বাউল চর্চা এবং ইতালি, একটি আন্তঃসাংস্কৃতিক ইতিহাস | Baul Studies and Italy, The Brief History of an Intercultural Interaction

Abstract

Several scholars on Bauls have nowadays turned their attention towards the global and transnational influence of Baul music and philosophy outside of Bengal. This article aims to bring a little contribution in this direction through the presentation of the ways in which the awareness about the Baul tradition arrived in Italy, my homeland. The arrival of Baul performances in Italy and the historical analysis of the intercultural communication between Italian scholars, intellectuals, musicians, and Bauls, can be inserted in the theoretical framework of the study of "folklore out-of-context", or "staged folklore". When indigenous traditions leave their native context and land in an alien environment, the intercourse that is created between different social groups never happens in an indirect and unmediated way. Particular agents (patrons, publishers, holders of institutional power, etc.) are often responsible for the management of such intercourse. These agents operate particular selections, following their own agenda, and decide, among the broad spectrum of cultural aspects that can be represented, what is to be shown/printed/recorded, what is to be omitted, or highlighted. These "politics of (cultural) representation" are at play also in the field of the Baul tradition out-of-context. In each foreign country, the mechanisms of cultural representation, selection and omission at work construct, as a result, a particular collective idea about Bauls. The goal of this article is to show what is the constructed collective idea of "Baul" diffused among Italian audiences and readerships and how this idea reiterated particular assumptions and misconceptions, through the brief story of the cultural. Interactions between Italy and the Bauls of Bengal.