An
Intimate History of
BOOK XVII
|| Kachar vethar achin pakhi
kemne ase jai
Dharte parle monoberi ditam pakhir pai
||
-
Traditional Baul song
It has been my experience that each book of AIHB corpus, as if waits for a trigger
to see itself released in the Web. The Last Book, Book-XVI focused on the
relevance of Tagore in the globalized
The second trigger is more of external in
nature. While I was in
However, Mr. Dalrymple has opened up a debate of a more profound nature on
the methodology of writing history
itself. In this way, he finds himself in the same boat as AJP Taylor in history
and Dr. Sagan in Science. I can argue with good
reason that such personalities are available in all scholarly and non-scholarly
domain. The common theme that connects their view and sharp criticism from
their colleagues is the fact that they ‘deciphered‘ and ‘simplified‘ their
subject so as to bring to such a shape which is essentially and necessarily attractive to people. These people also
used the contemporary media to reach an audience, much wider than the experts,
students and that circuit where there are obligations involved. Attraction is
their key weapon for penetration among a wider audience. Hence, a part of their
critics charged them in diluting the rigour of the
subject through oversimplification and another set of critics, in a harsher
tone admonished them of falsification at the altar of mass appeal.
Concentrating on the centre of this highly
charged debate, especially in Indian context, AIHB in spite of its obscurity
and lack of reach in relative terms poses the problem of its place in
historical works. Following from that, we may venture to ask whether the
contributors of this project can be called historians of
Narrative History:
Inside the mind of the Indian Historians
I
have argued in previous books that in general, majority of Indian historians
lack literary qualities in their historical works. I have been witness to it as
a student myself and later as I ventured to read many classic works in English
by professional historians of
There
is another more pervasive facet of Indian mind and very few historians have any
conscious awareness of it. Before I
explain this facet, I need to provide a classification on the Line of Thinking
of a scholar‘s mind, irrespective of its quality of output. There are two types
of scholars for any subject. The first type is like gas which is found after
huge hardships, boring, drilling under mother earth‘s interior. The second type
does all this, alright but knows how to make light out of it - gaslight. A
Bengali writer of high competence in French language and literature gave this
simile while comparing German and French scholarship.[4]
I believe that most of Indian historians writing on Indian history approach the
subject with the attitude of a workman‘s habit of mind rather than an
aristocratic habit of mind. Their prose reflects that. Moreover, since most of them are paid
teachers, i.e. having a professorship or sorts, they have to justify their
salaries and cannot experiment with any new methodology. In course of time, the
system drags them into its chasm and they have only one response to any new
methodological experiments: conditioned denial of any merit whatsoever of any
novel methodology. The polite among them give a patronizing ugly oily smile which
is worse than a venomous attack. I have personal experience on that count while
I tried to put my arguments to some of those professional historians about the
methodological philosophy of AIHB. Interested reader can see this declaration
at AIHB Preface[5]
itself.
The
more I see India‘s success in Outsourcing business and some commentators
proclaiming too loudly that we are perhaps genetically advantaged to be
successful in an outsourced-paradigm world. This is not sense speaking but the
warmth of easy money coming from Call Centres and similar ventures. For
sometime, I have been in communication with a friend of mine who has been
studying MBA in one of the leading Indian institutes imparting that education.
He observes that in the institute, students are overloaded with so many things
to read and absorb (and of course all coming from West, led by the Harvard
Business Review) that this is a genetic miracle how we have few Indians who
have some originality left. Almost
entire energy is spent in tackling these formidable array of subjects that
finally little bit of critical attitude is left. In addition, there is that
ceaseless drive to prepare as to how to earn more money. It is a sad fact and
sadly enough, management education, including at the highest level of
Making
a long digression complete, I would put forth my argument in this form: It is
quite difficult for general Indian scholars to write powerfully, passionately
history of our country. Even those who have the necessary abilities would have
already gotten into the train of diggers rather than lighters. Being brought up
in an environment distinguished for its respect for ‘tradition‘, time, they are
surely to find themselves surrounded by the Scylla and Charybdis of Indian
history: highly complex and compartmentalized search or painfully simplistic
view of championing national glory. AIHB belongs to neither of these schools.
