Nine Lives

by William Dalrymple

  At this point, Tapan, who had been half-listening as he tended his fire, left the Basus, who had begun to sing some kirtans. He came and squatted beside us, at the foot of the trident, next to the skull. I asked him what had happened.

  “It gave me great pain,” he said, shaking his head. “My son was very angry with me. He said I had never taken any interest in him, and never been in touch.”

  “Was that true?”

  “It was partly true,” said Tapan. “After I answered the call of the Mother, I never found a way of connecting back with them.” He sighed, and threw a piece of kindling into the fire. “Now my son feels obliged to the people who brought him up, not to me. He says they are the people who supported him. He doesn’t want to try to understand my point of view.”

  “How did you come to hear about your wife’s death?” I asked.

  “I was in Calcutta with some disciples when a call came from my brother saying, ‘Your wife has expired.’ I went straight to the crematorium, and as I walked in, there was my son. I recognised him immediately, after nearly twenty years. How could I not recognise my own son? But even as I was heading towards him, I heard my niece’s husband commenting, ‘Look at him! After all these years he hasn’t been here, and now she’s dead he reappears.’ My son wouldn’t even look at me, and his wife’s family formed a sort of wall between me and him. Without saying anything, they gave me the feeling I should not approach him.”

  In the light of the fire, Tapan Sadhu suddenly looked old and vulnerable.

  “This was my own kith and kin,” he said. “They were preventing me from talking to my son.”

  Tapan fell silent again, staring into the flames.

  “They are not spiritual, and probably don’t even believe in God,” he said eventually. “They belong to a very different world. My niece is a professor, and her husband does electrocardiograms. My son is now an accountant with Tata. He was very smartly dressed, in a blazer. A good-looking boy. But they all reject the world I live in. I don’t think I can ever explain it to him.”

  “Now he is married,” said Manisha, “maybe his wife will change his mind?”

  “I don’t think so,” replied Tapan Sadhu, stroking his beard. “What signs are there? My son is dominated by the people around him. He is not strong enough to think independently.”

  The Basus were still singing around the fire. Tapan looked to see if they needed him, but they seemed engrossed in their chants.

  “So what did you do?” I asked.

  “I stayed at the back. After the ceremony was finished I left. I won’t ever go back.”

  “As long as there is life in you,” said Manisha, “you should be full of hope.”

  “This life of renunciation, of sanyas, is a life of joy,” said Tapan. “But in the life of every sadhu, some pain is there. The longer you live as a sadhu, the more you enjoy the life, and the more you forget your past. Then something happens to remind you, and you weep.”

  “I have been more lucky,” said Manisha. “When my husband was dying he told my daughters that I was in Tarapith. Someone from my village had seen me here, and reported back. So after his death, the girls came to the burning ground looking for me. ‘Have you seen a woman whose skin is flecked with white?’ they asked. A sadhu pointed out my hut and my daughters came and touched my feet. It had been over twenty years. When I left them they were children. Now they were all middle-aged women, two of them with children of their own.

  “It was a very tense moment. We looked at each other for a moment, then we all embraced, and burst into tears. They told me that my husband was now dead, so then and there I broke my bangles. The youngest one, the only one who is unmarried, decided to move to Tarapith, along with my mother. Now they both stay in the town, and we see each other every day. She was here this morning.”

  Manisha looked at Tapan. “Tapan Sadhu has come to love my daughters and is like a father for them.” She paused. “I know it is not exactly like every family, but in this burning ground, in this place of sorrow, we have found new hope.”

  From behind us there were more cries of “Jai Tara!” as sacrificial flames streaked up across the burning ghat. The woody noise of a bansuri flute could be heard drifting through the trees from the tarpaulins of an encampment of sadhus. The two elderly Tantrics exchanged a shy glance.

  “When I look at her feet,” said Tapan Sadhu, “I am happy. What I see in Ma Tara, I see in her.”

  “He found a live Tara in Tarapith,” said Manisha. “Now Tapan Sadhu looks after us. He is as strong as Tara Ma.”

  “As long as you are in my protection, no one will harm you.”

  “And by the grace of Ma, I have my daughters back. I thought I had lost them forever.”

  “Things have worked out for us all.”

  “I never imagined it would be possible to see them again,” said Manisha. “People think that we who live in the burning ground are crazy. But you get here what you cannot find anywhere else: pure human beings.”

  “When she first came to me,” said Tapan Sadhu, “I thought: look at this girl, how vulnerable she is, all on her own. Only later did I begin to realise what a gift she was.”

  “You were sent a woman who understands your calling.”

  “Some people here protested when we got together,” said Tapan. “But we didn’t listen.”

  “This is the will of Tara,” said Manisha. “Everyone must accept it.”

  “She gives us what we need.”

  “My only wish now,” said Manisha, “is to finish my days in the arms of Tara, and that she takes me in a good way, with all the proper rites.”

  Mr. Basu had now brought the goat he had earlier tethered to a tree, and was looking expectantly at Tapan.

  “Come,” said Tapan. “Enough talking. This is the night of Tara. We should be praying, not chatting.”

  “It is true,” said Manisha. “It is late now—the time Ma comes. It is time to get ready for our sacrifice.”

  The Song of the Blind Minstrel

  On the feast of Makar Sakranti, the new moon night on which the sun passes through the winter solstice, from the Tropic of Cancer to the Tropic of Capricorn, a great gathering takes places on the banks of the Ajoy River in West Bengal.

