By TwoCircles.net Staff Reporter,
Guwahati: In what can be termed as a landmark endeavour, Guwahati-based cultural activist, documentation consultant and curator of the Guwahati International Music Festival, Aiyushman Dutta, has been invited to join a first-ever documentation project of the centuries-old ‘Dol Purnima Utsab’ of the Bauls to be held from March 14-17 in Kushtia, Bangladesh this year.
The documentation project “THE ROAD TO BAULIANA: Mapping the Baul Traditions of Bangladesh” has been conceived and implemented by acclaimed Bangladeshi fusion musician and poet of Assamese ancestry Maqsoodul Haque (Mac Haque).
Bangladesh witnesses the Dol Purnima Utsab at Seuria, Kushtia every year for a period of three consecutive days. The festival this year will commence at 08:00 a.m., at the Ankhra (sakta in Assamese) of Fakir Lalon Shah on 15th March 15 and continue non-stop until 17th March, 2014. Over 1.5 million Bauls from all across Bangladesh and India, as well as the US, UK, Scandinavian countries and Japan among other are expected to join in.
There will be music, spiritual engagements, alternative medicine camps, herbalist and Baul rituals like communal meal and initiation diksha ceremonies, guru-siswya parampara etc. The Dol Purnima Utsab is very significant in Baul spirituality because the revered sage of the Bauls Fakir Lalon Shah would organise this during his lifetime, meaning the festival has been going on with unbroken regularity every year for over a century. The three-day festival is focussed on the Bauls getting together and sharing their spiritual insight. Singing and chanting goes on nearly non-stop for 3 days. Baul music and spirituality together with the corpus of Fakir Lalon Shah’s work was included in the UNESCO’s list of Intangible Oral Heritage of Humanity in 2005.
The festival also has another pertinent aspect in the sense that Dol Purnima is actually the Birthday of Shri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, the scion of the Vaishnavite movement, with Bengal’s Nadiya school of thoughts of which Fakir Lalon Shah and the Bauls identify as their belief system. And also as we all know Shri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu was also Assam’s Shrimant Shankardev’s contemporary, and a pallbearer of the Bhakti Movement that that swept our regions from the 7th to the 9th Century, profoundly changing our thought process and way of life, and thereby enriching our culture and sacred heritage.
In a letter addressed to the Principal Secretary, Cultural Affairs, Government of Assam, extending his invitation to Aiyushman Dutta, Maqsoodul said, “The Dol Purnima Utsab has not been documented till now in any format and we have embarked on an ambitious project to video document this centuries-old festival. Given the shared cultural heritage between both India and Bangladesh for this festival and also because of the Vaishnavite aspect, we have invited Guwahati-based journalist, cultural activist and curator of Guwahati International Music Festival Aiyushman Dutta, who has vast experience in documenting and promote a lot of Northeast Indian folk traditions, to join us in this project for we feel his inputs would be invaluable.”
During his stay in Bangladesh, Aiyushman has also been invited to take part in a seminar talk on Northeast Indian culture and folk traditions organized by the Department of Anthropology, Jahangirnagar University, on March 24, 2014.