Zest

Bengali art finds a home in Monmouth County
Cultural center working
to preserve traditions
of Southern Asia
BY GLORIA STRAVELLI
Staff Writer

They are minstrels and mystics and keepers of an ancient Bengali art form that they have carried into the 21st century.

But Bauls (pronounced Bowuls) and the folk music they perform are in danger of disappearing in a modern world that is threatening to overtake their traditions.

"They are a nomadic people and theirs is a dying art form," said Dhriti Bagchi, a native of Bengal, India, and founder of Mrittika – South Asian Center for Language and Heritage, Manalapan.

Bagchi recently presented "Folk Music and Dance of Bengal," a program on indigenous music and art forms of Bengal at the Eastern Branch of the Monmouth County Library in Shrewsbury. Sponsored by the Monmouth Arts Foundation, the event drew a full house despite inclement weather.

JEFF GRANIT staff Bengal instruments (top left) are on display while Dhitri Bagchi (above) lectures about preserving the Bengal culture and Marilyn Preede (bottom left) plays an Ekatara at the Eastern Branch of the Monmouth County Library, Shrewsbury.

"Their music is enchanting," Bagchi told attendees. "It has a lot of inner meaning. In their songs, life is a river, constantly flowing, and God is the boatman."

Passed from generation to generation, Baul is a form of traditional Indian music characterized by the intense mysticism of the saffron-robed singers as they perform, she explained. Bagchi brought along a collection of instruments like the khamak, a stringed instrument made from a gourd, and tabla, drums, played by Bauls.

Bagchi told her audience that each year around holiday time, she returns to her native Bengal to attend Shadhu Shangho, a major Baul festival held at the fairground at Visva Bharati, the university in Shantiniketan in West Bengal. Nomadic singers come from all over to perform.

Her recording and filming at the festival are part of her effort to preserve folk art forms that are in danger of disappearing.

"The next generation of these artists is not following their parents into the art, that’s my concern," she said. "I am trying to get the Indian government to help because they are almost extinct."

Bauls, who eschew material possessions in favor of pursuing their mysticism through song and dance, took on the status of folk heroes after they became the subject of poems written by Rabindranath Tagore, India’s poet laureate in 1913, she said. Bauls had a profound influence on Tagore and, in return, many sing and dance to his poems.

Bagchi founded Mrittika in 1988 to keep the language of West Bengal and Bangladesh and the cultural traditions of this once unified region alive for the second generation of Bengali immigrants, including her own children, and to introduce Bengali language and art to the broader community.

Bengal, she explained, was an area of southern India that has been partitioned into West Bengal and Bangladesh. The two geographic areas share a common language, social structure, religious mix of Hindus and Muslims, and a shared history.

The name she chose for the center — Mrittika — means Mother Earth, she said,

signifying that Indian immigrants have been transplanted from one country to another and "our soil is with us."

"Our community is here for only one generation," she explained recently. "When we came here we didn’t understand how important it is to know about your roots. We are Indian, and at the same time, Indian-American. I wanted my children to learn about their roots and I wanted to propagate our culture to the community."

According to Bagchi, who immigrated to America with her husband in 1974, Mrittika’s students are primarily second-generation, American-born children of Indian parents who are part of the cultural mainstream and, she said, are intermarrying with people from different cultures when they grow up.

Bagchi began Mrittika, which has two distinct divisions — language and culture — with eight students and a few parents who volunteered to help teach Bengali language to their children.

"We started with eight students and it grew to 44 students," she said, noting that students ranged from preschoolers to a woman getting married to a Bengali.

Through Mrittika, she aims to preserve the language and disappearing art forms of Bengal and Pakistan and other rural areas of India and she does this by presenting dramas, recitals, discussions, storytelling, music, dance, puppet shows, public exhibits and arts events in which students participate.

The center’s major role is to teach students Bengali, the fifth largest spoken language in the world, and since its founding, more than 100 students, ranging in age from 4 to 24 years, have studied at the center. Classes, which are free, are offered at three levels — beginner, intermediate and advanced — taught by Bagchi and volunteers from the immigrant Bengali community.

The school currently holds two sessions on alternate weekends in two locations — one session is held at Mrittika’s office in Bagchi’s Manalapan home and the other at the Ananda Mandir, the state’s first Bengali community center in Franklin Township. A Web site, www.mrittika.org, is being developed.

In its cultural division, Mrittika’s students learn folk art forms like narrative scroll painting and decorative floor painting called alpana as well as how to make miniature terra cotta figurines, called shoal, that are used to teach Bengali mythology.

Bagchi has been a vigorous proponent of Bengali art forms and has extensive experience coordinating and curating exhibits and demonstrations at conferences, festivals, arts centers, museums and universities throughout the country.

In addition, she is an artist who has had major roles in full length Bengali dramas, dance dramas, poetry and dramatic readings and has received grants from the New Jersey State Council of the Arts to work as a master artist teaching alpana to apprentices to keep the art form alive.

Through her own work as a writer, editor and teacher, and by traveling to India to record arts events, Bagchi is an important participant in keeping Bengali folk traditions and art forms alive. Working with contacts in India, she has produced slides and films. Two volumes of a planned 10-volume interactive CD-ROM set on Bengali language and culture produced by Bagchi are currently available through Mrittika.

For now, instruction at Mrittika is free but Bagchi is seeking grant funding so she can expand the school and hire more teachers to keep up with the growing population of immigrants.

"We want to have more students and we need more classroom space and a permanent home for the school," she explained.

Bagchi would like to have a building that would also accommodate displays and a museum dedicated to Bengali art forms.

She is also seeking funding for a documentary she plans to produce on dying South Asian art forms before they are lost forever.

According to Bagchi, modern culture has already greatly impacted indigenous artists like those that create pata, traditional scroll paintings that are the basis for storytelling and song.

"The scroll is a script for a folk story," she explained. "The scroll painter, or patua, creates a song for the story. It’s a form of oral history.

"They used to sit and paint and sing under a banyan tree in their village and people would come and watch," she said. "It still happens, but now there’s a VCR hanging in the tree. Technology has replaced the patua."