  Around the middle of January, several thousand saffron-clad wandering minstrels, or Bauls—the word means simply “mad” or “possessed” in Bengali—begin to gather at Kenduli, in the flat floodplains near Tagore’s old home of Shantiniketan. As they have done on this site for at least 500 years, the Bauls wander the huge campsite, greeting old friends, smoking ganja and exchanging gossip. Then, as the night draws in, they gather around their fires, and begin the singing and dancing that will carry on until dawn.

  You approach the festival through green wetlands, past bullocks ploughing the rich mud of the rice paddy. Reed-thatched or tin-topped Bengali cottages are surrounded by clumps of young green bamboo and groves of giant banyans, through which evening clouds of parakeets whirr and screech. As you near the Baul monastery of Tamalatala, which acts as the focus of the festival, the stream of pilgrims slowly thickens along the roadsides. Bengali villagers herding their goats and ducks along the high 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 travel alone, carrying hand drums or the Bauls’ simple single-stringed instrument, the ektara.

  Throughout their 500-year history, the Bauls of Bengal have refused to conform to the conventions of caste-conscious Bengali society. Subversive and seductive, wild and abandoned, they have preserved a series of esoteric spiritual teachings on breathing techniques, sex, asceticism, philosophy and mystical devotion. They have also amassed a treasury of beautifully melancholic and often enigmatic teaching songs which help map out their path to inner vision.

  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.”

  In due course, many years later, after a terrible family tragedy, Kanai remembered the guru’s words and set off to find him. He joined him on the road, learning the songs and becoming in time one of the Bauls’ most celebrated singers.

  Then, after the death of his guru, Kanai took up residence in the cremation ground of Tarapith, where Manisha, Tapan Sadhu and some of their friends helped arrange a marriage for him, to a young widow who looked after the shoes of visitors.

  Kanai, Manisha told me, had arrived at the Kenduli Mela a few days ahead of me, and had already joined up with an itinerant group of other Bauls. They were all staying in a small house off the main bazaar: to get there you had to leave the bathers washing on the banks of the Ajoy and pick your way through the usual mêlée of Indian religious festivals: street children selling balloons and marigold garlands; a contortionist and a holy man begging for alms; a group of argumentative naked Naga sadhus; a hissing snake goddess and her attendants; lines of bullock carts loaded up with clay images of the goddess Durga; beggars and mendicants; a man selling pink candyfloss to a blare of Bollywood strings emerging from a huge pink loudspeaker attached to the flossing machine. All along the main drag of the encampment, rival akharas, or monasteries, of the different Baul gurus had been erected, interspersed with tented temples full of brightly lit idols, constellations of clay lamps and camphor flames winking amid the wafts of sandalwood incense filling the warm, dusty Bengali darkness.

  By the time I found the house—a simple unfurnished Bengali hut—it was dark and Kanai’s Bauls were in full song. They had scattered straw on the ground and were sitting in a circle around the fire, cross-legged on the floor, breaking their singing only to pass a chillum of ganja from one to the other.

  There were six of them: Kanai himself, a thin, delicate and self-possessed man in his fifties with a straggling grey beard and a pair of small cymbals in his hand. Beside him sat a fabulously handsome old Baul, Kanai’s great friend and travelling companion Debdas, singing with a dugi drum in one hand and an ektara in the other. His hair hung loose, as did his great fan of grey beard, while a string of copper bells was attached to the big toe of his right foot, which he jingled as he sang.

  Facing them was another of the most celebrated Baul singers in Bengal, Paban Das Baul, who was flanked by his khepi, or Baul partner, Mimlu Sen, and his two younger sisters. Paban was a lithe, handsome and hyperactive figure in his late forties, with full lips, a shock of wiry pepper-and-salt hair, a short goatee and bushy sideburns. He was playing a small, two-stringed dotara and dominating the group as much by the sheer manic energy of his performance as by his singing: “Never plunge into the river of lust,” he sang with his rich, velvety voice, “for you will not reach the shore.”

  It is a river without banks,

  where typhoons rage,

  and the current is strong.

  Only those who are masters,

  of the five rasas, the juices of love,

  Know the play of the tides.

  Their boats do not sink.

  Paddled by oars of Love,

  They row strongly upstream.

 
The three men—Kanai, Debdas and Paban—were old friends, and as the music gathered momentum they passed verses and songs back and forth, so that when one would ask a philosophical question, the other would answer it: a symposium in song. Paban sang a verse of a traditional Bengali folksong about his wish to visit Krishna’s home:

  The peacock cries—

  Oh who will show me the way to Vrindavan?

  He raises his tail and cries:

  Krishna! Krishna!

  Kanai then answered with a verse reminding Paban that the only proper place of pilgrimage for a Baul was the human heart:

  Oh my deaf ears and blind eyes!

  How will I ever rid myself of this urge

  to find you, except in my own soul?

  If you want to go to Vrindavan,

  Look first into your heart …

  “Who knows if the gods exist at all?” sang Debdas, supporting Kanai.

  Can you find them in the heavens?

  Or the Himalayas?

  On the earth, or in the air?

  Nowhere else can God be found,

  But in the heart of the seeker of Truth.

  The voices of all three men were perfectly complementary, Paban’s resonant and smoky, alternately urgent and sensuous; Debdas’s a fine tenor; Kanai’s softer, more vulnerable, tender and high-pitched—at times almost a falsetto—with a fine, reed-like clarity. As Paban sang, he twanged a khomok hand drum or thundered away at the dubki, a sort of small, rustic tambourine. Kanai, in contrast, invariably sang with his sightless blue eyes fixed ecstatically upwards, 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 and images of the Bengali village, and contained parables that anyone could understand: the body, sang Paban, is like a pot of clay; the human soul the water of love. Inner knowledge found with the help of the guru 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: