Mimlu Sen records the songs and stories of Paban Das Baul and other wandering minstrels. When Paban Das Bauls album with guitarist Sam Mills called Real Sugar was released in 1997 featuring the heart-wrenching plea to Khoda,Dil ki doya,he became an instant celebrity on the world music circuit. (Khoda,lord of the unfortunate/ Have you no compassion in your heart?/ Have you no compassion in your heart?/ He whom you strike with thorns/ Cannot bear the blows of flowers./ Have you no compassion in your heart?) Those who have been lucky enough to visit Santiniketans Poush Mela and Kenduli in the 1980s would not have missed Pabans performances his deep voice,the ferocious rhythm he built up on his dubki and his twirling,dancing ways always ensured him an enthralled audience. Now,his partner,Mimlu Sen hers is an incredible story too brings us a ringside view of Paban and the lives of other wandering minstrels who are such a part of the Bengal countryside. Sen,a born rebel,who loved to prance about the Khasi,Jaintia hills in Shillong,first met Paban and other Baul singers at a concert in Paris in 1982. Mesmerised,she heard their songs recordings again and again and accepted Pabans first love note to her an ektara (the very emblem of the Bauls) with a pair of eyes,a nose and a mouth. Three months later,with two-year-old daughter Duniya in tow,she headed below the poverty line,the line that separates the world of the babus to which I belonged,from the world of the Bauls,the world of Paban. As Paban takes Sen through the Baul route,travelling the arc from Kenduli to Ghutiasharif in leafy,rural Bengal,he hands Mimlu the ektara one night,changing her life forever,thus giving us a story to remember. From the moment I began to play the ektara I felt released,armed with the means to offer myself to the pilgrimage I was about to undertake. It gave me a centre,permitting me to anchor myself in a magnetic field,a sphere of sounds and songs,of music and of human love: Baulsphere. But during the journey,she would witness the toll urbanisation and globalisation was taking on these free-spirited musicians; the violence in below-poverty societies,their attitudes towards women. She would encounter tantriks who would share their sexo-yogic secrets. Most of all,she would listen to,and remember for us,the songs,those soulful words which break free of all boundaries. How does this unknown bird/ Flit back and forth,/ In and out of the cage?/ If I could catch him,/ I would bind him/ With the chains of my spirit./ But I cant get a hold of him,/ He still flits in and out. Thus sang Lallan Shah Fakir,a 19th century Baul Tagore was particularly inspired by. Tagore was in touch with Lallan in Bangladesh and even published some of Lallans songs after his death. Now,as the world shrinks globally,Baul songs need a new flight,a new audience. When Sen initiates Paban into the world of reading and writing,a well-wisher tells her: We have our world and they have theirs. The Bauls believe in the power of speech; books are stale knowledge,writes Sen. She was warned that Pabans memory,entirely oral,would suffer if he learnt to read. She doesnt agree: Can we not be elastic? Swing between multiple visions of the world,like monkeys. who swing from branch to branch? That has been her quest to seek the reincarnation of Baul art and its mode of life.