Here is Mr. Dalrymple speaking direct on a theme
very dear to my heart – the Bauls of Bengal. I have driven across the river
Ajay many a times while going to Shantiniketan from
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The song of the holy fools[7]
William Darlymple
When he was six months old, Kanai Das Baul caught smallpox and went
blind. His parents - simple day labourers - despaired as to how their son would
make a living. Then, one day, when Kanai was 10, a passing Baul,
one of
After the death
of his guru, Kanai took up residence in the cremation ground of Tarapith, where at
On the feast of Makar
Sakrant, around the middle of January, an incredible
gathering takes place on the banks of the river Ajoy
in west
As you approach the festival through the
low-level wetlands, past the bullocks ploughing the rich mud of the rice
paddies and the low, reed-thatched Bengali cottages surrounded by clumps of
young, green bamboo, the stream of pilgrims thickens along the roadsides.
Bengali villagers herding their goats and ducks along the high, raised
embankments give way to lines of lean, dark, wiry men with matted hair and
straggling beards. Some travel in groups of two or three, others alone,
carrying hand drums or an ektara, the Bauls' simple, single-stringed instrument.
Throughout their 500-year history, the Bauls have refused to conform to the social or religious
conventions of conservative and caste-conscious Bengali society. Subversive and
seductive, they have preserved a series of esoteric spiritual teachings on the
use of breath, Tantric sex and mystical devotion.
They believe that God is found not 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
adherence to the path of Love. Mixing elements of Sufism, Tantra,
Vaishnavism and Buddhism, they revere the Gods and visit
temples, mosques and wayside shrines, but only as a road to enlightenment,
never as an end in itself. The goal is to discover the "Man of the
Heart" - Moner Manush
- the ideal that lives within every man, but that may take a lifetime to
discover.
As such, some - though not all - Bauls come close to a form of atheism, denying the
existence of any transcendent divinity, or the usefulness of rituals and idols,
seeking instead the ultimate truth in the physical world, in every human heart.
Man is the final measure for the Bauls. Moreover,
they defy distinctions of caste and religion: Bauls
can be from any background, and they straddle the frontiers of Hinduism and
Islam. The music, lyrics and dance of "God's troubadours" (as they
are called in
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?
Today, the Bauls
play an important role as the bridge between Islam and Hinduism, and they
perform as much in Sufi shrines as Hindu temples. Usually poor and from rural
villages, these illiterate dancing monks are nevertheless important guardians
of moderate, pluralistic Hinduism against the narrow Muslim-hatred propagated
by the resurgent Hindu right wing.
Travelling from village to village,
owning nothing but a patchwork quilt, they sit in teashops and under roadside
banyan trees, in the compartments of trains and at village bus stops, singing
their ballads about love, mysticism and universal brotherhood to gatherings of
ordinary Bengali farmers and villagers. They break the rhythm of ordinary rural
life, inviting intimacies and wooing their audience with poetry and song,
rather than hectoring them with sermons or speeches. They sing of desire and
devotion, of the individual as the crazed Lover and the divine as the
unattainable Beloved. Mourning man's separation from the divine, they remind
their listeners of the transitory nature of this life, and encourage them to
renounce the divisions and hatreds of the world. Inner knowledge, they teach,
is acquired through power not over others, but over the self.
Once a year, however, the Bauls leave their wanderings and converge on Kenduli for the biggest gathering of singers and Tantrics in
But first I had to find Kanai.
Bhaskar had arrived at the Kenduli
Mela a few days ahead of me, and had found that Kanai
had already joined up with an itinerant group of Bauls.
