 As you know, this is a taster session. So I'm going to speak for about 30 minutes more or less and do a sort of half, a half lecture for you. And this would be the typical kind of content that you would get on our master's programs in music at SOAS. And in particular, what we do is a combination of some modules that are theoretical or about a particular kind of methodology and then others that are more regionally focused. So this is an example of a lecture that I would give on my regional courses. So I work on the music of South Asia. I work primarily in North India, but my research also covers aspects of music and culture in Pakistan and Bangladesh. And so I'm going to give you a sense of some of the things that we explore in my courses. So I'm feel free to ask away with questions in the Q&A box relating to this, but at the end there'll be lots of time for discussion. And I'm happy to answer any questions relating to the courses obviously and the structure and so on. So you don't have to ask questions about Bengali music if you don't want to. So the topic today is sacred, scandalous or sell out. And this revolves around the identity of a group of musicians called the Baals. And the Baals are based in Bengal in South Asia. And as we'll see, there's a whole series of different debates around how they are framed by the people who listen to them, how they understand themselves and then also some problems with the way these academics talk about these musicians. So let's just start off with a couple of basics and hone in on the region that I'm talking about. So Bengal can be thought of as a Bengali language speaking region, which is spread over two nations now. So on the one hand, we've got West Bengal, which is a state in India. And then we also have the nation of Bangladesh as well. So you can just see in the map there, the Indian Ocean framing the Indian subcontinent. And we've got Bangladesh and West Bengal up in that corner. The, this region, although it spread either side of a national border, in fact is seen in many ways as an area of a shared culture. The boundaries in theory are on the basis of religion. So what's now Bangladesh was originally part of Pakistan, East Pakistan. And in 1947, when India achieved independence from British colonialism, at that point the country was split up into India and Pakistan. And then in 1971, after a devastating war of independence, East Pakistan became Bangladesh. And so like I say, there are lots of cultural affinities, but one of the particularly interesting things about Bengali culture is that when you look at ground level and you talk to people, particularly musicians, you see all kinds of practices and ideas that don't fit neatly into the categories that are imposed on them, such as religious categories like Hinduism here, Islam there. So the Baals are a very good example of this. So the Baals are often described as wandering minstrels, often dressed in rags, iconoclastic and opposed to formal religion, often homeless, supported by begging from their music. So the idea is that they beg arms through their songs. And they have a very mixed image. On the one hand, they're often derided by society, but they are also romanticized. And in particular, they are often seen as the folk spirit of the Bengali region. And there's a lot of ambiguity in the way people talk about them. Sometimes they are these noble, anti-urban, romantic spirits who wander around. And then other people see them as sort of hippies who have abandoned polite society. So they have a very mixed reputation. As we'll discuss, there are a whole series of debates about the history of this group. It's often assumed that they are a fairly historical phenomenon. Some people will say, oh, well, they were there at least from the 16th century onwards. But as we'll see, there's a big debate about this. A lot of people talk about how they underwent a refashioning in the 19th century. And as a result, there's lots of disagreements over the fundamentals of how to begin defining what this community is. Are they musicians? Are they monks? Are they a religious organization? There's one scholar, Hugh Urban, who you would read in connection to this. And Hugh Urban in 2007 went even further and said that basically the Bowls are an invented community. They're an identity that was constructed in the 19th century and 20th century and have been thought about as a way of forming a Bangladeshi identity and a West Bengal-y identity. So he sees them as something that the nation has created. Which is very different from this idea of the wandering ascetic who has nothing to do with urban culture. So there are lots of disagreements. There are even disagreements about what to call them and how to place them. So like I said, in many ways, musicians on ground level in South Asia don't really fit into these top-down categories we impose. So people who work on religious cultures in South Asia will talk about how a lot of these terms have been invented or are at least just so porous that they're not particularly helpful to concretely say something definitive about how people think and act. Hinduism is one of these disputed terms. Some people will place the Bowls within the tradition of Hinduism. They'll say, oh yes, these are Hindu musicians. But often they get this category of heterodox, i.e. they're not part of the mainstream. But actually there's a whole debate about what is the mainstream in Hinduism at all. Some people will say that they're tantric. Again, I can explain more about tantra later. One specific form, which again, in my course, we talk about more is this technical form of Hindu practice called esoteric Vaishnavism. But you don't have