A Serpent-Shaped Lifeboat: Kuṇḍalinī in Bāul-Fakir Musical Language Worlds

This paper focuses on references to kuṇḍalinī in the songs of Bengali Bāul-Fakirs, an early modern tantric and contemporary global esoteric movement that has its origins in an interconnected society of male, female, and androgynous sadhus (“renunciates”) in Bangladesh and West Bengal, India. The paper begins by claiming that the presence of kuṇḍalinī in Bāul-Fakir songs deserves more specific consideration within the semantic range of the term sādhana "practice" as understood by Bāul-Fakirs The next part analyzes one such song on sādhana that contains a key word: prāṇ (vital breath, life), and explicitly describes the practice of transforming kuṇḍalinī into a life-giving boat through techniques of breath-work. The final part of the paper extends the scope to cosmology in general to show these songs' expansion of themes out of Sanskrit and Middle Bengali texts is equally important to consider in the context of what the author calls "musical language worlds."