This re-printing (I hesitate to call it a “new edition”) of Charles Capwell’s The Music of the Bauls of Bengal, originally published in 1986 by Kent State University Press, is both a welcome event and a disappointment. It is welcome in that it makes available again Capwell’s careful study of the music of a significant religious sect of eastern India. More importantly, since this re-issue is by Calcutta-based Seagull Books, it will make the book much more widely available to Indians and especially Bengalis, thus returning the results of Capwell’s research to the community where he studied. At the same time, this re-printing is a disappointment in that the author has chosen to basically re-publish his original monograph from twenty-five years ago without updating the text in reference to new developments in Baul music or in scholarly research on the Bauls that have emerged since the book was first published. The book has been given a new, more evocative title [1]; the author has added a new two-page preface in which he only very briefly acknowledges new developments such as the growing visibility of the Bauls and their music around the globe, including a significant Internet presence; the recordings on the two cassettes accompanying the original edition are now included on two CDs packaged inside the front and back covers; and a bibliographical reference that was missing from the original edition has been added, but otherwise the text has not been revised.
The Bauls are a religious sect found primarily in West Bengal and Bangladesh. Their religious practices are a complex hybrid of tantrism, Vaishnava Hinduism, and Islam. The Bauls are best known in India (and beyond) as mendicant singers who travel around the region and perform their engaging, mystical music for alms. Romanticized as free-spirited mystics who revel in flouting social and religious convention, within Bengal the Bauls have attained “the status of representing something quintessentially Bengali” (20). The Bauls and their music have thus been appropriated by intellectual projects for imagining Bengali-ness, not least in the work of poet and musician Rabindranath Tagore.
Capwell studied musicology and ethnomusicology in the middle-to-late 1960s at Harvard, Brown, and Wesleyan University, and subsequently carried out in West Bengal the extended fieldwork (two-and-a-half years, 1969-1971) that forms the basis of this book. The research presented here thus has its intellectual genesis in the late 1960s. While now reissued in 2011, the book should thus be read as a product of a much earlier era of scholarship. Readers accustomed to the kind of authorial reflexivity and sensitivity to the politics of ethnographic authority and representation found in more recent ethnographic writing on music may find Capwell’s writing style and seemingly omniscient authorial stance somewhat old-fashioned and off-putting. The authoritative and normative stance the author takes in the writing – “the Bauls do this”; “the Bauls believe that” – while perhaps acceptable during the time the research and writing were originally done, seems out of place alongside contemporary scholarship (much of it originating in South Asia) that highlights the indeterminacy of culture and that calls into question the kind of cultural coherence taken for granted here. And the careful attention devoted to the transliteration of the Bengali-language texts – for example, getting all the macrons placed correctly over all the long vowels and all the dots placed correctly under retroflex consonants – also betrays a basically positivist approach, focused as it is primarily on texts rather than on the role of music in social life.
After a brief introduction establishing geographic and linguistic contexts for the study, chapter 1 introduces the Bauls in terms of their sectarian identity, including a detailed description of the distinctive Baul dress and hairstyle. Chapter 2, “The Evolution of the Bauls as Cultural Emblem,” focuses especially on the efforts of Tagore and his intellectual compatriot Kshitimohan Sen to promote a particular, romanticized understanding of the Bauls, their poetry, and their music as the basis for an authentic Bengali culture. Chapter 3 deals with the place of Baul song within various classification systems, including systems treating Bengali folksong types as well as other approaches adapted from Indian musical theorists. Chapter 4 gives the backgrounds of several specific, named singers, including biographical and genealogical information; the writing here nicely gives a sense of the individual personalities of some of the singers, in a welcome departure from the generalizing, normative approach that characterizes most of the book. Chapter 5 describes a number of different performance contexts, and chapter 6 focuses on the classification, subject matter, and some aspects of the poetics of song texts. Chapter 7 describes and classifies the various musical instruments the Bauls use to accompany their singing. Chapters 8 and 9 deal with aspects of musical style, focusing respectively on temporal organization and pitch/tonality; both of these chapters include extensive musical transcriptions of song excerpts. In chapter 10 Capwell presents his theory of the structure of Baul song and notes how it contrasts with theories put forward by Bengali musicologists. Here, as in chapter 3’s discussion of Bengali musicologists’ genre classification systems, Capwell’s deep grounding in and respectful treatment of Bengali-language resources pays off in what amounts to a serious engagement with what Regula Qureshi has called “other musicologies.” Capwell illustrates his arguments with an extended discussion of a single song performance (transcribed in full over thirteen pages in Appendix B), along with briefer transcribed excerpts from other songs for comparative purposes. Appendix A, comprising thirty-two pages, gives the full text for thirty-four songs in transliterated Bengali with English translation and brief explanatory notes. The two appendices with textual and musical transcriptions thus comprise about twenty percent of the whole book.
The eleven pages of references cited at the end of the book show Capwell’s deep engagement with the area studies literature for South Asia generally, and for South Asian music and Bengali culture more specifically, but curiously include nothing from general ethnomusicological theoretical literature for the period when he was researching and writing this book. Given that the author studied ethnomusicology at various institutions and made his professional career as an ethnomusicologist (he is now retired from the University of Illinois), the book is frustratingly (for this reader at least) parochial in its area studies focus and its seeming refusal to look beyond the confines of a fairly narrowly defined topic and engage with contemporary issues in ethnomusicology, whether contemporary to the time when Capwell was originally writing or contemporary today. For example, Capwell briefly works in a mention (in the book’s last endnote) to Milton Singer’s concept of “cultural performance,” developed in the context of Singer’s work in India, but he makes no reference to the extensive ethnomusicological literature of the late 1970s and 1980s that built on Singer’s work (in combination with contemporary theorizations in folklore of verbal art as performance) to elaborate an approach to musical performance. The ethnomusicological approach to performance, prominent during the period when Capwell would have been finishing this book in the early-mid 1980s, certainly would have been relevant to issues such as the role of different performance contexts in shaping variations in the performance of the “same” song (37). The book thus constitutes not so much an ethnomusicological monograph representative of its period than an adoption of the general approach and specific methods of European orientalist textual scholarship.
In its time, this book was exemplary in terms of the author’s careful textual scholarship and, especially, his sustained attention to work in the Bengali language by Bengali scholars. This re-issue could have been made much more relevant to contemporary research agendas had the author taken the time to update it with more than just a few perfunctory lines in the new preface. The entry of Baul music into the canons and discourses of “world music” since the 1990s (exemplified, for example, by coverage in The Rough Guide to World Music) deserves a careful, extended discussion. Certainly the extensive resources relating to the Bauls available on the Internet [2] could have provided material for an additional chapter, taking this account of the Bauls and their music into the twenty-first century.
[1] The intended exact title of this re-issue is unclear; the subtitle on the front cover reads The Music of the Bauls of Bengal, while on the title page it is given as The Music of the Bauls of India.
[2] A search on YouTube in August 2011 for the term “Baul” retrieved over 13,000 hits.
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[Review length: 1406 words • Review posted on November 23, 2011]