Lisa Knight's engaging and superbly accessible ethnography, Contradictory Lives, fills a lacuna in academic studies on Bauls and offers a signal contribution to the growing field of women and ethnography through its deft analysis of the lives and practices of female Bauls in eastern India and Bangladesh. Her book breaks new ground in Baul scholarship by complicating dominant representations of the concept “bâul,” showing through the vantage point of the Baul women with whom she worked that “the term bâul remains fluid and unbounded” (p. 14). Knight expertly demonstrates that what being a Baul means to the women she met is linked to the geographical regions in which Baul women live and travel; the religious identities (Hindu or Muslim) they emphasize before and after their initiations into the Baul community; age and marital status; their publicly recognized status as professional singers; and, most significantly, the competing and conflicting expectations of them as Bengali householders and Baul women.
Divided into two parts, the first section of Contradictory Lives illuminates the particular discourses and contexts impinging on Baul women's lives and the choices they make. Chapter 1 elucidates the dominant Baul ideal as a socially unencumbered male who carries a one-stringed instrument (ektârâ), wears the ocher-colored clothing of renunciation (sannyâs), and wanders the countryside begging for alms (madhukarî), while passionately performing his music. This gendered representation has affected local perceptions of “real” Bauls and marginalized women. Finding Baul women, therefore, proved to be difficult in the initial stages of Knight's fieldwork. Despite the warnings she received, Knight located Baul women in the districts of Birbhum (West Bengal, India), Sylhet, Jhenaidah, and Dhaka (Bangladesh). Knight's multi-sited fieldwork approach enabled her to see the connections between Baul women's experiences, including whether or not they claimed Baul identity, and their spatial locations in India and Bangladesh.
Chapter 2 analyzes the dominant bhadralok (the Bengali elite who serve as the main patrons of Bauls) discourses that stigmatize Baul women as “bad” women. Bhadralok imaginings of “good” Bauls are rooted in nineteenth century Bengali and Bangladeshi nationalisms that turned to regional images as emblematic of national pride. Bhadralok constructions denied Baul women a role in Baul ideology because, as chapter 3 discusses, the notion of the “good Baul” conflicts with that of the “good Bengali woman.” These conflicting paradigms obviate the categorical possibility of “Baul women.” Local Bengali discourses, like many discourses of gender norms in South Asia, emphasize behaviors like modesty (lajjâ) and being silent and dependent on male kin. Local expectations, hence, make it impossible for Baul women to meet Baul expectations without risking their reputations in their local communities.
Baul women, however, find ways to live meaningfully by drawing on the tools of their encumbering. The next section of Knight's Contradictory Lives entitled “Negotiations,” thus explores the strategies Baul women utilize in bridging conflicting discourses. Chapter 4 offers a sensitive portrayal of Baul women's fears of being abandoned by their husbands, a feeling grounded in Baul women's personal experiences and in the ideologies of the Baul male as unencumbered and promiscuous. Drawing on the Bengali paradigm of the good woman helps Baul women to secure respect and emotional support from their non-Baul neighbors in the event that their husbands abandon them, while increasing their status as virtuous women in their communities even as their role as public performers challenges that traditional paradigm.
Chapter 5 examines Baul women's performances of Baul songs as a vehicle to create personal and societal transformation. The songs Baul women sing speak about the value of the human being and critique what Bauls perceive to be the social ills of caste and gender discrimination. Furthermore, some Baul women's songs shame Baul men who abuse alcohol and abandon their wives and fail to protect them from scandal. Chapter 6 discusses Baul renunciation (bhek; khilâphat), distinguishing between Baul and Brahmanical varieties of sannyâs. Knight contends that Baul couples take sannyâs in order to legitimate themselves and garner respect from their bhadralok patrons. Couple-oriented renunciation may be the norm but Baul women can and do pursue this path alone. In spite of the obstacles they face, renunciation enables Baul women to live as women alone in a society where being female requires being encumbered.
Drawing on the work of Wynne Maggi, Saba Mahmood, and Sadaf Ahmad, Knight's book concludes by explaining that Baul women's constructive projects, though engaged in the goal of liberation, are not “centrally concerned with women's equality” (p. 182). Baul women share Baul egalitarian views on gender and understand that Baul women's mobility and independence distinguish them from their non-Baul neighbors. But Baul women also recognize the structures that limit their movements. And, while they do not agree with those restrictions, Baul women utilize them to voice their concerns as mothers and wives. That Knight's excellent work conceptualizes Baul women's agency through use of the familiar analytical language of defiance appears, I admit, to contradict her claim that Baul women's goals move beyond projects focused solely on women's equality. I also admit, however, that Knight's language of defiance works well in the specific case of Baul women by virtue of the larger unorthodox project of the Baul path. Baul ideology celebrates the rhetoric of non-conformity. Thus, Baul women not only draw on a familiar rhetorical grammar illustrative of shared assumptions of what being a Baul means in West Bengal and Bangladesh, but also reconfigure it in ways that allow them to bridge conflicting expectations and create meaningful lives. Knight's Contradictory Lives will be of interest to scholars and students working in the areas of oral and narrative history, performance studies, anthropology, religious studies, Asian Studies, and gender and women's studies.