They were staying in a small house off the main bazaar; to get there, you had
to pick your way through the usual melee of Indian religious festivals - street
children selling balloons and marigold garlands, a contortionist, a holy man
begging for alms, a group of argumentative naked sadhus,
a hissing Snake goddess and her attendants, lines of bullock carts loaded up
with clay images of the goddess Durga and a man
selling pink candyfloss. All along the main drag of the encampment, tented
temples had been erected, full of brightly-lit idols, with constellations of
clay lamps and camphor flames winking in the dust of the warm, encompassing
Bengali darkness.
By the time I found the house - a simple,
unfurnished Bengali cottage - the Bauls were in full
song. It was like a scene from a Mughal miniature.
The Bauls were sitting in a circle around the fire,
cross-legged in the straw on the floor, breaking their singing only to pass a
chillum of bhang from one to the other.
There were six of them. Kanai himself, a
thin, delicate and self-possessed man in his 50s, with straggling, grey beard
and a pair of small cymbals in his hand. Beside him sat an older Baul, Hari Goshai,
hung with the beads of a rudraksha rosary, singing
with a khomok drum in one hand and an ektara in the other. His grey hair was gathered into a
topknot, a string of copper bells, which he rang as he sang, attached to the big
toe of his right foot. Facing these two was the celebrated Baul
Paban Das Baul, who was surrounded by his wife Mimlu
and his two younger sisters. Paban was a handsome,
hyperactive figure in his late 40s, with full lips, a shock of wiry,
pepper-and-salt hair. He was playing a small dotara
and dominating the group as much by the manic energy of his performance as by
his singing: "Never plunge into the river of lust," he sang,
"for you will not reach the shores. It is a river of no coasts where
typhoons rage."
Kanai and Paban
were old friends, and as the music gathered momentum they passed verses and
songs back and forwards between them, so that when one asked a philosophical
question, the other would answer it, a sort of musical symposium, or a dialogue
in song. Paban would sing a verse about his wish to
visit
Their voices were perfectly complementary:
Paban's deep and smoky, alternately urgent and
sensuous; Kanai's softer, more vulnerable and tender. His singing was
surprisingly high-pitched - at times almost falsetto - with a fine, reed-like
clarity. While Paban sang, he banged on a khomok drum or a dubki, a small
rustic tambourine; Kanai sang with his sightless blue eyes fixed ecstatically
upwards, as if gazing at the heavens. Paban would
occasionally tickle his chin and tease him: "Don't give me that wicked
smile, Kanai."
The songs all drew on the world of the
Bengali village, and contained parables that any villager could understand: the
body, sang Paban, is like a pot of clay; the human
soul the water of love. Inner knowledge fires the pot and bakes the clay, for
an unfired pot cannot contain water. Other songs were sprinkled with readily
comprehensible images of boats and nets, rice fields, fish ponds and the
village shop:
Cut the rice stalks,
O rice-growing brother.
Cut them in a bunch
Before they begin to smell
Rotten like your body
Without a living heart.
Sell your good, my store-keeping brother,
While the market is brisk,
When the sun fades
And your customers depart,
Your store is a lonely place
Later, towards
"Initially, I joined the Bauls because it seemed the only way I could make a
livelihood," he said. "A blind man cannot be a farmer, but he can be
a singer. My guru soon taught me that there are much more important things than
getting by, or making money, or material pleasures. I am still very poor but,
thanks to the lessons of my guru, my soul is rich. He taught me to seek God and
inspire our people to seek God, too."
"Is it a good life?" I asked.
"It is the best life," he
replied without hesitation. "The entire world is my home. We walk anywhere
and are welcome anywhere. When you walk, you are freed from the worries of
ordinary life, from the imprisonment of being rooted in the same place."
"But don't you miss your home? Don't
you tire of the road?"
"When you first become a Baul, you have to leave your family, and for 12 years you
must wander in strange countries where you have no relatives," said Kanai.
