00:00I'm Eva, Eva Zanettin.
00:02I'm Raghav Pasricha, and we were both doing photography independently.
00:09And then after photography school at New York,
00:13we started thinking of multimedia and film.
00:19And that's where Syncretic Traditions of India was born.
00:30Syncretic Traditions of India
00:56The work itself is an excerpt from our project called Syncretic Traditions of India.
01:01The excerpt that we showed at the Biennale is called Crossing the Divide.
01:05And before I get into that, it might be useful to understand
01:10what we mean by the Syncretic Traditions of India.
01:13Part of the ethic in which I was educated
01:17was about an India that has a lot of diversity.
01:22And while I experienced it since childhood,
01:24over the years, Eva has shared in that understanding of India
01:28as being a culturally rich, diverse country.
01:34So we began to ask the question of what does faith mean?
01:39Not just religion and spirituality,
01:41but what is the experience of faith in India,
01:43because it's so important to everyone.
01:46So Syncretic Traditions of India was about finding
01:49these incredible traditions that are born out of the Bhakti and Sufi movement
01:55that have guided people for somewhere between 1200 to 750 years
02:03to have an individual relationship with the divine.
02:07It's like a legacy that both of us got from our families, you know,
02:10through the music that they introduced us to,
02:12through the poetry and literature they introduced us to,
02:16and that's what we took forward.
02:19At the Biennale, we are showing, as I said, Crossing the Divide,
02:24and this is a documentation of the Baul and Fakir communities of Bengal.
02:29Oi hi toh bighi noyoti kudham
02:38Ode manus bighi jodhi bhagavan
02:45We had heard Baul music with my family at home.
02:48My maasi is a singer, and we had heard Baul gaan with her,
02:55and it was beautiful, but neither one of us is Bengali-speaking, not Banglabashi.
03:01But one of the sort of take-homes from that,
03:05through conversations with my mother and my aunt very specifically,
03:10was that Bauls are singing mystic poetry, so to speak,
03:18but that mystic poetry often has a profound understanding of something we call humanism.
03:24So, the basic questions that we began with is, who are the Bauls?
03:29Where do they come from geographically?
03:31And where do they come from historically?
03:35Geography, as you said, many people believe or assume that they come from Bengal.
03:39Now, one has to point out that this is not just West Bengal, but Bangladesh,
03:46and including parts of Assam, so Greater Bengal, if you would.
03:54Who are they?
03:55This is a more contentious subject, which we in fact deal with in our film.
04:01If you ask a lot of people in Bengal, if you ask,
04:04Baul ka ke bole? They'll tell you,
04:06Oh, Baul khub bhalo gaan kare.
04:08Loko shangeet.
04:10The fact that Bauls have a sadhana,
04:16or they are the part of a great tradition of philosophy,
04:23is sort of sometimes lost.
04:26It's not always lost. There are many people very aware of that.
04:30But often they're described as singers or wandering minstrels,
04:34which is, I would say, less than 10% of the story.
04:37So, that was what we began to investigate with the film and documentary.
04:43After researching a lot about the topic, and about them,
04:47and about reading a lot about the philosophy,
04:51we finally decided to go and document on the field.
04:56And we spent quite a lot of time with them.
05:02One of the things, I guess, that I took into my daily life,
05:08and while I was there, I was noticing, and I was telling myself,
05:14try to bring this home and keep it with you.
05:18It's the fact that they do live in harmony.
05:22They try to avoid feelings, negative feelings,
05:27such as greed, anger, jealousy.
05:32And they do try to maintain respectful relationships.
05:38They're really driven by love, respect.
05:43They don't want any discriminations,
05:49religious, politics, gender.
05:54So, I think at the base of all of it,
05:57there's great teachings that someone can take into their daily life.
06:04If you're looking at a 1200-year-long tradition,
06:08which is contemplating the human condition,
06:12which is contemplating gender, which is contemplating religion,
06:17which is contemplating materialism,
06:19which is contemplating conflict and violence,
06:23you can pick any subject in the world, really,
06:26and I think, by and large, you'd have a Baulgaan that addresses it.
06:34And it's not dated. That's what's incredible.
06:42The Bauls see gender as a continuum.
06:45It's there in our films, it's there in the music we've recorded.
06:48They see gender as a continuum.
06:50They see materialism as a part of the way society functions.
06:58They don't condemn it, and yet they build a distance from it.
07:02So, they have a very, you know,
07:08grand legacy, a 1200-year-old tradition, as I said,
07:12but their perspective is not just modern, it's contemporary.
07:16And that's what we went out looking for in Crossing the Divide.
07:20You know, we went across five districts of Bengal
07:23because through our research and conversations with people like Mukul Das
07:28and Uttam Das, who's our project mentor,
07:30who runs the Arshi Nagar Ashram and the Pranayama Ashram,
07:34who runs the Arshi Nagar Ashram and the Pranayama Ashram,
07:39we realized that there are philosophical strands within the Bauls.
07:42And we wanted to create a representative kind of documentation.
07:46We want to try, to the best of our abilities,
07:49which I'll be the first one to admit, and I think evalucate,
07:53is limited, to translate Baul poetry, their philosophy, their lives,
08:01from Bangla to English and make it more accessible to a global audience,
08:10to a younger Indian audience. And that's why we're doing this.
08:16That's why we're out there making photos, films, recordings.
08:21Finally, it's not about what we're doing. It's about what the Mahajani Padavali offers.
08:26And that tradition of Mahajani Padavali lives within the Bauls.
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