The heart of the matter

Mimlu Sen and her lifemate Paban Das Baul have had an unusual journey, she tells Anand Sankar, and her book is an intimate account of Baul life.

You would hardly believe Mimlu Sen’s story when you see her. It is hard to relate her diminutive frame to her life so far. Her book, BaulSphere, is the story of the nomadic performers from Bengal, stitched together from notes jotted down in her diary and told through the love for her partner, the dashing Paban Das Baul.

“We were very romantic, not practical back then. And I was born a wild child,” says Sen, describing the early years of her life. The urge to be away from home to discover the world was irresistible for Sen, even at the age of 11. She tried running away from her parents’ home in Shillong, but only got as far as the suburbs. The family later moved to Kolkata. It was the Swinging Sixties and Sen, then in college, found herself in the thick of the revolutionary student movements. They finally took her to the cultural hotchpotch of Paris during the heyday of rock ‘n’ roll and the protests against the war in Vietnam. By 1980, she found herself living in a ménage à trois with her two best friends, whom she identifies just as Terai and Katoun.

 

“I know from my kids there is enormous pressure and the need to find jobs today. We were instead brought up with egalitarian values and considered ourselves world citizens. It was a special time when suddenly the whole world was coming together. Globalisation was beginning,” she recalls, adding that everyone could then dream of seeing the world. A friend went as far as stowing away on a ship to go meet Mr Honda in Japan. But he was unlucky — he got only as far as Hong Kong before he was deported.

In 1982, a flyer advertising a Baul concert in Paris changed everything. Sen says she was content in her relationship, a mother of two kids — two-year-old Duniya and the toddler Krishna — when she met the curly-haired, travelling Baul performer Paban Das. She was mesmerised by his songs and decided to move back with him to Bengal to be his boshtomi (lifemate).

Thus began a love story that Sen says she wrote to “please the editors who are young like my kids”. “I felt if I told the story of the Bauls from an academic/ethnographic point of view, I would miss out on the heart of the matter. Paban is a special person. He is a Baul and belongs to everybody. You can never say he is my husband and only belongs to me. I have never had that approach with him.”

The poverty of rural Bengal was a big change from what they left behind in France. It was especially hard, initially, on the children, but Sen says Paban played a large role in easing the children into their new relationship and way of life. “It was very important for me, the way the children related to Paban. He loves kids. Since we have been a nomadic family, our ties naturally became very close. I feared if I left them in Paris in French school, after a few years, they would ask ‘Who are you?’ I took the risk of taking them out very young on the road. They established a deep link with India.”

Sen and Paban, with children in tow, soon found themselves at the annual Baul gathering of Kenduli. Here they were exposed to Bauls as a part of the culture of rural Bengal. Though their origins are unclear, Baul thought mixes elements of Tantrism, Sufi Islam, Vaishnavism and Buddhism. The couple began to search for a master to complete their learning. They wanted to learn the prem sadhana, which roughly translates into tantric sex.

“It is not the practice of prem sadhana that drew me to Paban. It was the person himself, his songs. I knew such esoteric practices existed, but that is not what fascinates me about the Bauls. It is their songs, stories and knowledge of the body. But sexual relations in the villages are completely different from the cities. Village society is very conservative. So, if you have a Baul guru there teaching Bauls to do prem sadhana, it is a way of balancing sexual relations, because there women are not allowed to derive bodily pleasure,” says Sen.

An interesting sub-plot in Sen’s life is her relationship with her parents. Though progressive, Sen’s father lived in conservative Kolkata. “My father had a rule. If I wanted to live by my own rules, I had to live away. My mother, on the other hand, wanted me to have all that she couldn’t. When I went to university, my mom lost the only companion she had. The last five months I was with her and she died in my arms. My dad wanted me to be with him, but he didn’t compromise on his rules till the end, what could I do?” But that, Sen says, doesn’t take away from the fact that her father was extremely proud of her. “Dad used to love to shock people. When people came with marriage proposals, he would say his daughter was in Bihar, was last heard of in Paris, and now he doesn’t know where she is,” she laughs.

While Sen and Paban’s life initially revolved around the bustle of Baul life in Bengal, today they make their living as world music artists recording in studios in France and Mexico. Sen, when I ask if I can visit Kenduli for the Baul experience, tells me to brace myself for disappointment. “The Kenduli that I have described no longer exists. A problem now is borders — between India and Bangladesh. How are Bauls going to cross the wire fence to come to Kenduli, like they used to come every year? I suppose they will have to start digging tunnels. Or they will cross anyway, it costs 50 bucks.

People who have these annual calendars as tradition will keep going to them. But the interference does change things, Bauls are doing work only when they are active in their own world. The local support structures are dying away. Bauls could write great songs if they could interpret reality. Now they don’t even understand what is happening. Unless they can be made to understand, they will be singing the same songs as they have been doing for the last 100 years. It is like the 20th century never existed.”

While things might not be happy in Baul country, there is a twinkle in Sen’s eye when she reveals that people often say “Paban lives on a planet which is called Mimlu”. I suppose that is what is called a happy place.

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BAULSPHERE
Author:Mimlu Sen
Publisher: Random House India
Pages: 287
Price: Rs 395