"There is a saying, 'No Baul should live under
the same tree for more than three days.' At first, you feel alone,
disorientated. But people are always pleased to see the Bauls
- when the villagers see our coloured robes, they shout, 'Look, the madmen are
coming! Now we can take the day off and have some fun!' Wherever we go, the
people stop what they are doing and come and listen to us. They bring fish from
the fish ponds and cook some rice and dal for us, and
while they do that we sing and teach them. We try to give back some of the love
we receive, to reconcile people, and to offer them peace and solace. We try to
help them with their difficulties and to show them the path to ecstasy."
"How do you do that?" I asked.
"By our songs," he said.
"For us Bauls, our songs are a source of both
love and knowledge. We tease the rich and the arrogant, and make digs at the
hypocrisy of the Brahmins. We sing against caste and against injustice. We tell
the people that God is not in the temple or in the
"In what way?"
"We believe that the way to God lies
not in rituals but in living a simple life, walking the country on foot and
doing what your guru says. The joy of walking on foot on unknown roads brings
you closer to God. You learn to recognise that the divine is everywhere - in
plants and animals and the rocks. You learn also that music and dance is a way
of meeting God. God is the purest form of joy - complete joy."
Kanai shook his long grey locks.
"There is no jealousy in this life," he added. "No Brahmin or Sudra, no Hindu or Muslim. Wherever I am, that is my
home."
For five days, I followed Paban and Kanai around. All over the huge campsite, at all
hours of the day and night, groups of musicians were breaking into song.
Sometimes, this was part of a formal concert - the Bengali government had put
up a small stage in honour of Kenduli's celebrated
poet, Joydev, the 12th-century author of the great
poem on the loves of
The Bauls were
always happy to talk about their songs and their beliefs, but I soon discovered
that there is a side to them about which they are much more cagey. For though
they do not discuss it in public, there is an entire body of esoteric wisdom
that the Bauls practise, and which they have
preserved from the late medieval period, when Buddhist Tantra
was the dominant faith in
At the root of Tantra
- as at the heart of the Bauls' faith - lies the idea
of reaching God through opposing convention. Whereas caste Hindus believe that
purity and good living are safeguarded by avoiding meat and alcoholic drink, by
keeping away from unclean places such as cremation grounds and by avoiding
polluting substances such as bodily fluids, Tantrics
and Bauls believe that one path to salvation lies in
inverting these strictures.
In this, they take their lead from Tara
and the other great Tantric goddesses: dark-skinned, untameable
divinities, attended by jackals, furies and ghosts; goddesses who cut off their
own heads, who are offered blood sacrifices by their devotees, and who prefer
to have sex with corpses, straddling them on a burning cremation pyre. Such
goddesses - embodying all that would normally be considered outrageous or even
repulsive - are antimodels, challenging comforting
ideas about how the world should be ordered, and violating approved social
values. "Going up the down-current," as one Baul
put it to me.
The folk Tantric
practices of the Bauls (called sadhana)
are closely guarded secrets, but they embrace elaborate, ritualised sex -
sometimes with menstruating women, and occasionally combined with the ingestion
of a drink compounded of semen, blood and bodily fluids - so making as firm a
statement as possible about flouting established norms and taboos.
Kanai talked briefly to me about the Bauls' sexual yoga, explaining it as a way of awakening
latent energies from the base of your body and bringing them to the fore.
According to Bhaskar, who has researched the customs
of the Bauls as deeply as anyone, they use the sexual
urge - the most powerful emotional force in the human body - as a way of
reaching the divine: "They use it as a sort of booster rocket," he
said. "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 and channel it, that is the
real art."
For the Bauls,
such sexual exotica are part of a wider set of yogic practices that aim to make
the body supple and coordinated with itself, using the mastery of breathing,
meditation and exercises as a way of taming energies and drives. "For the Bauls, the body is the chariot that can take you up into
the sky, towards the sun,"as Bhaskar
put it.
