Love and The Turning Seasons

by Andrew Schelling

  Central to Baul belief is that the presence of love is what gives spiritual stature, not observance of ritual or adherence to some creed. Love and life are joyful affairs, and religious celibacy they consider absurd. Asceticism? A dry, withered path. They reject it for a juicy (rosik, Sanskrit rasika) spirituality. Their core practice is a sexual mysticism, their beliefs drawn from aboriginal lore, the Vedas, yoga, Tantra, Krishna devotion, and Islamic mysticism. Deben Bhattacharya characterizes the way their creed takes from various sources, “discarding the system while accepting the faith.” Rejection of official, organized, systematic religion—or poetry, for that matter—locates them in a worldwide underground of poets who mix mystical practice with political dissent.

  Street singing is not germane to Baul spiritual life. It seems to have arisen as a way for some to earn a small livelihood, supplemented by agricultural work at home. Singers will compose their own songs or patch together lyrics learnt from others. Mostly it is the men who sing, doing so in village languages that differ a bit from district to district. Their lyrics can seem baffling, maybe because few outsiders have gotten an intimate look at their practices, and often because their songs speak in riddles—as when they call themselves madmen, or speak of the “inner man” of the heart. The charge of madness, when flung by outsiders, may show frustration or anxiety at the guarded nature of Baul religion. It’s this “madness” that struck Allen Ginsberg on a visit to India in 1962–1963, along with that mix of mystical song and candid political dissent. Years later he wrote a Baul-inspired poem, “After Lalon” [Lālan]—

  It’s true I got caught in

  the world

  When I was young Blake

  tipped me off

  Other teachers followed:

  Better prepare for Death

  Don’t get entangled with

  possessions

  That was when I was young,

  I was warned

  Now I’m a Senior Citizen

  and stuck with a million

  books

  a million thoughts a million

  dollars a million

  loves

  How’ll I ever leave my body?

  Allen Ginsberg says, I’m

  really up shits creek

  On the India trip Ginsberg met Nabani Das, a Baul who had known Rabindranath Tagore some decades earlier. When he returned to the States Ginsberg recommended Baul music to record producer Albert Grossman. Keeping Ginsberg’s words in mind, Grossman eventually traveled to India, and in 1967 brought five Baul singers to New York, housed them in a barn outside Woodstock, and introduced them to Bob Dylan and the Band. Two of those Bauls—Purna Das and Luxman Das—flank Dylan on the cover of his album John Wesley Harding. Purna Das later stated,

  There was a great similarity between our music and his. There is a connection between Baul music and Western folk music because the subjects are nature, love, human bodies, sorrow, which in fact are subjects common to all people everywhere.

  Deben Bhattacharya’s translations come from field recordings he made in the 1950s traveling around Bengal, as well as from available books. They seem pretty transparent. The following poem was recorded and translated by ethnomusicologist Charles Capwell in the 1980s, for his book The Music of the Bauls of Bengal. More coded, it uses the automobile to transport yoga-teachings and Tantra symbolism that date back millennia. The key to Baul riddle poems, as Capwell describes some of them, may lie in ancient texts: the Upaniṣads, or farther back.

  Drive the human-body-motor-car upon the road of sadhona.*

  Be informed of who is your mind-driver

  by the word of a true guru.

  Two lights are at the front of the car;

  they are lit night and day; they don’t go out.

  A car with seven locks;

  keep alert, o mind, while driving.

  Within the car are two conductors;

  there are also sixteen acquitted men within.

  Each is absorbed in his own work

  and has no connection with anyone.

  Hiramon says, “I remember the feet of the guru;

  come and drive for me, now.

  “I cannot drive your car any longer

  in this material kingdom.”

  Singer: Narayon Das Odhikari

  : CODA

  Wake up,

  my lover of women

  my amorous fluteplayer,

  night has fled

  it is dawn.

  Shutters bang open in house after house.

  Hear the bracelets

  chiming together

  as gopis strain at their butter churns.

