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Bengal has a glorious and long-standing lineage of folk traditions. Amongst them, Baul tradition stands at the acme of the indigenous hierarchy of Bengal (both East and West Bengal). Baul tradition is exclusively an amalgamation of various distinctive religious traditions including Sufi mysticism, Sahajiya Buddhism, and Tantric philosophies. Baul practices historically resisted the established institutional religions, cast hierarchies and materialist social structures through their embodied spirituality, wandering way of life, and enigmatic songs. Such established pattern of their way of life has been diluted and transformed due to the intervention of globalization, cultural tourism, heritage industries, stage patronage and digital media economies. As a result, a bundle of binaries such as ‘authentic’ and ‘inauthentic’; ‘professional baul’ and ‘practitioner baul’; ‘asol baul’ and ‘nakol baul’ has come to the fore under critical discourses. The transformation of Baul performance from akhra (a community hub and living school where spiritual knowledge and musical wisdom are passed down orally from a master to disciples) to a staged cultural stream poses broader anxieties surrounding folk authenticity in neoliberal modernity. Through analysis of folk festivals, media representations, and the performances of contemporary Baul singers, this study demonstrates how Baul identity is continuously reconstructed through the processes of negotiation, adaptation and resistance. This paper argues that authenticity within Baul culture is not a fixed or recoverable essence but a contested performative category which is solely shaped by institutions, audiences, and market forces.
Mr. Sukhiram Kumar, Amar Nath Kumar. “Reconfiguring Tradition: Baul Performance and the Politics of Folk Authenticity.” The Criterion: An International Journal in English, vol. 17, no. 4, August 2026, pp. 586-598. DOI, https://doi.org/10.66376/criterion.v17.n4.35.
Open Access · CC BY 4.0 · Crossref DOI ·
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