All this, however, is no more important
in the daily lives of Bauls than the ordinary
business of living simply and passing on the wisdom of the Baul
gurus through song and dance. This was brought home to me very clearly on the
last day of the Kenduli festival, when I went for a
walk through the Baul encampment as the
festival-goers were beginning to strike their tents and head off back on the
road. Everywhere, canvas awnings were folded up and loaded on to bullock carts.
Only two old people seemed to be sitting still. Near the Kenduli
cremation ground, I came across a Baul couple I had
met previously with Paban and Kanai. Both were
sitting cross-legged on the projecting ledge of a small roadside temple. Subhol Kapa and his wife Lalita were old, but they were still singing the Baul songs to anyone who stopped to listen to them.
"I am 83," said Subhol, "and Lalita is 70.
Our age prevents us walking the roads like we used to do. But we can still
dance and sing, and listen to the other Bauls. Lalita is a brilliant singer - much better than I. These
days, I am so sick, but when I sing or listen to Lalita,
it makes me forget my illness."
"It's true," said Lalita. "When I sing, I forget everything else. Often
I don't sing for anyone, just for myself, for my soul. I could not live without
this life. I need to dance and to sing. I feel ecstatic when I sing. It is
enough for me. I need nothing else."
"Song helps you transcend the
material life," said Subhol. "It takes you
to a different spiritual level."
"When a Baul
starts to sing, he gets so carried away he starts dancing," said Lalita. "The happiness and joy that comes with the
music helps you find God inside yourself."
"The songs of the Bauls are my companions in my old age," said Subhol. "We sing together, or with other Bauls like Paban and Kanai if
they come here. But when I am alone, I take up my dubki
and sing to myself to keep myself company."
"Did you both used to wander the
roads together?" I asked.
"We used to be ordinary
householders," said Lalita. "Only after I
had finished rearing my four sons did we become Bauls
together - some 25 to 30 years back."
"Even before then, we used to
sing," said Subhol, "but after we became Bauls, we were welcomed everywhere with love and warmth and
respect. It has made our life complete."
"For 18 years we walked the roads of
this country," said Lalita, "until we were
too old to walk any more. This temple was my guru's ashram. Now we cannot
wander, we live here following the Baul way,
protecting our body and keeping our hearts alive."
"But I thought Bauls
didn't believe in temples?"
"This temple is just to attract
people," said Subhol. "For me, it is just a
building - it has nothing to do with God. But people come here and tell us
about their problems, and we can give them solutions."
"God resides in everything,"
said Lalita. "In plants, in animals. You have to
learn to recognise God everywhere. Only then can you become a true searcher. We
have a song about this. You would like to hear it?"
"Very much," I said.
They went into a room to one side of the
shrine and returned a few minutes later, Lalita with
a harmonium and Subhol an ektara.
Lalita squatted in front of the harmonium and Subhol plucked a few notes on the ektara,
then began to sing. Before long, he was rocking backwards and forwards, hopping
from one leg to the other, totally carried away by the beauty of the music he
was singing. When they had finished, they sat together, looking out in silence
over the river. It was getting late, and the sun was setting over the Ajoy - the time Bengalis call go dhuli
bhela, or cow dust time.
"When I hear this music," said Lalita, breaking the silence after a few minutes, "I
don't care if I die tomorrow. It makes everything in life seem sweet."
"It's true," said Subhol. "Thanks to this music, we live out our old age
in peace. It makes us so happy, we don't remember what sadness is."
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A Personal Postscript:
The Bauls, if present during the Middle Age in
The dance of Baul is no ordinary
dance. An ordinary dancer dances in space and in local time. A Baul dances in
space as well as in time. For a Baul, his body, this body of flesh, bone,
marrow, blood, pus, semen, and menses is a miniature universe. So when this
universe gets into motion, there are infinite circles of energy circulating
like a spiral. He does not specialize in music, his very movement becomes
music.
