Mimlu Sen records the songs and stories of Paban Das Baul and other wandering minstrels.

When Paban Das Baul’s 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 Santiniketan’s Poush Mela and Kenduli in the 1980s would not have missed Paban’s 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 Paban’s 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.

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