A Grassroots Wisdom Tradition

The Baul of BengalFootnote ³ are a surviving grassroots wisdom tradition, akin to others across South Asia that are now largely extinct; it is characterized by a religiously syncretic, noncommunalist spirit of humanism that refuses caste-based differentiation and upholds a path of life celebration, human salvation and self-realization for the “little people.” Its initiates claim universalism, in the sense that it is a human path—and it does indeed seek to go to the core of reality that is experienced by deep initiates of all the major esoteric traditions. It is deeply esoteric,Footnote ⁴ yet no less deeply embedded in real and material life, and it thus informs every aspect of initiates' life, linking up the mundane and the lofty. Initiates were, and sometimes still are, a kind of village elite providing various sorts of guidance, teaching, dispute settlement, and healing services.

Its chief transmission vectors are oral, made up of master–disciple dialogues, initiate debates, and a vast repertoire of signature esoteric songs, all rooted in the creative ingenuity of a formerly illiterate society. These oral vectors are in turn totally embedded in practices, chiefly esoteric and secret (they belong to the South Asian continuum of unorthodox tantra), without the embodied benefit of which the oral vectors are ineffective. For Baul initiates it is inconceivable to separate TK (the wisdom knowledge pervading all of life, material and spiritual) and TCE (the songs), both of which share a special coded language that is “Bengali” yet incomprehensible to noninitiate Bengalis and embodied practices inseparable from the cognitive content.

Creatively Embodied Spirituality

The Baul path belongs to the vast spiritual category of South Asian sadhana (“quest” can be a shorthand equivalent), a term that denotes the cultivation by a person called a sadhu of self-improving effort (be it spiritual, artistic, creative, service to others, or any deeply ethical or aesthetic pursuit) over a long period. Whatever the chosen form and theme of the effort, the aim is always spiritual in essence; as in traditional societies elsewhere, spirituality informs all domains of life and is inseparable from materiality and embodiment. This category of sadhana, severely endangered in the rapid changes of modernization and globalization, used to belong to various degrees to holy people (explicitly) and to ordinary people (implicitly) as a shared behavioral and cognitive value system shaping harmonious human individuality and collectivity. Sadhana was the foundation of indianity's great and numerous contributions to intellectual, scientific, artistic, and artisanal heritage—an all-pervasive category of elites', as well as common people's, sustained creativity.

Scientific Knowledge

In the case of the Baul, sadhana underpinned the cultivation of a remarkable body of illiterate esoteric and mundane wisdom, with unique grassroots scientific knowledge—especially in natural science and medicine. The medical knowledge of Baul people would be applied differently when healing ordinary people (to whom largely plant medicine would be administered) and helping initiates (for whom more esoteric drugs and practices would be prescribed).

Overall, and like other “little traditions” of South Asia, Baul medical wisdom is, in the grassroots realm, on an intellectual continuum with the codified traditions of AyurvedaFootnote ⁵ and Yunani. But it is not specialized in medicine, for its knowledge is considered medicine to multiple domains of human life—given that in indigenous and peasant societies, knowledge circulates between categories, and the circulating or encompassing agent is spirituality as the celebration and meaning of all life, knowable and unknowable (i.e., partly attainable through esoteric cognition). Like other domains of cognitive excellence, it demands lengthy studies, where theory and practice are mutually reinforcing.

Secrecy

Like other systems of deep knowledge, the more advanced one's level of esoteric practice, the more secrecy is required. Secrecy is a form of responsibility, both inwardly and outwardly oriented—to protect overenthusiastic novices from dangerous effects of uninformed use, to protect the core essence of the knowledge from abuse by wrongly intentioned acquisitiveness, and simply to protect Baul people as unorthodox minorities within mainstream societies that have historically inflicted persecution on them out of orthodoxy, caste mentality, and power-seeking motivations.

While there is a rule of secrecy, much of the confidentiality surrounding the core wisdom is self-generated by the very language used for expressing esoteric teachings and tenets, in particular in the songs. Indeed, the songs can be heard strictly at an exoteric level by ordinary Bengali speakers, while initiates can also hear the deeper messages encrypted in coded terminology and phrases (much of which is derived and bengalized from Sufi and Tantric heritage).

Customary Law

The Baul system has its built-in customary law, by now vestigial and no longer enforced. Major Baul saints contributed to its evolution, particularly with respect to gender relations, moral and behavioral standards, types and grades of practitioners, and esoteric practices.