  Wake up, it is dawn,

  gods and men

  throng through the doorways;

  cowherding boys

  their little hands stuffed with bread and butter

  drive cattle to pasture.

  Wake up! Mira says, wake up,

  The fluteplayer will save you

  but you must come

  seeking refuge.

  Mirabai

  :AS

  : AFTERWORD:

  ON READING INDIA’S DEVOTIONAL POETRY

  The Spirit of Bhakti

  THE CRUCIAL term for most of the poetry found in this collection is bhakti, a Sanskrit word instantly recognizable throughout India. Bhakti means devotional, and refers specifically to the songs and poems of bhaktas, worshippers or devotees. Bhava me bhaktaḥ, Krishna says in the Bhagavad-gītā: “Be my bhakta.”

  The term derives from a verbal root, bhaj, which first meant to divide, share, or distribute. With time the usage came to include enjoy and participate; to eat, to make love, to adore. The notion of loving, joined with the idea of a share or distribution, came to mean something like: the portion of oneself a person gives to the spiritual or creative, or offers a deity that embodies the divine.

  For North Americans the easy translation has been devotion. Bhakti poetry as devotional hymn. But in a culture still dragging Puritan attitudes into the twenty-first century, devotion carries implications of sobriety, piety, restraint, meekness; a skeptical attitude toward pleasure. At least it suggests the renunciation of reckless ecstasy.

  Bhakti in India, among the singers identified with it, carries few of these qualities. Glance quickly through the tradition and you’ll see that bhakti is juicy, impious, intoxicated, confrontational, often fiercely political, unremitting in how it opposes oppression. It is sexy. It delights in paradox, undermining rational thought or restraint. The nearest analogue in North America might be gospel or even the blues. Religious, yes; devotional, at times; self-restrained, maybe. Underneath runs a current of precise disaffection. The songs are intended to establish a community of dissent—one that bases itself on love, not hierarchy, power, or prestige. Charismatic churches in North America, or revival sects based on ecstatic singing, speaking in tongues, and mystical visions, come close to the bhaktas of India.

  This anyhow is what you glean from bhakti, which spread over the last 1,200 years through India—a range of spiritual and political revivals—from south to north, west to east. It is often erotic, typically anticlerical, disdainful toward piety, skeptical of scripture, hostile to ritual, incensed by social injustice. Most important for its poetry, it makes little use of logic or rationality, those tools of propriety. Extravagant, ferocious, the songs brim with irrational generosity.

  I find two particular traits of bhakti poetry to highlight. The first is how much of it is pointedly, unabashedly erotic. India has excelled at love poetry for two thousand years. In fact the foremost emotional territory in the classical Sanskrit poetry that preceded bhakti was erotic love. In those poems human sexuality resonated with the erotic life of flowers, plants, birds, and mammals, all of which quicken with procreative urge in the monsoon season. The poetry considers human love calibrated to that of the natural orders. Similarly in the southern parts of subcontinent In
dia, where Tamil stood instead of Sanskrit as the early classical language, much of the poetry turns out to be intricately romantic, placed in bioregions with specific plants and animals charging the landscapes. An ecological vision permeates the love poetry, with precise bioregional plants working to signal the arousal of erotic moods. The genius of the bhakti poets, who drew on both Sanskrit and Tamil poetry traditions, was to sweep religious and social fervor up in a wave of ecstatically charged passion. To see the entire natural world conspiring in the spiritual quest.

  The theology is easy. The primary image of the soul’s longing for god is given as the changing phases of love. A great deal of it revolves around the figures of Krishna and his strikingly passionate lover Radha. In the springtime arousal of longing, the sexual rapture, the heartaches, feverish moods, jealousy, and fierce reconciliation these lovers undergo, any distinction between bodily or spiritual makes no sense. Sexual energy, flaming under the hide of every living creature—something you’ll quit eating for, give up home and family for, accept social disgrace for—is the most immediate vehicle for the human spirit in its quest to shake free of ignorance and approach the divine.

