Nine Lives(102)

The Bauls were always happy to talk about their lives and songs and beliefs, but were not prepared to discuss in public the esoteric sexual practices which each guru teaches to his pupils when he considers they are ready. These folk Tantric practices of the Bauls, or sadhana, are closely guarded secrets, but embrace control of breathing and orgasm in elaborately ritualised sexual rites. Sometimes this involves sex with menstruating women, which in their songs they call “the full moon at the new moon.” Occasionally this is combined with the ingestion of a drink compounded of semen, blood and bodily fluids—so making a firm Tantric statement about flouting established norms and taboos.

Kanai talked briefly to me about the Bauls’ sexual yoga, “drinking nectar from the moon,” explaining it as a way of awakening and controlling the latent erotic energies from the base of your body and bringing them to the fore. His words were explained to me by another new arrival at the festival: the Delhi-based writer on religion Bhaskar Bhattacharyya, who had once lived for an extended period with Kanai in Tarapith, and who had researched the customs of the Bauls as deeply as anyone.

The Bauls, explained Bhaskar, seek to channel the mysteries of sexuality and the sexual urge—the most powerful emotional force in the human body—as a way of reaching and revealing the divinity of the inner self. “They use it as a sort of booster rocket,” he explained. “Just as a rocket uses huge amounts of energy to blast out of the field of gravity, so the Bauls use their Tantric sexual yoga as a powerhouse to drive the mind out of the gravity of everyday life, to make sex not so much enjoyable as something approaching a divine experience. Yet the sex is useless if it is not performed with love, and even then sex is just the beginning of a long journey. It’s how you learn to use it, how you learn to control it, that is the real art.”

For the Bauls, these sexual exotica are part of a much wider set of yogic practices which aim to make the sacred physiology of the body supple and coordinated with itself, using the mastery of breathing, meditation, posture and exercises as a way of charging and taming energies and drives, and perfecting the body in order to transform it. “For the Bauls, the body is the chariot that can take you up into the sky, towards the sun,” as Bhaskar put it.

For this reason, marriage is very important for the Bauls, and to be a fully initiated Baul you have to have a partner with whom you can perform Tantric sadhana. Debdas had in fact been married twice. His first wife was Radha Rani, the daughter of his guru, Sudhir Das, the Baul who had first taken him to Kenduli. Aged eighteen, he was staying in Sudhir Das’s akhara when he caught a fever.

“I was almost unconscious and Radha Rani tended me,” Debdas told me. “She was a beauty and a wonderful singer. The trap was laid: it was like a football match with only one goalpost. Whatever happened, happened. I was so ill that I was hardly aware of what was going on.”

“Ha!” said Kanai from across the room.

“I was snared,” said Debdas. “Completely in love.”

“He was like an intoxicated elephant,” said Kanai.

“Ah—she was wonderful,” continued Debdas. “I wanted to team up with her and travel Bengal with her, singing. But in the end we were only together two years. Our love soured. Things built up, and one day the bomb burst. I just walked out. By then we had a six-month-old baby. In life, happiness and sorrow go hand in hand. Sorrow is part of life. We have to find the happiness that lies beside it.”

I asked how he had met his current wife.

“Several years later I joined the akhara of Ramananda Das Goswami,” said Debdas. “After a while I asked him to give me both musical and spiritual direction, and to teach me Tantric sadhana. I wanted to learn how to close the mouth of the snake and boil the milk of bliss [to make love without ejaculating]. My guru replied, ‘You are asking for water, do you have a container?’ He meant did I have a woman. I replied that I was single. So he said, ‘There is a girl with us, Hari Dasi, why don’t you marry her and I will teach you both?’ I agreed, and Hari Dasi and I have been together ever since. She has enriched me in many ways, and been my route to our secret practices. I can’t tell you about our sadhana together—this can only be shared with initiated Bauls who have taken diksha—but I can tell you it transformed my life.”

Kanai came to marriage later than Debdas, and it was Manisha Ma who brought him together with his wife. When Debdas was at the akhara of Ramananda Das Goswami, Kanai spent the monsoon breaks in the cremation ground of Tarapith.

“My friends in the burning ground got together and decided it was about time I was married,” said Kanai. “Arati, who became my khepi, had been married before, but her husband had fallen from a tree and had been totally disabled. He used to come to the cremation ground in a little cart and take care of the shoes at the entrance. After he died, Arati took over his job, and would sit by the entrance with her young son, all alone in the world. Manisha Ma said to her that she was very young, and needed a protector: why didn’t she tie up with Kanai? All the sadhus thought it was a good idea, so my mother came and met her, and liked her. She wanted me looked after and settled before she died, so she said to Arati, ‘Look after my son—he may be blind, but he’s a good boy.’