There would be specific laws governing forms of marriage, status and roles of women and men in their esoteric and ordinary life activities, and issues of property—all inspired from esoteric wisdom to govern both esoteric and ordinary life. There would be lineage-related rules. Overall such a system ensured respect for knowledge holders and protection of core wisdom goods, while also affording very sensible ethical guidance for day-to-day human relations.

Failure to pass tests in esoteric practice would lead to irrevocable exclusion from the community of deep initiates. The failed seeker would return into ordinary society, either by entering into the orthodox mainstream or exploring some alternative path, or by retaining the Baul title and some of the practices as a householder engaged in normal livelihood activities (householders nowadays make up the majority of the Baul movement). To this day, many Baul frown upon brethren, male and female, whose behavior deviates from a certain standard. On the whole, Baul customary rules of conduct were organically rooted in proper practice of the esoteric doctrines. Baul householders were generally known to be self-reliant and law-abiding good citizens, while wise Baul would be called upon to offer guidance to ordinary villagers or to settle disputes. Customary rules were not codified as law, since they would be constantly repeated and commented in the songs.

Gendered Knowledge-Power

Baul wisdom, like other traditions, had plenty to do with knowledge as a special form of power, and especially with gendered specializations as the necessary spiritual-and-material complementarity of male and female knowledge-and-agency characteristic in peasant societies. In particular, female knowledge-power was crucial in agriculture (especially in seed management, deemed to inhere in women), the multiple abilities of caring for others, and the life-promoting processes of family-based subsistence economies. Most of the esoteric Baul knowledge, more intellectually cultivated by males, revolved around such female knowledge-power, the latter being cognitively on a continuum with life, nature, subsistence prosperity, and the Mother Goddess. Women, as embodiments of the Mother Goddess, were bearers of traditional life-wealth and knowledge of nature, now wiped out by poverty, resource depletion, drastic changes in economic production, and consumption processes.

The importance of the feminine survives vestigially in now frozen tenets of doctrine and songs, in coded language that most Baul no longer understand. While it is still acknowledged that initiate women are the best teachers of the path, many women intuitively attracted to the path find no real teachers, male or female.

A Not-So-Little “Little Tradition”

In its own lands, Baul wisdom's anchorage in the lower classes does not relegate it to the position of a minor tradition. It has been cultivated across the territorial breadth of Bengal. The name Baul appears in written sources as of the early sixteenth century,Footnote ⁶ but the origins of the path are much older. In spite of much high-caste and mainstream contempt as well as outright persecution over the past two centuries, and even though the essence of the tradition is now severely endangered, the name “Baul” is still invoked and cherished by countless Bengalis through both East and West Bengal. This humble grassroots path was possibly the single most important influence on Nobel Prize winner Rabindranath Tagore, scion of a wealthy and refined family, who found in its “rustic philosophy the true roots of the Bengali soul and mind.” The Baul as a figure has been emblematically invoked in the constitution of a national Bengali identity, a figure celebrated as free-minded mystic minstrel who refuses hierarchies of castes and conflicts of religions.

Baul Songs

In relation to that identity-building role, Baul songs with their distinctive style have become highly popular in Bengal as one of the chief Bengali musical genres. Beyond Bengal and India, world music enjoys their dynamic musical texture, and new-age seekers want their tantric spirituality as (mis)understood by Western audiences. By now, a majority of consumers—and, alarmingly, of performers—of Baul songs have little or no idea of the meanings they convey. In other words, the songs have become divorced from the wisdom largely due to their popularity, which then contributes to erosion of the wisdom itself.

The wisdom and sadhana that had successfully survived many disruptive evolutions in history, including the colonial period, are being torn apart by the disproportionate forces of economic and cultural globalization commodifying a local practice that is now, at best, artistic. The songs are now more often heard performed by artists and noninitiates on large stages or in recordings than by genuine holders of the wisdom under a tree. They have fed into musical fusion. Carelessly distorted lyrics are perverting the language and meanings. As the songs are also increasingly professionalized and appropriated by polished urban artists, villagers grow self-conscious about their rustic voices and stay quiet or disastrously imitate the artists' amplified effects.

In Bangladesh there has been talk of introducing the songs into school curricula—a seemingly virtuous plan fraught with the risks of mainstreaming and sterilizing their real living content.Footnote ⁷ Bangladesh has obtained the listing of Baul songs as one of UNESCO's Intangible Heritage Masterpieces—as the legacy of mystic minstrels but with no reference to the underlying body of knowledge. The listing, and the misleadingly superficial description given for the songs as heritage, has little to do with promoting the effective ownership of the songs by the people who still cultivate (or might cultivate) their meanings—arguably, it further undermines potential for such ownership as it rather encourages artistic appropriation.

