For the Bauls believe that God is found not in a stone or bronze idol, or in the heavens, or even in the afterlife, but in the present moment, in the body of the man or woman who seeks the truth; all that is required is that you give up your possessions, take up the life of the road, find a guru and adhere to the path of love. Each man is alone, they believe, and must find his own way. Drawing elements from Sufism, Tantra, Shakta, Sahajiya, Vaishnavism and Buddhism, they revere deities such as Krishna or Kali, and visit temples, mosques and wayside shrines—but only as helpful symbols and signposts along a road to Enlightenment, never as an end in themselves.
Their goal is to discover the divine inner knowledge: the “Unknown Bird,” “The Golden Man” or the “Man of the Heart”—Moner Manush—an ideal that they believe lives within the body of every man, but may take a lifetime to discover. As such they reject the authority of the Brahmins and the usefulness of religious rituals, while some—though not all—Bauls come close to a form of atheism, denying the existence of any transcendental deity, and seeking instead ultimate truth in this present physical world, in every human body and every human heart. Man is the final measure for the Bauls.
The near-atheism and humanism of these singing philosophers is not in any sense a new departure in Indian thought, and dates back at least to the sceptical and materialistic Charvaka school of the sixth century BC, which rejected the idea of God and professed that no living creature was immortal. Ancient India in fact has a larger atheistic and agnostic literature than any other classical civilisation, and an Indian tradition of ambiguity in the face of eternity can be traced back as far as the Rig Veda, which enshrines at its centre the idea of uncertainty about the divine. “Who really knows?” it asks. “Who will here proclaim it? Whence was it produced? Whence is this creation? Perhaps it formed itself, perhaps it did not. The one who looks down on it from the highest heaven, only he knows—or perhaps he does not know.” The strange mix of spirituality and scepticism in Baul philosophy is thus rooted in a very ancient strand of Hindu agnostic thought.
In pursuit of this path, the Bauls defy distinctions of caste and religion. Bauls can be from any background, and they straddle the frontiers of Hinduism and Islam. The music of “God’s Troubadours” reflects their impulsive restlessness and their love of the open road:
The Mirror of the sky,
reflects my soul.
O Baul of the road,
O Baul, my heart,
What keeps you tied,
to the corner of the room?
As the storm rampages
In your crumbling hut,
the water rises to your bed.
Your tattered quilt
Floats on the flood,
Your shelter is down.
O Baul of the road,
O Baul, my heart,
What keeps you tied,
to the corner of the room?
Travelling from village to village, owning nothing but a multicoloured patchwork robe known as an alkhalla, they sit in tea shops and under roadside banyan trees, in the compartments of trains and at village bus stops, busking their ballads of love and mysticism, divine madness and universal brotherhood, and the goal of Mahasukha, the great bliss of the void, to gatherings of ordinary Bengali farmers and villagers.
They break the rhythm of rural life, inviting intimacies and wooing and consoling their audience with poetry and song, rather than hectoring them with sermons or speeches. They sing of desire and devotion, ecstasy and madness; of life as a river and the body as a boat. They sing of Radha’s mad love for the elusive Krishna, of the individual as the crazed Lover, and the Divine as the unattainable Beloved. They remind their listeners of the transitory nature of this life, and encourage them to renounce the divisions and hatreds of the world, so provoking them into facing themselves. Inner knowledge, they teach, is acquired not through power over others, but over the Self.
Once a year, however, the Bauls leave their wanderings and converge on Kenduli for their biggest annual festival. It’s the largest gathering of singers and Tantrics in South Asia. To get there I flew to Calcutta and took a train north to Shantiniketan, determined to see this gathering for myself.
But first I had to find Manisha Ma’s friend Kanai Das Baul.
Manisha had told me something of Kanai’s story when I was with her in the Tarapith cremation ground.
When he was six months old, Kanai caught smallpox and went blind. His parents—day labourers—despaired as to how their son would make a living. Then one day, when Kanai was ten, a passing Baul guru heard the boy singing as he took a bath amid the water hyacinths of the village pond, or pukur. In Bengal, the pukur is to village life what the green was to medieval England—the centre of rural life—as well as swimming pool, duck pond and communal laundromat. Kanai’s voice was high, sad and elegiac, and the Baul guru asked Kanai’s parents if they would consider letting him take Kanai as a pupil. “Once your parents have gone,” he said, “you will be able to support yourself if you let us teach you to sing.”