Laltoo Baul didn’t much like being asked to pose for a photograph. “I am working now”, he said, smiling lightly through his irritation. “I need to get off soon at Sainthia. That’s where I live”.

Bauls are the wandering minstrels of Bengal, mendicants who live a life of holy detachment away from the material world. But, as the Prime Minister of Canada just reminded us, it’s 2015 and today, even the Baul travels Bengal’s local trains almost as a professional performer, singing to harried train travellers, songs of spiritual rapture but, also, of the futility of formal religion: of caste and rosaries.

Bauls were once found throughout Bengal and were a powerful folk art movement. Armed with their ektara, a basic one-stringed instrument, they drifted around the country. Now, impacted by modernity, their space has shrunk. But Bauls are still found on the trains of Birbhum, a western district of Bengal which is their traditional home.

Rabindranath Tagore was greatly influenced by Bauls, as was the American poet Allen Ginsberga century later, as he visited Calcutta in the 1960s. Ginsberg even wrote a poem trying to apply the Baul’s anti-materialist philosophy to modern Western life. Titled “After Lalon”, it’s named after Lalon Fokir, a famous 19th century Baul.

Here it is, being read out by Ginsberg himself:

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Meanwhile Laltoo had taken up position in another section of the chair car bogey and had taken out his ektara. His longhair being whipped about by the wind, swaying rhythmically along with the train, he launched into a plangent song called “Baare Baare Ar Asha Hobe Na”, a famous Baul ballad. In the end, he was tipped, mostly with coins of Rs 1 and 2.

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