Without such ownership, the underlying wisdom can hardly be expected to survive, which of course means that the songs themselves can only become the empty shells of masterpieces that depend on the perpetuation of living meanings. This is tragic for the Baul themselves, but also for the many disorientated Bengalis who still, intuitively at least, perceive that there is fundamental value in those meaningsFootnote ⁸ and have trouble deciphering the songs, be they correctly or incorrectly performed. Indeed, would-be seekers consistently complain about the dearth of authentic Baul masters.

Formerly at the center of the Baul cognitive quest, women are now utterly marginalized from residual male wisdom and circles of transmission. Indeed, it is easier for women to claim a Baul identity as (preferably successful) singers, and women seeking Baul wisdom are utterly on their own.

Who Makes Up the Community and Who Are Its Authoritative Leaders?

Wise old Baul lament the loss of real power of the songs and are all too aware that nowadays an artistic career, earnings, and celebrity are more attractive than a path that remunerates more deeply but more demandingly. Their greatest grief is to lose to the stage even their best disciples, for whom spiritual exclusion from initiate ranks is no longer a major spiritual price to pay.

While in the past, wise Baul would locally have ethical leadership roles, individually or as small councils, they never seem to have established a central body of customary authority. Historically, the Baul did not organize as a deliberately structured broader community (although there would be small communities living around a revered master or in particularly holy locations). This is largely because they were/are esoterically inclined individuals living among more exoterically minded people on a shared social-economic-cultural continuum. They did not create a specifically delineated secret society, as they were not intrinsically different from their neighbors, but differed only in the depth of their personal commitment as seekers. In grassroots society where most people would be farmers and artisans, there was no boundary (ethnic, geographic, social) to demarcate the Baul from their non-Baul neighbors. Even in linguistic terms, the coded language they use(d) is still Bengali, with added layers of esoteric idiom. Traditionally, there would just be degrees of Baulness to differentiate a deep initiate from lesser ones or orthodox people, and this diversity rather contributed to neighborly exchange and mutual interest. Because Baulness was fluidly ubiquitous across the grassroots fabric of Bengal, it never needed to establish itself as a separate identity—rather, it eventually contributed to national identity building!

Thus we have a paradoxical situation: a whole nation (both East and West Bengal) somehow owning a vanishing Baul identity, a whole nation where the superficial success of the identity betrays its own deeper reality and those few people who still have access to it. Unlike endangered traditional communities across the world, the strange feature in this case is that these few wise people are not constituted as a leadership group of elders who would be the authoritative representatives of the community and the recognized role models and teachers for the next generation of leaders, as well as the interlocutors for negotiating Baul affairs.

Art and Wisdom in Spiritual Cultural Expressions

In a leaderless and indefinable community, Baul songs raise difficult questions in terms of ownership and authenticity of an oral tradition where the songs as cultural expression are in principle inseparable from the underlying body of knowledge as spiritual and wisdom based. Only initiates can adjudicate the extent to which performers of the heritage own it as wisdom or only as expression, while widespread secularization and mainstreaming of esoteric wisdom songs generate two diverging strands, the more spiritually informed strand now being the loser.

Around the world, spiritual songs are public domain that can legitimately be rendered by laypersons—but there are sensible norms for venues, timings, and performers' qualifications for public performance. Negro spirituals, for instance, are best sung by people with the right voices, personal backgrounds, and deep faith, for like-minded listeners, but nonbelievers can also sing (and listen to) them nicely enough because the power of inspiration in these songs is direct, hence relatively unproblematic. Here the spiritual dimension is a matter of faith, and faith is not the same as the spiritual in wisdom so characteristic of most endangered traditional systems.

Faith is very much a concept of monotheistic religions, for which there is no equivalent in other religious systems that do not have a duality of believing versus not believing. In the Baul wisdom tradition, seekers are encouraged specifically not to take anything on faith, but to build up their ability to know deeper. In traditional wisdom systems, it is not just faith but the cultivation of deep knowledge that produces spirituality capable of interconnecting all the components of life. Faith can be kept quite separate from everyday life, as churches can keep separate from states—but wisdom spirituality is everywhere in life. This distinction between knowledge wisdom and faith—not found in the IP literature where it does acknowledge TK as spirituality informed—is crucial to the meaning of spirituality as part and parcel of TK systems, and consequently to possible IP approaches to them.

