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New bangla baul song samscho dewan
New bangla baul song samscho dewan







new bangla baul song samscho dewan

“How can I stop singing? I have been practicing the Baul path since my childhood,” Sarker told BenarNews. Shariat Sarker, another Baul singer, languished in prison for seven months after he was arrested under the act in January last year. The Digital Security Act has emerged as a new weapon to harass them.”ĭewan, the Baul singer, has four cases against her under the DSA for allegedly hurting religious sentiments.

new bangla baul song samscho dewan

“But now the people belonging to the same ideology are filing cases against Bauls and the people of other faiths.

new bangla baul song samscho dewan

“Physical attacks and killings of Bauls and Sufi researchers have decreased since the government’s crackdown against militants following the Holey Artisan terror attack of July 1, 2016,” Billah said, referring to a massacre of hostages by machete-wielding militants who attacked a Dhaka cafe.

new bangla baul song samscho dewan

The war being referred to is the one in what was then East Pakistan in 1971. It also makes “propaganda” against “the liberation war, the spirit of the liberation war, the nation’s founding father, the national anthem, or national flag” punishable with a maximum of life in prison. This law punishes those who produce or distribute content that “hurts religious sentiments or religious values” or “destroys communal harmony, or creates unrest or disorder” with 10 years in prison. “The preservation of the Baul songs and the general context in which they are performed depend mainly on the social and economic situation of their practitioners, the Bauls, who have always been a relatively marginalized group,” UNESCO said in its 2008 inscription on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.Īccording to Billah, Baul artists in recent years have been tied up in cases lodged against them by religious fundamentalists under Bangladesh’s draconian Digital Security Act. In 2005, UNESCO, the cultural arm of the United Nations, proclaimed the Baul artistic genre a “Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity.” These attacks on Bauls are also a threat to the survival in Bangladesh of the folk form, which has influenced the likes of Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore, American folk icon Bob Dylan, acclaimed beat poet Alan Ginsberg, and others. “The Baul performers have been increasingly facing death threats and attacks due to the rise of hardline Islamists since then,” Billah told BenarNews. That is what has been happening since 2011, when a surge in Islamic extremism targeted Bauls as well as writers, bloggers, publishers, activists and intellectuals, said Baki Billah, a human rights activist in Dhaka. That means, when members of the community are killed or tied up in legal challenges for their allegedly anti-Islam performances, their already meagre earnings take a huge hit. While the community is not entirely ascetic, most Bauls live frugally, surviving on what they earn from their itinerant performances. I feel the blessings and touch of Allah through my songs, which also teach me to hate no one.” “But I will continue to sing because this is not only the source of my income, but also a part of my prayers. “I am in trouble and facing death threats by Mullahs,” the singer told BenarNews. They accused her of defaming Islam “by making vulgar remarks about god” in a performance uploaded online last January. Rita Dewan, an acclaimed Bangladeshi Baul singer, says she was forced into hiding for most of last year after religious zealots in the Muslim-majority nation threatened to kill her. Singers of the Baul folk tradition in Bangladesh are struggling to survive after more than a decade of physical and legal attacks by Islamic hardliners who consider these artists apostates and heretics.īauls – as these wandering minstrels are called in Bangladesh and West Bengal in India – are neither of those things, but they are nonconformists whose songs boldly showcase their syncretic mystical roots.









New bangla baul song samscho dewan