In-Between Worlds

This book examines the performance of Bauls, folk performers from Bengal, in the context of a rapidly globalizing Indian economy and against the backdrop of extreme nationalistic discourses. Recognizing their scope beyond the musical and cultural realm, Sukanya Chakrabarti engages in discussing the subversive and transformational potency of Bauls and their performances. In-Between Worlds argues that the Bauls through their musical, spiritual, and cultural performances offer joy and spirituality, thus making space for what Dr. Ambedkar in his famous 1942 speech had identified as reclamation of human personality. Chakrabarti destabilizes the category of folk as a fixed classification or an origin point, and fractures homogeneous historical representations of the Baul as a folk performer and a wandering mendicant exposing the complex heterogeneity that characterizes this group. Establishing folk-ness as a performance category, and folk festivals as sites of performing folk-ness, contributing to a heritage industry that thrives on imagined and recreated nostalgia, Chakrabarti examines different sites that produce varied performative identities of Bauls, probing the limits of such categories while simultaneously advocating for polyvocality and multifocality. While this project has grounded itself firmly in performance studies, it has borrowed extensively from fields of postcolonial studies and subaltern histories, literature, ethnography and ethnomusicology, and cosmopolitan studies.