In the case of Baul songs, the initiate knows that the uninitiated singer is necessarily distorting the meaning out of ignorance, that is, lack of wisdom (not a matter of faith), and should normally be corrected. Sincere masters of sincere disciples are very strict about this correct knowledge and the demanding learning curve that it entails. They are helpless to impose their rules against the sheer number of increasingly artistic singers whose ignorance is contributing to wiping out the whole way of life that created the songs and kept their transmission alive through generations. The lay person and their audience derive their own level of enjoyment from the performance, but their narrow scope diminishes the true deep value that the song has when performed by an initiate. The tradition is acutely endangered when audiences enjoy that performance more than the rendition of the same songs by a true initiate. At issue then is the legitimacy of mainstream enjoyment when it creates higher value for superficial derivatives that distort the inventions of wiser minds.

Noninitiates never were denied the right to sing such songs, deemed to be all-Bengali heritage, especially since the songs are or were vectors of awakening and transmission. However, with the repertoire being layered with more or less esoterically oriented songs and more or less esoterically layered meanings in the deeper level songs, only initiates can truly differentiate between the layers—each song could be said to belong to the Bengali public domain in its cognitively most accessible layer of meaning, while the crucially significant esoteric layers belong solely to the public domain of those who are, were, and will be conversant with them. This layering involves a factor akin to trade secrets, the secrecy being inherent in the coded language of esoteric layers, thus producing a kind of de facto defensive copyright, for hidden IP that is nevertheless a public domain awaiting any seeker's wise appropriation. Respectful people would not, in principle, sing a song beyond their understanding unless the riddle in the song was being cultivated precisely for heuristic purposes by a seeker, in which case, it would be sung only in private. Nowadays lay people lack humility in acquiring such songs to add to their repertoire—something of the artist's acquisitive greed for an artifact known to hold some mysterious and desirable special power. In terms of power then, the undigested charge of such songs and their inevitably erroneous rendition are offset by the size of audiences and loudness of amplification, abundant musical effects, and the multiplying power of recordings. The charge of secret meanings is drowned out and lost in erroneous rendition.

Another important copyright aspect that uninformed performers naturally neglect is the tradition of authorship attribution that normally reinforces the value of correct rendition of a song's text. Sincere disciples always make the right attribution of songs to their authors, whose names are usually inserted more or less overtly toward the end of the song. A further layer of respect that was quite frequent in the past was for disciples to attribute their own compositions to their masters, in which case only people truly in the know could decipher authorship. The point here was not just reverence to masters but also the acknowledgment that a seeker's main job prior to becoming truly creative within the tradition was to cultivate the existing wealth of knowledge of masters and that of nature as mistress of all masters. A great many composers of Baul songs would feel no desire to insert their signature. There is thus plenty of scope today for dubious or erroneous attributions, as well as Baul singers copyrighting their own artistic renditions of the songs of others' deeper inspiration.

The Baul case shows a further layer of fluidity in authorship and ownership—a master's song is his gift that belongs to the whole Baul movement (or even to the whole of humankind) as an inspirational contribution, and what he owns is nothing more, and nothing less, than his own life-path of quest that resulted in that song. The deep truths that masters can successfully utter are those of the universe, which cannot possibly belong to them; rather they celebrate the masters' belonging to the universe, and their invitation to others to join them!Footnote ⁹ In this sense, ownership of the songs is for all who aspire for such belonging. Yet the deeper esoteric layers of the songs, as layers of knowledge, can only really belong to those who have reached those layers tangibly—in this sense they could be deemed proprietary. The tangibility of such levels of attainment is clearly perceived only by other true initiates.

The sui generis copyright system and the rule of correct rendition of masters' songs might be construed as imposing an undesirable freezing of those particular artifacts, hence a limitation on others' creativity. This is not so. If masters' authoritative songs are not to be modified it is precisely because they are expert teachings, powerful riddlesFootnote ¹⁰ that open gateways of the mind to prod the quest along, and this very power would be diminished by a change in the words. As such, they are a compelling stimulus to the seeker's eagerness to seek, which makes the seeker in turn compose more songs.Footnote ¹¹ Many songs are in fact responses—and further questions—to others' songs. In the past, there used to be a practice of initiate sessions where knowledge holders would challenge each other through improvised songs charged with such questions and answers. Baul creativity was thus cumulative, a constantly growing body of composition exploring a shared esoteric core.

The Baul IP system, involving the songs as included in the overall wisdom, was the most appropriate to the realities of a knowledge system where authorship protection was of a different order altogether. The all-powerful wisdom of the universe had no need for protection (such a need being eventually generated only by the foolishness of humans!). Baul copyright with trade secrets never prohibited anyone trying to sing or to decipher a powerful song belonging to a sui generis public domain, but it had built-in defenses that remain operational today, since the deeper meanings remain inherently inaccessible to noninitiates.