to worry too much about that because we've only got 30 minutes. But then on the other extreme, particularly when you're more in the Bangladeshi side, so a country that in some ways defines itself by its Muslim culture, there they're seen as expressions of popular Islam. So a form of Islam that isn't shaped by a top-down definition of a kind of global Islam, but rather something very local, coloured by local traditions. So there they're often called Dorevesh. And Dorevesh comes from this older word that's there in Persian and Turkish, like Dorevesh or Dervish. So a sort of Sufi spiritual figure. And a lot of them are also connected to local cults of healing saints. So in terms of how people describe these musicians, sometimes they use the word Baal and I'll be using that word today. Often they use Fakir, which again points more to Islamic culture. And then sometimes they'll use the word pier. And so a pier is a spiritual saint, a saintly figure, a teacher, but in the Bengali context, it's even more specific. In the Bengali context, you have pier cults where you have often quite local stories about saintly figures who are thought of as healers, Fakirs, sometimes they're based on historical figures, sometimes they're legendary, they're associated with healing powers, they protect cattle, and often they have powers that are more related to Hindu deities rather than the Muslim saints. So again, this is what we mean by popular Islam, somewhere something that has been colored by local cultures rather than sort of global concerns. So let me just go to the next slide. So in the full lecture, we would discuss some of the complicating factors and some of the ethical issues around labelling these religious communities at all. Are bowels and Fakirs and piers, in fact, the same phenomenon? I've put them on a spectrum, but is that the right way to talk about them? But what I want us to look at today in particular is a debate around what is a real bow? What is the defining criteria? Because these people are musicians that do develop a particular kind of identity in the way they talk about themselves, in the way they practice their music. But there's also a lot of skepticism and cynicism in Bengal and Bangladesh around, what is a real bow? We'll come to that in a minute and try and discuss that. What is this word I'm using though, bowel? Again, there's a whole debate about where that word comes from. Some people go back to a Sanskrit word, vatula, which means crazy or blown by the wind. Others will point at another word, vyakula, which is confused. And then some people will look at Islamic references like Olia, which is a friend or a devotee of God and particularly in Sufism. And it's sometimes difficult to know what to do with all these definitions. And you might be wondering, well, why is it so relevant for music? One story which I'm not going to pick up on here is how Bob Dylan was influenced by the bowels. He met one bowel, in particular, Pernodash Bowel, invited him to the States and put Pernodash Bowel on the front cover of one of his albums. And the bowels in turn were quite interested in Bob Dylan's lyrics. And there's this whole idea of blowing in the wind. And so these ideas of vatula, that the one who is crazy, the one who is blown by the wind really resonated strangely with Bob Dylan. In fact, I have a PhD student who's working on bowel rock music and how it's been influenced by Dylan. But anyway, that's a slightly different story. Let's just think then about their music. So one aspect of their musical culture is the symbolism of their iconography. Their instruments are iconic, in fact. In fact, if you have WhatsApp, I checked this early, if you have WhatsApp and they've got the GIF generator where you can add a GIF into your conversation, if you put in bowel, you will get to GIF and it's this instrument here on the right hand side where you've got the gourd and the two sticks attached to the string. And it will pop up and this is a sort of symbol of the bowels. So this is called a gopi giuntro. It's also called a drone ectara. So it's a plucked string that's over a membrane-covered hollow gourd and it comes with a tuning peg and it's super iconic. And whenever someone's holding one of these instruments, even if they're not playing it, you think, okay, this person is claiming to be a bowel. You also have the doltara, which literally means two strings, but in fact it comes with four, but it's reliant on two central strings to provide a tonic. So again, with both of these instruments, they're designed really to accompany singing. They provide a tonic drone, which the human voice will build up on top of and it also is there to provide melodic accompaniment as well. Another instrument, which is very unusual, so I'm just gonna quickly touch on it, is the komok. And the komok, the word itself comes from, it's onomatopoeic, it comes from the sounds of the kok, which is a forceful upbeat and the mok, which is the sharp accent sound. So the komok is similar to this plucked string instrument, the gobi giuntro, and it's essentially a plucked drum. So you have a very small drum and then a larger drum that are connected by a string and you play it to make this tonic drone and it creates a really lively sound, a very unusual sound. This was the first time I'd heard a plucked drum. So I'm just gonna play you a little recording so you can hear how this is played. Hey, what are you doing? What? What are you doing? I'm playing the drum. What are you doing? I'm playing the drum. Okay, you get the idea. I'm conscious of time, so I have to stop there. Note that this baal, Lokundar Shbaal, is wearing orange and you'll have seen this before in the