From Oral Tradition to Digital Archive: New Primary Sources for the Study of Baul Traditions

Abstract

Practitioners’ notebooks and personal letters are neglected items that deserve attention in the study of ritual and performance traditions, especially if these can be complemented with oral–aural sources. This article presents some features of an unexplored archive of new sources for the study of Baul songs and popular religious movements in Bengal by introducing and complementing the data contained in the digital archive called ‘Songs of the Old Madmen’ (EAP1247, British Library), comprising notebooks of Baul songs and correspondence between an influential Bengali guru and his disciple. I highlight three aspects. (i) The notebook as archive and metadata of Baul performances. (ii) Emic notions of authorship and cultural ownership. (iii) The contextualisation of the digital archive within the history of representation of the Baul tradition. Embedded in such context, this digital archive provides a nuanced and intimate picture where Baul practitioners emerge as neither the lonely minstrels lauded by Rabindranath Tagore, nor as the antinomian materialists portrayed in more recent scholarship on Bauls. Questioning the politics of cultural representation of digital archives, this article integrates oral histories and ethnographic sources collected during fieldwork in West Bengal that are inextricably part of the material digitised through remote capture.