Importantly, copyright never entailed monetary gain to the rights holder—authorship attribution rather celebrated the holder's gift of the song to the community, adding a gain of authoritative prestige for the holder, and it celebrated what was the latter's true profits: wisdom.

The embodied spiritual cognitivity of the Baul as an age-old deep exploration of the frontiers of human wisdom knowledge is an invention that the collective Bengali mind (and humankind's intellectual heritage) can perhaps ill afford to lose. Having contributed to Bengali cultural and national identity building, it could also, ideally, have tremendous potential for a highly relevant agenda of human rights, poor people's dignity, gender, and environmental cultural sustainability.

The Case of Yoga

Authentic yoga is an immense and diverse knowledge system of the Indian subcontinent. It is one of the best known types of spiritually informed sadhana, which is a fundamental part of deep South Asian culture, broadly on an ethical continuum of constructions of “virtuous living” in traditional cultures.

Commercial yogaFootnote ¹² is, to many people, a shocking case of segmenting off and rearranging for commercial purposes selected pieces of the vast heritage of yoga, in itself a whole/holistic and interconnected TK system. It claims to do customers a lot of good, while in fact it may well make it impossible for such customers to attain the wholeness that yoga is really all about. By segmenting what is a total knowledge system, it evidently attacks the systemic integrity of yoga. It further consolidates its conquests through the patenting and branding of yoga.

The customary law inherent in sadhana pursuits gives a direct and unambiguous response to such IP appropriations. In the ethical regime of teacher–disciple interactions in all types of sadhana, the intrinsic value of teachings is so great as to reside beyond the realm of monetary transaction: Customary rules of gurus preclude any direct payment, and greed is foolishness that disqualifies greedy masters on substance. With the invasion of that universe, formerly congruent with the surrounding material economy, by the powerful dynamics of the monetarized market economy, and with the worldwide export of yoga's promises, such a straightforward rule of ethics is conveniently ignored. New-age and well-being services now intensely compete in a spirituality-hungry market. They brand as “authentic” certain yoga creations that are at best appropriations of instrumentalized authentic material. IP tools are evidently used for rich profit in clear violation of traditional rules.

A recent legal battle in the United States involved copyrights and trademarks of the Bikram Yoga College of India on a yoga-derived well-being commercial service. It appears to have ignored both the customary prohibition of profit seeking and the intellectual illegitimacy of an individual's extracting, appropriating, branding, and copyrighting a segment of an encompassing knowledge system. In the intellectual logic of yoga, there can be no individual gainful ownership of a part of it as an invention—historically, great contributors to yoga gained far higher recognition as saints whose sole profit taking was in the ineffable benefits of their own practice and in the preference for profit sharing, that is, free dissemination of access to such benefits.

In this sort of case, ethically minded IP lawyers could turn to the source heritage for clear and unambiguous customary law guidance on nonpayment, and the latter should have precedence over modern IP considerations.

An extension of the profit-related contradiction is the further contradiction residing in advertising practices necessary for providers of new-age and exotic well-being services to compete in the modern market. Self-advertising is frowned upon in customary law, traditional healing, and traditional attitudes in general—the large-scale costly publicity that bolsters branding as IP and image is an alien phenomenon to them. Not only is authentically effective TK not advertised, it is often deliberately concealed by secrecy and initiation, while the grapevine affords sufficient publicity for a master's skills. The fact that IP-protected TK derivatives use modern publicity budgets and tools would thus, in customary law terms, be an unambiguous indication of disqualification as TK on ethical grounds. It would actually reveal the substance of their performance as fake and fraudulent (e.g., ineffective or possibly harmful to users).

Ethical customary rules show the deeper contradiction: The dominance of modern individual profit seeking, namely, greed, deemed a necessary condition for promoting human inventiveness, is the denial of the far larger (historically and geographically) reality of inventiveness motivated by all sorts of other profits including the wide distribution of benefits. Logically, nothing but patterns of ignorance and narrow self-interest precludes IP law from opening its intellectual interests to the broader forms of equity and diversity of human creativity.

Yogic practices are variously found in Baul masters' paths, including certain more esoteric layers of yoga. Baul mind–body practices amount to a considerable wealth of grassroots unorthodox medicine that is remarkably effective, economical, and self-contained. Its unorthodoxy makes it off-limits for noninitiate consumption, let alone any form of product development or IP. Yet the greed factor under economic market conditions has kicked in: Some initiates sell esoteric medicine at exorbitant prices—such items, tainted by indiscriminate distribution and personal greed, are said to be ineffective if not harmful.