images. There's a certain look that baals cultivate to be clear about who they are and be recognized by their communities. Orange and saffron and yellow and red are associated with mendicants and holy men in South Asia, but this patchwork accessory is very typical of baals. You'll see it there as well. These patchwork clothes. And so again, this becomes part of the self-representation of baals. Anyway, and as you can see here, there are all kinds of other instruments, which if we have more time and a full lecture, we would talk through some of these as well. Some of these instruments are associated with other kinds of devotional music in Bengal, temple music and so on, like the kohl. Other drums like the tabla, here's a kohl here. Other drums like the tabla are more associated with art music. Ankle bells and so on. Dancing is quite interesting in baal contexts. But I want us to look at the songs because this is really where the emphasis lies in baal music. So songs and the genre overall for baal music making is baal gan. So gan is a Bengali word for song or music. So it's a whole genre, actually, baal gan. Let's listen to a typical example. So this is a song genre called La Longhiti. It's named after a man, La Longhiti, who is sort of the archetype of the baals. He lived in the 19th century. And I'm just going to quickly introduce the lyric to you because actually the lyrical meaning is very important with this. And one thing about baal songs is that they are very metaphorical, very symbolic, and often it takes quite a lot to unpick the images. Often they're very cryptic. So this one goes. I'm saying it quickly just so we have more time to talk about it. So let's look at the English. So the Lord collected well water in the abandoned lake. And again, it could be abandoned. It could be a blind lake. So if it's a blind lake that instantly starts triggering different ideas. You know, maybe it's not a lake, maybe it's a person, maybe it's me, etc. There will be wet rain, I'm sure of it. And again, if it's a blind, if it's an abandoned lake, why is he collecting well water already? There are so many different confusing images here. There will be wet rain, I'm sure of it. How long will my wretched state continue? If I don't find his feet this time, shall I but stray again? And again, to seek the feet of a spiritual teacher is to take refuge in them and their teachings. The well water is river water. It steers clear of the swamp. Can it go into the Ganges when the Ganges does not come? In the same way, the soul's worship is in vain without your compassion. So again, here the Ganges, the sacred river, can the well water, the water that is contained in a very kind of tight space, a bit like the soul perhaps, which is contained in this tight space of a body, can it flow into the Ganges? Can it become one with the Supreme if the Ganges doesn't come to it? Because the water is trapped in that well. It's not going anywhere near a river. But if the river hits the well, then something could happen. So it's saying God or the teacher or whoever has to come to the disciple for the disciple to be, to find teaching, to find the liberation. With thousands of years, the instrument studies itself and turns inward. Without a player, the instrument is never played. I am the instrument, you the player. So again, the vows often bring in the explicit references to the music into their work. Bring out my pleasant sounds. This sinner heard the purifying name clearly in the scriptures, but if you do not reach this sinner, how can I call your name? Lalon Fakir says, help me cross over, Lord, this world is like a prison. Lots going on there, which we don't have time to unpack. So instead, let's think about some of these images while we listen to the song. So just in the interest of time, but that was the last line where he says, I am the instrument, you are the player. That's the Lalon Giti by Fakir Tuntun Shah. So if you do want to see the full thing, this is actually available on YouTube now. So you will be able to make a note of the name and you can listen to it. So that's a few recordings from this session. So how then do we frame the vows? And you'll remember at the beginning, I said that, you know, there's a debate about how they are seen. So a number of anthropologists who have done work with the vows sort of talk about how a lot of the time when people say, this is what the vows believe, what they've actually written down is what people think the vows believe. And there's a constant question about the secrecy around bowel teaching and whether people are sort of making stereotypical assumptions about them. So what are some of these assumptions? For example, one is the idea that they are wandering, homeless, solitary men. In fact, many of them have families and they organize themselves according to lineages and that has been going on for a very long time. Another idea is that they are mad and madness is actually seen as a term of respect in this community. And this is because there's an idea that they are committing themselves to spontaneous love that defies traditional social rules. And being mad allows for a kind of mixing with other things, mixing with other cultures, and then also mixing with the divine. So there's a bowel proverb, mud mixes with mud that bricks never merge. So if you're kind of a baked brick, you know, you can't do anything with it whereas mud is that which can mix with other things and take on other properties and so on. One area that a lot of people talk about in relation to the bowels is their attitudes to their body. The idea that they're not sort of spiritual in the sense of looking to some transcendent being, be it like God