Songs of the Old Madmen
10.000 hand-written songs
The contemplative poets are they who sang the songs of tattwas,
In my songs, I portray images of people’s misery and grief,
And, the demands of the famished,
Karim wants a peaceful co-existence1
তত্ত্বগান গেয়ে গেলেন যারা মরমী কবি
আমি তুলে ধরি দেশের দুঃখ-দুর্দশার ছবি
নিরন্ন মানুষের দাবি-
করিম চায় শান্তি বিধান ।
The songs of the Bauls2 (literally “mad”, intoxicated by divine love) are composed by gurus or spiritual teachers and performed by itinerant folk musicians. They are transmitted among low-caste communities in India and Bangladesh, where they are recognized as intangible cultural heritage. An encyclopaedia of beliefs and practices, Baul songs discuss ideas on cosmogony, health, sexuality, meditation and everyday life. This project aims to digitize 10.000 hand-written songs from the personal note-books of influential singers/songwriters of the Baul tradition, located with their lineage descendants in West Bengal (India). It also aims to locate endangered note-books of important gurus to protect other corpora of songs in the future.3
This digitization project is part of the Endangered Archives Programme at the British Library.4
“The Endangered Archives Programme captures forgotten and still not written histories, often suppressed or marginalised. It gives voice to the voiceless: it opens a dialogue with global humanity’s multiple pasts. It is a library of history still waiting to be written.”
Tattwas are spiritual theories and epistemologies —Baul Shah Abdul Karim
Uttaran Dutta, Panchali Banerjee, Soham Ghosh, Priyam Ghosal, Samya Srimany, and Sahana Mukherjee. “Songs of Dissent and Consciousness: Pronouncements of the Bauls of Rural Bengal.” Religions (Basel, Switzerland ) 12, no. 1018 (2021): 1018-
Songs of the Old Madmen: Recovering Baul Songs from the Note-Books of 19th and 20th Century Bengali Saint-Composers. British Library. Grant holder: Dr Carola Lorea. Host Institution: Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore Archival partners: School of Cultural Texts and Records, Jadavpur University.
Welcome to the Endangered Archives Programme. British Library.
This is the kind of thing that makes you wonder about the lost songs of Bronze Age/Classical era in European/Near Eastern cultures, given how many written works we know existed and are lost.
elm
great that they're saving this stuff
You've discovered another piece of history that I had never heard of before. I'm very glad these songs are being preserved so they won't disappear entirely, Thank you for telling us about the archives.