A different form of modern inventiveness in yogic Baul know-how takes the other route—distribution of benefits rather than greed. Some practitioners in recent decades have pragmatically isolated a particular body-based discipline from the overall regime of practices and taught it to ordinary villagers for purposes of birth control. Many of the latter are said to have taken superficial initiation for this purpose of acquiring an objectively useful skill, contraception without chemicals, operations, or costs, and with a reputed psychological benefit for couples. None of this happened through outside interference or advice—Baul people and their neighbors simply found their own cheap method to deal with overpopulation. That the authorities ignore this valuable piece of Baul TK in these regions could be viewed as a missed opportunity,Footnote ¹³ compared with the cost, effort, and partial success of official population control programs. Grassroots low-tech sexuality methods are of course unorthodox in the eyes of all the dominant orthodoxies—religious, political, economic, scientific, medical, gendered, and the like—so the people are well advised to keep such ingenious TK know-how in a deliberately negative IP space!

From the perspective of serious practitioners, however, the spontaneous adaptation to modern grassroots needs of a useful pro-poor piece of Baul TK is erroneous in terms of true sadhana, a utilitarian distortion of authentic salvation purposes,Footnote ¹⁴ pretty much as serious tantric initiates might dismiss new-age versions of tantric sexuality. Arguably, this position of elders would deserve discussion in the community—is their position a freezing that prevents the traditional heritage from recreating its resources in tune with social change?

Should the State Step In?

Yoga (among other sadhana) collectively and individually belongs to many schools and lineages and to all its practitioners. It requires recognition of moral rights, inseparably collective and individual, embedded in generational continuity since time immemorial, and prohibiting apportionment in the present in a way detrimental to future integrity potential.

Arguably, there can be no rights holders since no single individual or group can legitimately represent the whole. Yoga is not one invention, but a continuum across time and space of multiple invention using a huge range of techniques and interpretations, where each practitioner literally invents, literally discovers for him- or herself—day after day, a never-ending process. A derivative, IP-sanctioned application of yoga TK (not to mention a multiplication of such applications) amounts to diminishing or preempting the immeasurable potential, over immeasurable time, for such an invention by an immeasurable number of people. This invention of one's inner self, in a process unique to each practitioner, is both systematic in its own TK terms and nonstandard. It is anonymous, yet its great practitioners can stand out as saints. Unlike art, it is not at all a form of expression—indeed, it is all about the cultivation of impression toward one's inner self.Footnote ¹⁵ Only technicalities of yoga postures can be given expression, but people's individual realizations of the inner goal cannot—and this is where the authentically desirable property resides.

When spiritual totalities are thus in substance (and not just as public domain) beyond IP protection, yet in effect endangered by narrow-minded uses of IP protection away from the public domain substance, when they are as huge as yoga, and moral rights holders are beyond counting, is it up to the state to come in as representing those rights? It could be said that such a public domain being a common good (like health protection) of public interest (like national culture) should naturally be taken care of by the state. India seems to have taken this path and has launched a fittingly gigantic project—an online inventory of yoga texts to establish prior art.

But state custodianship, potential legal action, and law making in such a multiple and multidimensional field as yoga is fraught with all sorts of risks of dispossession for yoga practitioners, if ownership creeps into custodianship. Yoga is a commons that as such should be tended by its communities, and perhaps a wise state should rather seek to reempower that level of broad-based and diffuse responsibility. Besides, is it not contradictory for the secular state to take over protection of what is a spiritual wisdom system that should normally be left in the care of its own institutions and guides?

Conversely, the online project will not, and cannot, document all the unwritten and local variations of yoga sadhana, which go well beyond what yoga means to Western or modern minds and include all sorts of vernacular and secret variations. In terms of recognition of knowledge traditions, this means perpetuating the invisibility of nonscripture schools. But might such invisibility, in a negative IP space, be a lesser evil than state protection? In the same sense, would a negative IP space perhaps be less detrimental to the substance of Baul songs than international masterpiece status that divorces the songs from their sadhana moorings?

Negative IP Space and the Cases of Magicians and Chefs

There might be some interesting clues for Baul wisdom protection in the way professional magicians protect their secrets, the intangible assets of an ancient craft. Magicians use very little by way of conventional IP tools, preferring reliance on their own community ethics. Aspects of self-management of their knowledge by magicians is consonant with customary protection of Baul esoteric wisdom.