or breaking free of the body. In fact, they see religious practices being within the body, using the body and there are lots of different theories about emotional practices and music kicks in there. Also sexual practices and then also practices using materials of the body. So these are called the four, the four moons and people will talk about the role of excrement, urine, blood and semen in bowel rituals. A lot of this is sort of very secretive and behind closed doors and you need to be initiated. But again, this is why some people have issues with the bowels and say, well, they have heterodox religious practices involving all of these, all of these things. And so this is why when you first see the term bowel popping up, people are talking about them as being immoral and being unclean. So now bowls are very celebrated and they're seen as sort of symbols of Bengali cultural identity and Bengali religious hybridity and so on. But when people first started looking at them, they were criticizing them. There's this text from 1925 on the destruction of the bowels and this called this called out the fact that they were accused them of eating excrement human flesh conducting orgies and incest and so on. And so a lot of moral campaigns define the bowls in order to destroy them and get rid of them and said that these are disgusting people. So there's this interesting history about how they were rebranded as as musicians and as spiritual musicians. And a lot of this goes back to the figure Rabindranath Tagore, who's the most famous Bengali of all time he won the Nobel Prize for literature, among other things. He won the first Asian recipient of that of that award and he was very interested in a folk revival. He developed a particular form of his own music Rabindranath Shangeet which is very popular still in Bengal. And he sort of did what Hugh Urban calls the deodorization of the bowels. He cleaned up their look. He suggested that this was an ideal aesthetic that gentile upper class Bengalis living in cities, could admire, could respect, and he started collecting their songs and explaining and promoting their music. But he did it in a very specific way. And he cut out all of the things that people had issues with so he doesn't mention using body products, etc. He doesn't mention the sexual practices. He just talks about them as these sort of spiritual aloof mendicants who are fabulous musicians. He even dressed up as a bowel himself for a play that he'd written. And this sort of ambiguity, are they entertaining? Are they mystical and secret? Are they spiritual? Are they the folk nation embodied? This tension continues and Jean Openshaw talks about how bowels approach musical performances differently. So in the scene we've just seen that song, the bowels are dressed very formally. They look very clean. They're there in a nice closed environment indoors. They've got a picture of Lalon Fakir who wrote the song behind them and so on and so on. They're presenting a very clean spiritual image. The same musicians in different scenes are way more entertaining and they change what they do and will even dance, etc., according to who's in front of them. And this is part of their technique. So she talks about how they have a sensitivity to context and specifically a fulfilling different people's expectations of them. And this flexibility about them and about how they change their musical act according to who's in front of them is something that has raised criticism. So a lot of people are getting cynical about bowels. There's a question about bowels who become professional musicians who go touring around concerts and festivals. Are they too materialistic? There are bowels on Facebook now and bowels on Instagram. And if they're homeless wandering minstrels, should they be on social media? So there's increasingly people are talking about a criteria for authenticity. There's an usher bowl, an authentic bowl. They also talk about artificial fake bowels, kritten. And how do you distinguish? Well, people talk about how there has to be that inner spiritual feeling or emotion to their music. They can't just be doing a musical form. They have to have the emotion there, the pub. But also they should be free of social bonds and they should be practicing a spiritual practice defined by the Baal Gurus. So this is called a Shadana. And again, these can include sexual rights and so on. So there's a question here about the amateur bowels who dress like baals, sing like baals, but maybe they're not baals. And this extends right through into popular music. I mentioned Baal Rock, which I earlier, but there's a whole style because Baal Gan is a genre and it speaks to lots of people. So there are lots of musicians out there now, popular musicians, pop musicians in Bengal who adopt aspects of the Baal aesthetic and bring it into their music without actually being baals. So again, it's tricky when you look at these groups to know, are people taking them seriously, or are they dismissing about them? So we'll finish there. But I mean, the larger questions from this is this idea about authenticity, which most people who work with folk music dismiss and say, actually, authenticity is a very dangerous word, a very narrow word. But audiences are using this idea of authenticity to talk about baals. So we can also think about how baals are responding to modernity. You know, they aren't writing songs about wells anymore, while some are, but some are writing songs about mobile phones. Some are writing songs about cricket matches and so on, and they're using new metaphors to talk about these same spiritual problems. But is that okay? Or does that make them materialistic? And