Ek rājye hale dujonā rājā, kār hukume gata hoy prajā: metaphors of everyday peasant resistance in Bāul songs of colonial Bengal

Abstract

In its preoccupation with decoding the esoteric beliefs and practices of the Bāuls of Bengal, Bāul scholarship has largely viewed the Bāuls as asocial, ahistorical and insulated esoteric sects. By breaking with this strand in the available scholarship, this essay moves away from an exclusive interrogation of the Bāuls' esoteric beliefs and practices. Instead, it forestages the socio-historical dimensions of the metaphors deployed in the Bāul songs of colonial Bengal. Rather than using these metaphors as keys to unlock the esoteric registers of Bāul praxis, we see how the metaphors themselves had been drawn from and mediated by the Bāuls' location in history and society. By situating the Bāul songs in the context of the changing agrarian systems of production following the implementation of the Permanent Settlement of 1793, the present study of the metaphors of everyday peasant resistance in these songs will interrogate the following questions: What do these metaphors tell us of the socio-economic plight of the peasantry – of which the Bāuls were an integral part? More crucially, can we locate in these metaphorical deployments clues to the forms of peasant resistance against changing agrarian power relations? In other words, can these metaphorical deployments be read as contestations of the hegemonic social formations? If so, what was the nature of this resistance?