It has been noted that magicians' “innovation does in fact need intellectual property. But it does not necessarily need intellectual property law.”Footnote ¹⁶ IP law is bypassed in favor of much more effective IP norms. Magic secrets per se cannot, for obvious reasons, be protected by tools such as copyright or patents. There are grades of magic, from the lowest level to the highest, with a corresponding deepening of secret content whereby the deepest level open to only a few experts is deemed proprietary. Expert magicians have an ethos of sharing information within their community, as part of a strategy to minimize theft and exposure of their secrets—they must never reveal secrets, even their own, outside the community. They have a firm custom of creative attribution of inventions and a strong ethical or norm-based regime of IP that even has effective enforcement mechanisms, with no dependence on conventional IP law. Adherence to this set of norms is important for a crucial asset, reputation within the community.

In view of these similarities with the Baul case, why is it that magicians can flourish while the Baul are in decline? For one thing, magicians are well organized in associations and have clearly articulated their norm system—the Baul are not at all organized, and their customary rules are implicit, embedded in their whole knowledge system. Magicians need their system to work so that they can derive meaningful incomes from their performance—the Baul arguably need their system to work for the sake of their esoteric income, what they themselves call “profit.” The income of magicians is aligned with a monetary economy, while that of the Baul belongs in the realm of nonmonetarized spiritual economies themselves marginalized even more, for example, in yoga, by the fashionable gurus whose highly sought-after teachings reap large profits. The ancient craft of magicians has modernized successfully, something that only Baul singers have managed, at the expense of Baul initiates.

Another parallel case is that of chefs,Footnote ¹⁷ who also have stronger norm-based than law-based IP, and honor ethics, along similar lines to magicians. Like both magicians and Bauls, they have rules of attribution, disclosure policies are selective and targeted, and their rules for using others' recipes are an effective informal code, violations of which are promptly sanctioned by community contempt and bad publicity.

While secrets in magic and recipes can be copied exactly, Baul secrets are not imitable since they can only be cognitively reached within an individual's inner esoteric practice. But across all three communities, it is interesting that a practitioner is respected as an expert when he or she has attained a level of creativity capable of generating innovations from what is the common stock of knowledge content. For a Baul, innovation means the person's ability to make the wisdom knowledge alive and operational rather than a capacity to invent a recipe—although esoteric practices involve lots of secret recipes that are or were perpetually reworked by generations of practitioners, strictly for their own use and certainly not for producing income-generating dishes, unless the income is here again seen on Baul terms as wisdom profit. As in the earlier comparison with magicians, the loss of spiritual economies or ecologies is to blame for the devaluation of wisdom profits, whereas chefs' appropriate use of their recipes is highly profitable.

Fundamentally, the comparison with chefs and magicians who need their norm-based IP, and deliberately not legal IP, to maintain the commercial value of their creativity cannot be taken any further than the translation described earlier into wisdom profits for a Baul practitioner. Any IP system that seeks to generate economic benefits from human creativity runs the risk, in spiritually grounded TK systems (not the case for chefs and magicians), of commercializing and trivializing the sacred connectivity of knowing that is precisely what makes such systems effective.

But a clear practical lesson does apply for the Baul—they need to establish a true community, capable of discussing their own issues and articulating rules explicitly.

The Power of Names

Names of traditions or of bodies of knowledge can be very powerfully charged words—for example, yoga, or in Bengal, Baul. Traditional people are very careful about not uttering certain charged names, generally very ancient names. Conversely, but in the same realm, modern corporations go to great branding lengths to appropriate powerful names or to generate power for new names. These considerations hint at the possibility of recognizing TK systems' names for their own sake and their own meanings of value. Illicit use of names away from where the customary rules of a tradition want to keep them should be prohibited.

The power of names having currency in spiritual economies should not be appropriated as carrying equivalent substance into derivative products for the market economy—the latter being unfair both to the original source (thus distorted or impoverished) and to their customers (deceived into buying false original goods). Clearer regimes of moral rights resting with all who are responsibly concerned by such names could be given official recognition, rather than entrusted to state custodianship. They could have empowering effects for the relevant knowledge communities to reclaim active ownership and find effective forms of enforcement.