so yeah, so in our full session, we would go through more of these Baal lyrics, unpick them and then think about how they're responding to media and new options and so on. So I think I'll finish there, in fact, and leave, but if you have any questions about baals, please put them into the Q&A. But also I'm just very happy to discuss the structure of the course, the different branches of our MA programme. So any questions you have? More than welcome. Thank you for waiting. Mal, do you want to sort of just discuss what degree you're doing, I guess, the music aspect of it, and then maybe what life is like as a student? Yeah, of course, sure. So I'm a third year undergrad studying development studies in economics. And I didn't do any music modules in my first and second year, but I'm currently doing one in African pop music in the 1970s. And I think what's so great about Sass is that you get to pick these modules outside of your degree and outside of your course. And I wanted to pick the music one because firstly it's just such a niche course and niche module, and I think it's one of the modules where you wouldn't find it anywhere else. And I also sing quite a bit in choirs. So that was why I wanted to do something music, but I thought that the music programmes at Sass would give me a different kind of lens. And yeah, if you've also got like any questions about life in Sass in general and also like joining societies, I'm in choirs so I can talk about that. Yeah, I think that's it. Yeah, feel free to put any questions that you might have in the Q&A box. Sorry, so I was saying yeah and thanks for pulling out those dimensions of what we offer. I think is the two things. One is the flexibility within Sass to kind of draw in kind of expertise from different disciplines. That's so nice. And in particular, one of the things people can do on our degrees is learn languages. So, you know, if you arrive thinking, I really love music in Africa and I want to get closer to those cultures, then yeah you can learn Swahili as part of your degree or another language. I'm always pushing people towards South Asian languages obviously and so I would say go do Hindi or Bengali and so on. And then the second thing you said, I think is really good to bring home, which is the point that yeah we do have things on our books that just aren't being taught anywhere else. So, you know, like you said your module is looking at popular music in West Africa in the 1970s. What else would you would you have that kind of course and it's just so I love working at so as because we do have these things. I'm on a course, I'm convening a course and we have guest lecturers talking about hip hop in South Sudan and Tibetan pop music and things and this just isn't something that's that's widely available. And with our, our MA music programs, we have things like music and development, which is completely pioneering and and a really unique program, connecting music to conversations that just haven't been connected up anywhere else really. But also our regional courses we offer courses on music in Cuba, and we're the only place in the UK that does do that. Same with our performance as well performance in a lot of music departments looks quite similar. But with us, we encourage you, we have a whole set of instruments of our own and we have music teachers on site for all those instruments, but we encourage performers to go and find musicians in in the community who can work with them. There was one student who wanted to do Tibetan singing. And so she got in touch with the Tibetan community, found a musician who had never taught someone and had definitely not played with someone who wasn't Tibetan before. And they worked together for a year and in her performance assignment came back and he played with her and they sang in Tibetan, and he was on Dranyan and she was on guitar and it was wonderful so it's it's very nice. So these these opportunities I get surprised by every year and seeing seeing what what students find out there it's very exciting place to be. Yeah, definitely. I think I think whatever program you're on the regional specialism so I did international relations. So the regional specialisms that they have they have is just it's really unlike any other university. They are really good. Any questions. I haven't had anything come through in the Q&A box. Well, if you if you think of a question later as well you can always drop me an email or any of my colleagues in fact we're up on the music department web page and you click on staff and we're all listed there. And always happy to talk about this. I mean one of the nice things about our programs is we don't have huge colossal numbers of students. So it means we get to tailor what we do for everyone's interest to some extent. In fact, there's there are a couple of modules where the convener will sit down at the beginning and say to students right. Why have you come here to do your masters what do you want to get out of it and we sort of shape the syllabus to fit for what people are looking for. That's really key for something like music and development, for example, because some people will say yes after this I want to go looking at music in post conflict scenarios or right let's do that and then other people are looking for for music called therapy and so they'll shift in that way. Yeah, amazing. Like he said, all of the contact details for staff are on our website so do feel free if you have any questions after that. But I just want to say thank you to everyone that's come. Thank you to Richard and for now for your time. Yeah, thank you. And I hope you will have a lovely evening. Thank you. Thank you. Bye. So much. Bye.