Author: Jeanne Openshaw
Publisher: Foundation Books
Year: 2004
Language: English
Pages: 301
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8175962054
Description
Bauls have become renowned as wandering minstrels and mystics of India and Bangladesh, and are known through their beautiful, often enigmatic songs. They are recruited from both Hindu and Muslim communities, privileging the human being over such identities. Despite their iconic status as representatives of the spiritual East, and although they have been the subject of a number of studies, systematic research with Bauls themselves has been largely neglected. Jeanne
Openshaw’s book is new, not only in analyzing the rise of Bauls to their present revered status, but in the depth of its ethnographic research and its reference to the lives of composers and singers as a context for their songs.
The author uses her fieldwork, and oral and manuscript materials to lead the reader from conventional historical and textual approaches towards a world defined by people called Baul, where the human body and love are primary and female is extolled above male. This is a compelling story of creativity and dissent even in the face of persecution.
Contents
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
NOTES ON TRANSLITERATION AND TEXTS
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
INTRODUCTION
PART I: BACKGROUND-LITERATURE ON BAULS AND BAUL SONGS
What’s in a name? The advent of the Baul
The making of the Bauls-Histories, Themes, Baul Songs
PART II: IN SEARCH OF BAULS
Fieldwork in Rarh
Fieldwork in Bagri
PART III: RECEIVED CLASSIFICATIONS
Two shores, two refuges: householder and renouncer
Evading the two shores: the guru
PART IV: REWORKING THE CLASSIFICATIONS
Affect-love and women
Theory: Images, the I and bartaman
PART V: PRACTICE (sadhana) and TALKING ABOUT PRACTICE (hari-katha)
Practice (sadhana)
Four moons practice and talking about practice
CONCLUSION
GLOSSARY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
GENERAL INDEX
NAME INDEX