In a world where branding is a strategy for loading names artificially with shallow substance that charges them with market power, the reverse, that is, protection of old names really charged by long histories of real content building, makes sense. It is also a route that could help in broadening the scope of conventional profit seeking to other sorts of profits (cultural, environmental, social, etc.) dictated by the knowledge systems bearing such names. Names are a category that can be owned by relevant communities far more readily than they can claim property of their knowledge systems as IP. Thus communities could also more readily step in to decide on whether such names are used dubiously or illegitimately, better ensuring informed custodianship than outsider authorities for their own heritage. Protecting the name “yoga” would mean that derivative products would have to pass specific tests, regulated by authentic holders of the name, or to forego using the name. Protecting the name “Baul” with respect to Baul songs would require informed judgment by initiates, leading to proper attribution of qualification as “popular Baul” or “authentic Baul.”

The right to use a powerful name should rest upon the duty to use it responsibly.

The Power of Duties

Indigenous peoples are the most articulate advocates of the urgent need for a shift in the dominant global paradigm. Much of what they advocate stems from another invariant in cognitive spirituality-connectivity and customary law systems—common ethical principles that can intellectually be shared by modern law, on the assumption that the legitimacy of law is grounded in ethics.

These systems all tend to emphasize the duties, explicit and implicit, of humans far more than their rights. These duties include various types: to nature, divinities, ancestors, and elders; reciprocal and/or asymmetrical duties; and, in all sadhana cultures, duties to the self, because ultimately the self is the microcosm containing/contained by the macrocosm. Such a sense of duties larger than rights has everything to do with the sense of being owned by larger entities including nature, the land, and the culture, and of being both indebted to ancestors and accountable to future generations. This resonates with today's clamorous calls for accountability and responsibility in state and corporate governance.

While under modern IP, a knowledge holder's or inventor's rights increase in tune with the person's inventiveness, customary law gives ever-greater duties to individuals who become more knowing and wise. Customary law simply knows that knowledge as the quality of knowing gives the holder the supreme distinction and entitlement, which is the right to hold responsibilities—it recognizes that the knowing person has these important abilities.

The emphasis on duties is radically different from modern law and indeed from the whole momentum of modern humanism, with its ever-expanding realm of consumable rights and entitlements, and little emphasis on concomitant obligations (most of which appear to reside with the downtrodden classes, and, unrealistically, with states). Diverse values attaching to diverse duties make for connective-spiritual economies that are radically different from the modern reduction of value and rewards to monetary vectors, from the modern market that encourages selfish interests over duties, and from modern trade's despiritualized/deconnective material and utility flows.

In healthy traditional settings (not in declining or unhappily modernizing ones), the clear understanding by all of the duties of all tends to result in the reliable enjoyment of suitable rights by all, congruent with the roles, gender, age group, and knowing of each person. In modernity, proliferating rights and entitlements, especially in a profit- and consumer-oriented mentality, do little to promote a spontaneous sense of duties for all that can balance those rights—hence an ever-expanding need for new legislation and enforcement mechanisms, as expanding rights tend, like opportunities and money, to accrue to those who already have more than others.

It is also seldom noted today that the effects of predominantly rights-oriented agendas (as the logical response to rampant denial of human dignity) are often far less empowering, in particular for the agency and creativity of the underprivileged and marginalized, than a good balance of rights and duties inside the community and at its interface with the wider world. People in traditional mind-sets are generally far more empowered when they have the agency to fulfill their duties correctly than when they are given new rights to which their mentalities are not accustomed—these newly given rights can be counterproductive and create imbalances within communities and families, while real agency in performing duties gives meaning to life.

Performing one's duties correctly within traditional values helps the maturing of a knowing essence, that is, the connectivity dimension of cognitivity, because it helps the development of wise elders (now in increasingly short supply in social groups). Conversely, disoriented youth in such societies, who do not yet have the knowing essence, are more open to the attractiveness of modernity's rights and consumption messages. While there is no denying that awareness of rights is crucial, precisely in situations of marginalization and dispossession, younger people are alarmingly, and universally, losing receptivity to their elders' values and knowledge—justifiably so when the latter become ossified conservative rules. Youth easily perceive how much more power resides in the mainstream of rights and opportunity than in the shrinking local effects of correctly performed customary duties.

The many risk factors documented for indigenous and other grassroots youth find their roots largely in these contradictions. To address these successfully, the underlying disruptions in connective-spiritual cognitivity dictating formerly relevant systems of duties have to be understood.

The learning and performing of duties in turn involve the whole complex issue of education, where traditional transmission of knowledge and values should be given more than marginal space for the meanings of heritage to be revitalized into the future.Footnote ²⁰ This is also relevant for modern countries' educational (and broader value forming) systems, where the many problems of youth can usefully be analyzed through empowering/disempowering imbalances in the rights-and-duties paradigm.