Baul Fakir Utsav 2006-2015

When friends decided to start a festival of the music of the bauls and fakirs of Bengal at Shaktigarh maath, a community ground in Jadavpur, South Kolkata, in 2006, quite naturally we got drawn in. Not so much as The Travelling Archive, but as individuals. In fact, we hadn’t started to think of our work as The Travelling Archive at that time, being barely three or four years in the field. It was Sukanta they wanted more, as he was then a young sound recordist, more freely available than others, also in the practice of recording bauls and fakirs in the field. They wanted him to record the festival. (Hence from the second year, it became a ritual to release albums of selected songs from the previous year; unknowingly we were participating in an act of recording, documenting, archiving and disseminating). First year, the computer went from 26H East Road, home of The Travelling Archive. Slowly as the years went, the festival became a major alternative cultural event of Kolkata, people came to the city from other places to join, crowds swelled and spilled onto the streets of the neighbourhood, the tent of the festival literally burst at the seams. It was not easy to stay out of corporate support or media partnership, but we somehow managed. The festival was essentially crowd-funded.

Slowly, our involvement grew to the point where as part of the core team comprising some ten or twelve friends, we had to start preparing for the festival, usually held in the first weekend of January, from the monsoon months of the previous year. The festival happened in winter, just before the festival at Joydeb-Kenduli, then we spent the next months ruminating on the festival, dissecting what went right and what did not, being angry and upset with one another, breaking into groups, each of us declaring we would quit, some actually leaving, usually temporarily. It was a place hard to leave. Meanwhile, the rains came down and once again we found ourselves planning the next Baul Fakir Utsav.

This film is from the fifth year, it was made by Amit Roy, the key person for all design and decoration matters of Baul Fakir Utsav.

Over the years Baul Fakir Utsav had singers from Bangladesh and other places, some of whom came directly through our work in the field as The Travelling Archive. The festival became a perfect meeting place for a scattered and broken Bengal. Both mashimas, Chandrabati and Sushoma came, as did the bauls of Kushtia and the bauls of Sylhet; Farijuddin came from Cachar. Moreover, from 2011, singers from other mystical traditions of the subcontinent, such as the Kabir-singers of central India, the Manganiars of Rajasthan or the Sufi qawwals of Uttar Pradesh, were also being invited to the festival.

Soumyada (Soumya Chakravarti), wiser than most of us, would implore us to stop at ten. Ten years is good enough, he would say. He was right. You cannot retain the juices, the rasa (pronounced rawsh in Bangla) if you drag on for too long. Through circumstances of our individual lives, many of us had to slowly disperse. But here we are keeping a record of the first ten years of the festival. It was too elaborate an event to hold within the space of our website, but we are keeping a record here just to say that we too were there. The festival goes on; 2021 was the first year it could not be held, owing to Covid.

The Baul Fakir Utsav journal began to be published from 2007. Here we have all the journals from 2007 to 2015. There were no issues in 2009 and 2010. Go to the ellipses (…) on the pdfs for a download option.