Literature—South Asia, Bengali
The Bengali language is as old as English, emerging from eastern dialects of Middle Indo-Aryan (standard colloquial Sanskrit, or Prakrit), sometime before 1000 CE. The earliest surviving literary texts in Old Bengali are mystic caryapad, "play-part" songs, dating between 1000 and 1200 CE and preserved in a single manuscript of Sanskrit commentary in the Nepal Darbar Library. These songs, composed in syllabic rhyming couplets with caesuras in mid-line, treat esoteric practices of yoga and tantrism in paradoxical, sometimes vulgar, code language. Their imagery, derived from everyday village life, is meant to reveal and conceal the inner meaning of the spiritual masters' (acaryas) yearnings for spiritual union and experiences in the process of attaining self-realization. These songs conclude with a signature couplet (bhaita) in which the poet identifies himself and comments obliquely on his theme. The carya-style song never disappeared entirely from Bengali folk culture.
Contemporary baul songs have forms and thematic concerns similar to those of carya-style songs. Bauls are members of a heterogeneous (Hindu and Muslim) syncretic sect of West Bengal and Bangladesh, originating in the sixteenth century CE, whose nondualistic beliefs and practices derive from Hindu Vaishnava, Buddhist Tantric, and Muslim Sufi teachings. The bauls traditionally led a wandering life, singing their distinctive devotional songs and playing folk instruments, especially at fairs and festivals, as their main source of livelihood.
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