I always wonder why Baul tradition
has grown in
Appendix
–I (Email dated
"As a huge admirer of
Professor Habib’s work- which is cited frequently
throughout the Last Mughal- I am profoundly
flattered that India’s greatest Mughal scholar has
seen fit to comment so thoughtfully and at such length on my book. I am however
a little surprised that a man famous for his scrupulous use of primary sources
has done so without first looking at the text in question. Had he read even the
introduction, he would have found that I have not said, written or implied, any
of the following statements which he seems to attribute to me.
1. That Indian historians are
either lazy or lethargic.
2. That I am the first person to
write the history of 1857 from Urdu and Persian sources.
3. That the Mutiny Papers in the
National Archives are uncatalogued.
4. That I discovered the
collection.
5. That to use British sources
is a sin to be avoided.
6. That I compare Muslim sepoys to jihadis.
What I have said is that I am a
little surprised that a collection as astonishingly rich and as beautifully
catalogued as the Mutiny Papers, and one located so centrally in the National
Archives of the capital city, within sight of Rashtrapati
Bhavan, have been so little consulted. After all, the
contents- some 20,000 Urdu and Persian documents- describe in fabulous detail
what happened in
As I acknowledge in the book,
several specialist papers and a full length biography of Zafar
in Urdu, have previously been written from the contents of the collection. But
of the documents studied by myself and my colleague Mahmood
Farooqui over four years of intensive research, fully
75% had never before been requisioned, as was clear
both from the absence of any previous stamps or requisition details on the
files in question (the archives list on each file the dates and names of
everyone who calls them up), and from the comments of the archivists. As the
staff of the archives confirmed to me this weekend, over the last two decades
several scholars have found the catalogue (which was printed in 1921 and is
available in libraries worldwide- my own copy was borrowed from the London
Library in St James Square, so is surely also available in that of Prof Habib’s AMU) and called up some of the papers, but most
have given up after seeing the difficulty of the shikastah
in which the documents are written. For cracking this, I have the skills
and amazing perseverance of Mahmood to thank.
As for Professor Habib’s charge that I make an unfortunate assumption that the Muslim sepoys were precursors
to the jihadis of today, this is also quite
incorrect. The precursors of the jihadis of today
were the self-described jihadis of 1857, who were
quite separate from the sepoys, and who gathered in some numbers in
As I describe at some length in
my book, during the Id of 1857, these jihadis
seriously threatened the intercommunal harmony
successfully maintained by both the court and the sepoys,
when they announced they wished to slaughter a cow on the steps of the Jama Masjid, something Zafar eventually dissuaded them from doing. Indeed it
is the way Zafar continually fights for Hindu-Muslim
unity in the face of the extremists, and his insistence on holding the jihadi spirit at bay, that forms the basis of my
admiration both for him and the composite culture he represents.
Moreover it is explicit
in the Mutiny Papers that many of the Mujahedin took bayats to an amir,
just as Bin Laden’s followers do today to him; there
was even a group of suicide ghazis from Gwalior who had vowed never to eat
again and to fight until they met death for those who have come to die
have no need for food. Though I dwell on contemporary
echoes only in the last two pages of the book, the parallels speak for themselves.
I have sent Professor Habib a copy of my book, and if he ever finds the time to
read it, and gets from it even a fraction of the enjoyment that I have received
from his remarkable body of work, I will be more than satisfied."
William Dalrymple
[1] Goswami literally
means Lord of the senses ( Go : senses , Swami : Lord) in Sanskrit. All
Vaishnav religious teachers of
[2] Dr. Irfan Habin in The Outlook
[3] This is
the frontage of temples in
[4] Promothinath Bishi on
Bengali – Outline of French Literature
[5] AIHB Preface - http://personal.vsnl.com/syhlleti/aihbpreface.htm
[6]
[7] This is reproduced from The
Guardian Unlimited, written by William Darlymple, after obtaining written persmission from Mr. Dalrymple. The permission from The Guardian is sought but any
intimation is yet to be received. The actual essay as published in The Guardian Unlimited can be seen here at http://www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,3605,1141492,00.html