Bauls are mystic minstrels who live in rural Bangladesh and West Bengal, India. Their music and way of life helped shape a large segment of Bengali culture, especially the compositions of Nobel Prize laureate Rabindranath Tagore.
Baul music is a form of folk song that has been influenced by both Hindu bhakti movements and the writing of shuphi, a form of Sufi devotional song. They are used by the spiritual leader to instruct disciples in Baul philosophy, and are transmitted orally by the spiritual leader. The Baul movement, which reached its zenith in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, has regained popularity among the rural Bangladeshi's.
Bauls belong to a non-orthodox devotional tradition, which is influenced by Hinduism, Buddhism, Bengali, Vasinavism, and Sufi Islam, but is distinctively different from each of them. In the Fal Kingdom, balus live either near a village or wander from place to place and earn their livelihood by singing to the accompaniment of the ektara, the lute dotara, a one-stringed instrument, and a drum called the dubki.
The Bauls do not identify themselves with any organized religion. This means that they do not identify themselves with a caste system, with any special deities, temples or sacred sites. They emphasize the importance of the physical body as the place where God resides within every human being. Baul music and way of life have gained a lot of popularity among farmers in Bangladesh.
Bauls are admired for this freedom from convention as well as their music. There is no doubt that baul poetry, music, song and dance are devoted to finding humanity's relationship with God as well as achieving spiritual liberation.
The devotional songs can be traced back to the fifteenth century when they first appeared in Bengali literature. It is fair to say that the language of the songs has been continuously modernized throughout the centuries, making them feel more relevant to today's audiences.
The preservation of Baul song repertoires and the general context in which they are performed are mainly affected by the social and economic situation of their practitioners, who have always been a relatively marginalized group of people. Due to the general impoverishment of rural Bangladesh in recent decades, their condition has deteriorated even more in recent decades.