Bauls.
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Anon
27 May 2011
02:11 AM
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Great read.... Hope to see more on this ...
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Monty
8 May 2011
12:40 PM
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This is a useful piece of documentation, despite minor errors of location and nomenclature, but truly reflective of the sleaze behind the "selling" of Baul and Fakir and Sufi music, mostly by people trusted by the performers - including other, more canny, performers. What a shame!
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