Paper short abstract:

This paper is focused on alternative constructions of sexuality and procreation in Bāul and Matua religious knowledge. Techniques of conception and contraception are discussed as a resilient thread connecting Middle Bengali literature with current low-caste esoteric lineages across the Bay of Bengal

Paper long abstract:

Being the primary site of esoteric knowledge about the self and the universe, the body and bodily techniques (deha-sādhanā) of self-realization figure prominently in the Songs and chanted hagiographies of Bengali esoteric lineages.

This paper is focused on techniques of the sexual body and the reproductive body of Bāul and Matua (matuẏā) practitioners. It is based on sonic ethnography, vernacular literature and oral-aural exegeses of premodern corpora of esoteric texts, in particular the compositions of 1. Haure Gosain (BS 1202-1317) 2. Duddu Shah (1841-1911) 3. The collection Śrī śrī Mahāsaṁkīrtan (1900) by Matua saint-composer Tarokcandra Sarkar (Gosain) and Śrī śrī Harisaṅkīrtan (1915) by Aswini Sarkar (Gosain) 4. The digitized notebooks of Vaiṣṇava Bāul families as part of the Endangered Archive Project EAP1247 “Songs of the Old Madmen”. The songs considered in this paper entail systems of theory (mātāpitātattva, dehatattva) and practice (yugala sādhanā, bindu sādhanā), with implications in the fields of ontogenesis, reproductive health and sexuality. Combining textual sources with an ethnography of their contemporary relevance and application among practitioners, I will attempt to follow the historical career of Bāul and Matua gurus as masters of fertility and birth control, tracing the contours of the doctrinal as well as social implications of such control over life (giving birth) and death (immortality, understood as cessation of production and loss of semen). I hope to demonstrate that techniques of the fertile body transmitted by itinerant esoteric performer-preachers for the conception of healthy children, or for contraception and voluntary childlessness, provide a resilient thread connecting Middle Bengali literature with present day Bengali-speaking low-caste esoteric lineages across the Indo-Bangladesh border and on many shores of the Bay of Bengal.