During my time in the Shantiniketan Zone, Bolpur time, I was so immersed in the cultural and spiritual space of the Baul's. Dad grew up with them around where he was as a kid.
At age 6, the first time i visited India, I remember sitting in the early evening, on a concrete porch of what felt like a crumbling shack, held up by it's own cracking shutters. But I know it was more than that, as a location.
He summoned 2 figures, a snake charmer, and a baul. The front yard suddenly became a new kind of performance space that, at 6, was my favorite to date. This was not television. This was not sitting in an audience and feeling my whole body begin to itch from the bones out, and my mind jumping out of here and towards what the next thing could be. The restlessness in this one way channels was always so much.
I now understand that the answer to impulsive challenges to attentiveness is to practice breathing and presence. This thing, this habit energy, it starts quite young, or maybe it is always there and is what is our animal trait.
So the Bauls, i only understood they were a certain type of performance style. Nobody told me they were a practicing spiritual system with rituals, gatherings, and institutions.
What i did learn, that was very interesting to me, was that this poet Joydeb, who was supposedly from the Bolpur area, and has an Ashram there, it's understood that he grew up there, practiced the Baul faith, adopted some of the ideas of Bhakti Vedanta, re-recentering on Radha rather than Krishna. That Radha might be the figure we should aspire to embody.
What a people set of ideas, very queer, very Shakti, and after Chaitanya's life devoted as a Mahaprabhu singing devotional songs towards Krishna. It's pretty queer that he wrote love songs to Krishna his whole life, and considered himself an integration of both Radha and Krishna (genderqueer).
Pre-colonial Hinduism had many non-dualistic interpretations of gender and sexuality. The lack of categorization probably freaked out the Abrahamic peoples, whose reality, to begin with, was defined by a few definitive dualities. God and humans. Male and Female (Adam and Eve). Birth and Death. Hell and Heaven. It's a very easy religion to remember because it's mostly dualities. Meanwhile in Hinduism...
Very different story altogether. One is in the embrace of duality, the other is a discussion with it, through evolution and refinement of it's own ideas through time.
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