  The other quality of bhakti I want to point out is the razor-sharp truth-telling. The poets call out religious hypocrisy or civic injustice. They pin life and death with a cold judicious eye. Here the closest poetry in the West might be William Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence,” or American antiwar poems of the sixties. To read Kabir, Lal Ded, Dadu Dayal, or Janabai is to enter a world based on contraries and paradox, with only one certainty—that the stakes are the highest, and predatory behavior contains its own dreadful punishment. The poet makes his or her own life the example of the desperate need to toss into the flames every delusion, here, now, before (as Kabir says) “death grabs you by the hair.”

  Histories

  Bhakti poetry occurs at the confluence of classical Sanskrit culture with India’s many vernacular traditions. Its first emergence—the point at which scholars name the appearance of some radically new spirit—occurred in South India, in Tamil Nadu, around the eighth or ninth century. The first bhakti poems were sung in Tamil, their vision of spiritual recklessness and disdain for rigid convention drawing on pan-Indian themes. They lifted threads from Sanskrit tradition, local vernacular cultures, classical Tamil literature, the gods known to the village or city, and from movements we moderns would call political uprisings. Yet in many ways bhakti’s impulse was subversive of all these. Bhakti, and the poems that convey its passions are, in translator A.K. Ramanujan’s words, pointedly “anti-tradition.”

  That first upheaval in Tamil set many of bhakti’s terms. Defiance of ritual and orthodoxy; rejection of educated speech or formal metrics; a turning away from classical training in poetry. And a search for disruptions in language that could give voice to suppressed emotion. It is remarkable how parallel bhakti’s poetic discoveries sound to the innovations of the twentieth century. In imagery, rhythm, and idiom, bhakti poems show a thrust toward illogic, the use of Dada-like ruptures, distinctly personal voices pressing up through imagery that can be troubling, indecipherable, or hopelessly extravagant. A “dark, ambiguous language of ciphers,” writes Ramanujan of some of the poems, and quotes historian of religion Mircea Eliade: “analogies, homologies, and double meanings.”

  Lest anyone think such poems simply riddles, I want to stress that behind every lyric you hear sharply articulated conflict, the struggles of a living person questioning his or her own experience in native speech. Regularly that speech manages to force new openings into language, disrupting conventional patterns of image-making or syntax. Unlike scripture or traditional religious verse—including India’s classic works like the Vedas, Upaniṣads, and Bhagavad-gītā—in bhakti the poem’s emotion and its drama stay focused on the poet. The poets don’t sing to a distant, abstract deity, or give voice to metaphysical thought. In fact they don’t bother with anything like doctrine. What they expose is a relationship. Generally this is the singer’s relationship to a god or to a trickster-like teacher, rapturous, often anguished. The cries of the bhakti singers sound to me as though they come directly out of the old love poetry, with one difference. In bhakti the singer is never an observer; his or her song is not a work of art, but a vehicle driven toward freedom.

  Over the course of a thousand years, measuring from eighth- or ninth-century Tamil Nadu, bhakti enveloped the south, emerged in India’s western districts of Maharashtra and Gujarat, spread across the north, and eventually appeared in the eastern regions of Bengal and Orissa. A Sanskrit verse takes count of the geography.

  Bhakti took birth in Dravidian lands

  ripened in Karnataka, came to

  womanhood in Maharashtra,

  and grew crone-like in Gujarat.

  Reaching Vrindavana she reemerged

  a nubile young woman.

  (AS translation)

  This clockwise “maturation,” then youthful renewal, spreading from the south to the regions around Delhi associated with Krishna, does not mean that bhakti was carried in a caravan region to region, nor that it spread in some readily charted time frame. It also does not mean—despite the Sanskrit verse—that it holds a single identity. Try to define bhakti, the paradoxes confound you at the next bend. If religious orthodoxy takes a few standard or prescribed forms, then the efforts to break free of social constraint are never standard, rarely predictable. They have taken hundreds of forms in India. The poets who come down to us look wild, untutored, sometimes quite savage, from the standpoint of social convention. Generalize about the poems, some hectoring poet will show up with a verse thorny with contradiction, a swift image that tangles your feet, a phrase that dumps logic into the Godavari River.

