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. Bāul (Bengali: bāul) and Fakir (phakir) refer to 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. Bāul likely derives either from vātul or vāyu, “wind,” a reference to the importance of the air and wind in Baul practice, or from bājul or bājil ("follower of the thunderbolt [vajra]"). Fakir means "poor" in Persian and Arabic but in this context is synonymous with Bāul. Bāul-Fakir songs celebrate the physical body as a divine vehicle of realization and are full of wordplays and hidden puns that use a language full of hints and gestures. The most famous Bāul-Fakir was Lalon Fakir (Lālan Phakir, d. 1890), although there are many other singers and mystics both before and after him who have greatly contributed to this tradition, such as Bhaba Pagla and Panja Shah. The history of the Bāul-Fakirs of Bengal includes centuries of religious innovation in which Sufi mediators gradually integrated Islamic ideas with Hindu (Vaiṣṇava, Śaiva, and Śākta) and Buddhist Tantric cosmologies to create a heterodox folk tradition highly unique to Bangladesh and West Bengal, India. Individuals who practice this tradition of bhakti or devotional yoga are called Bāul-Fakirs and can be from any religious background or jāt (caste, birth-religion). The Bāul-Fakirs of Bangladesh are distinguished by their greater reverence for the songs of Lalon Fakir, whose continued significance in the region cannot be underrated.  Indeed, it is likely that no folk poet has made a more substantial contribution to modern Bengali literature, and two feature films have been made about his life and songs. In West Bengal, however, the tradition appears to be more decentralized, and the songs of other Bāul-Fakir poets such as Bhaba Pagla (Bhabā Pāglā) and Raj Krishna (Rāj Kṛṣṇa) are at least as prevalent as those of Lalon. The songs of other poets such as Panja Shah (Pāñja Shah), Duddu Shah (one of Lalon’s pupils), and self-composed songs are performed in Bangladesh as well, although Lalon’s songs are usually given preeminence at most festivals given his cultural status. While songs are the primary vehicle of teachings and ideas, Bāul-Fakirs sometimes possess handwritten notebooks that contain initiatory formulae, and some were known to compose independent works and instructional materials. These written sources preserve an early modern and contemporary manuscript record of various theories and practices in a vernacular Indic language that are also of direct relevance to Yoga and Tantra.

                  This paper begins by claiming that the presence of kuṇḍalinī is especially important to highlight in the context of Bāul-Fakir songs since Bāul-Fakirs are most often framed by scholars as a survival of a medieval Tantric or Haṭhayogic tradition (White 2006, 77, 82; cf. Mallinson 2018, 199n59). On one hand, this frame is completely understandable; their sexual rituals—well-documented by anthropologists and ethnographers in other disciplines—do resemble instructions that are provided in Sanskrit manuals of Tantra as well as vernacular texts on yoga and embryology. Of special relevance here is the circa fifteenth-century Śivasaṃhitā, which was also an important compendium of Haṭhayoga, a form of yoga believed to have first been developed in the Buddhist Tantra-adjacent text Amṛtasiddhi (Birch 2019; Mallinson 2020). Other sources include the Bengali texts Yoga Kalandar and Ādya Paricaẏa. On the other hand, many Bāul-Fakirs do not usually use tantra as an operative word to denote the practice of sexual rites, but use the term sādhana instead. As a result, the distinctive features of kuṇḍalinī in Bāul-Fakir songs and teachings deserve more consideration within the semantic range of this term sādhana in Bāul-Fakir contexts. 

                  The next part of the paper analyzes one such song, translated by Carol Salomon and published in City of Mirrors (Cantú and Zakaria 2017). The songs chorus is as follows (translation Salomon): "In my Lord's own court—this will surely shock you—there's something that looks like a snake!" (yekhāne sāir bārāmkhānā / śunile prāṇ camake oṭhe / dekhte yena bhujaṅganā). While Salomon's translation is creative and communicates the spirit of the verse very well, it obscures the presence of a key word: prāṇ (vital breath, life). This word is repeated in the subsequent verse, which could be more literally translated as "that which when I touch it, makes me die in prāṇa / this is the very boat of the universe." Salomon notes that the connection with vitality refers to semen or generative fluid in general (sādā bindu), but the connection with the vital-breath also means that the song explicitly describes the practice of transforming kuṇḍalinī into a life-giving boat through techniques of breath-control (damer kāj = prāṇāyāma). The rest of the song is examined in this frame and in the context of more recent scholarly literature on Haṭhayoga and Tantra as well as Bengali folklore.

While kuṇḍalinī in songs like these can be analyzed specifically in the context of Bāul-Fakir sādhana, the final part of the paper extends the scope to cosmology in general to show these songs' expansion of themes from Middle Bengali literature and cosmology is equally important to consider. There are very few written systematic doctrines of Bāul-Fakir metaphysics from the perspective of practitioners, but cosmological ideas have been encoded in the form of “cosmogonic riddles" (Salomon). These riddles are functionally and inextricably linked to bodily practices and expressed in a wide variety of what I call "musical language worlds," with many songs having a dominant aesthetic bhāb (< Sanskrit bhāva,“attitude,” “being”) that informs the metaphors used. Starting with the connection between Bāul-Fakir songs and medieval Buddhist Tantric songs (e.g., Caryāpada, Caryāgītī), the paper uses this interface between the vital-breath and serpent (prāṇa and kuṇḍalinī) as an example of how such songs bridged Buddhist Tantric cosmology with correlated ideas in Hindu Tantric and Sufi teachings to create a human-centered system accessible to all, irrespective of religious caste or social group (jāt).