KOLKATA, INDIA, February 27, 2007: They live in the heart of a cacophonous megapolis but the music they make smells of the soil of rural Bengal in all its sylvan splendor. Walk down a narrow south Kolkata lane of Jadavpur to meet the happening baul couple of Utpal Fakir and Sahajma whose impassioned “Allah Meherban Khuda, Khuda Meherban” took the musical world by storm in percussionist Bikram Ghosh’s fusion Bengali folk album Folktale. “Both of us are from Kolkata but chose to tread a different musical path – a path not so easy since we travelled widely in villages and faced immense hardship to be with the wandering minstrels in rural Bengal and learn from them the real ethos of Baul tradition and music,” said 38-year-old Sahajma, clad in the traditional Baul color.
While Sahajma sings, her husband Fakir, in his mid 40s, writes the songs and composes the music. Sahajma is a history graduate from the city’s St Xavier’s College and Fakir did his masters in Bengali. Both changed their real names in keeping with the Baul nomenclature. “I was into classical music and a pupil of M R Gautam and Sunanda Patnaik of Vishnu Digambar gharana. My husband has learnt under Pratima Kar, a student of Alauddin Khan. But my marriage to Utpal Fakir introduced me to Baul music and I realized that I belong to this genre,” Sahajma told IANS. “Music came to me from my parents, but in classical I did not find what I found in Baul,” said Sahajma. “I travelled with my husband and realized the depth of Baul music. Their sense of melody, rhythm and notations is absolutely mind-boggling. So we decided to research it and then we combined classical, Asomiya (Assamese), Jhoomar and south Indian tunes with Baul to give the audience something new,” explained Sahajma.
Bauls, a group of saffron-clad mystic minstrels from West Bengal and Bangladesh, constitute both a syncretic religious sect and a musical tradition used as a vehicle to express the liberal Baul thought and philosophy. The heterogeneous group, with many different streams to the sect, can often be identified by their distinctive clothes and monochord musical instruments like the ektara. The origin of the word Baul is debated. It has been suggested that it comes either from Sanskrit batul, meaning divinely inspired insanity; or byakul, meaning fervently eager. Whatever their origin, Baul thought has mixed elements of Tantra, Sufi Islam, Vaishnavism and Buddhism. It is thought to have been influenced by the Hindu tantric sect of the Kartabhajas as well as Tantric Buddhist schools like the Sahajia. Though Bauls comprise only a small fraction of the Bengali population, their influence on the culture of Bengal is considerable. Recently, even the US-funded HIV/AIDS campaign in rural Bengal took the help of these wandering minstrels.