  What Is a Bhakti Poem?

  Bhakti poetry begins with the human voice. Its poems are to be sung, danced, recited, chanted. The late Dilip Chitre, a celebrated Indian poet who translated several volumes of the Varkari tradition of Maharashtra into English, applies a serviceable term, orature. In almost every instance bhakti is oral poetry—orature, not literature, spoken by the poet, transcribed to the page later. In many cases centuries later. In this sense its natural habitat originally was, and remains, performance.

  This means that a translation, printed on the page, will generally show only part of what the poem is: the linguistic elements. And of those, largely the elements that seem to be “meaningful.” Translation cannot replicate tones of speech, the steep climbs and ornamental descents of the singer’s voice, the insistent repetition of words and phrases. It cannot readily convey vocal sounds that hold no fixed meanings, or rework words that undergo deliberate or ritual distortion. Here is where translators have had to find echoes in our written language, parallels that echo what the early poets achieved. Or they’ve had to simply work from the page and forgo much that was carried outside the “words” of the poem.

  The widespread presence of subterranean and folk traditions through India, magical or mystical in nature, should alert us to the possibility that the most important part of a song may not be “what it says.” Magical language-use occurs among most tribal and nonliterate people. Traditions such as yoga and Tantra cultivate the paradox, the cipher, the surrealist or dream technique. They sometimes invent initiatory or secret languages-within-language. Some of the bhakti poets were trained in these darker corridors of ulaṭbāṃsī “upside-down speech” (a term used of Kabir’s poetry), though these many years distant from Lal Ded or Rāmprasād Sen it proves impossible to untangle the stories about their lives and say with certainty what training they had.

  In this context I need to point out that over the last hundred years bhakti has become comfortably situated in India’s religious traditions. Prior to that it existed apart from centers of power. Reading poetry that holds a spiritual charge, we need to remain alert to how the old songs may have been distorted or corrupted over the centuries to serve the ends of sectarian religion, ethnic exclusion, or nationalism.
Oral poetries have no state to protect them and no high technology (such as writing, a powerful technology) to solidify or render them incorruptible. They remain vulnerable—not just to change, which is their living condition as they pass through the years—but to appropriation.

  Certainly tales and popular stories of the lives of many bhakti poets seem built up in layers. Priests and scholars have taken low-caste or outcaste poets and “brahmanized” them: provided them fabulous births to cloud their marginal origins, named a properly orthodox guru, identified a husband they submitted to, or forged other distortions that brought poets in out of the cold and dressed them for church. If the life stories underwent this kind of pressure at times, how can we doubt that some songs got twisted to fit someone’s agenda? Later assimilation to powerful creeds, recognition of individual poets by kings or emperors, or the development of sectarian groups around dead poets can leave modern readers with a skewed sense of what that poet meant during his or her own day.

  The Six Roads of Bhakti Poetry

  Because this is an anthology of printed material, most of it oral to start with, often passed along through song for centuries, I am going to draw up some characteristics of the bhakti poem worth keeping in mind. The greatest change, the biggest effect of translation, might not have occurred when the poem crossed from Hindi or Bengali to English. It may have come years earlier, when a song performed on the street was transformed into a written text, congealed in ink or type-font, made invariable. Writing is “the solid form of language” (Robert Bringhurst).

  I’ve reworked some features of oral poetry pointed out by American poet Jerome Rothenberg in his 1968 collection, Technicians of the Sacred: A Range of Poetries from Africa, America, Asia, Europe & Oceania. Rothenberg wanted to show points of contact between “primitive poetry” and twentieth-century avant-garde texts. He provided contemporary poets with a raw sense of how the preliterate past stands hand in hand with the present. Drawing on Rothenberg’s thoughts, I’ve drawn up six features that characterize the bhakti poem. I call them roads.