Lalon

Two-three words about Fakir Lalon Shah (c.1774–1890)
　　Early life
　　The details of Lalon's early life are controversial and impossible to verify. Lalon also recorded very little information about himself, as he considered his spiritual endeavors to be a private matter. As a result, accounts of Lalon's life are often contradictory and unverifiable. However, a general backstory of Lalon's early life exists in the popular culture.
　　Around the age of sixteen he was found floating by the bank of Kaliganga river, suffering from smallpox. He was taken to the home of Maulana Malam Shah and his wife Matijan, who brought him up. Lalon was in a near comatose state for many months and when he recovered lapsed into complete amnesia from which he never recovered in life.
　　Though Lalon's origins are unclear, it is believed that he had no formal education and lived in extreme poverty
　　Philosophy
　　Lalon left no trace of his birth or his 'origin' and remained absolutely silent about his past, fearing that he would be cast into class, caste or communal identities by a fragmented and hierarchical society. Despite this silence on his origins, communal appropriation of this great politico-philosophical figure has created a controversy regarding whether he is 'Muslim' or a 'Hindu' -- a 'sufi' or a follower 'bhakti' tradition—a 'baul' or a 'fakir', etc. He is none, as he always strove to go beyond all politics of identities. Lalon sang, “People ask if Lalon Fakir is a Hindu or a Mussalman. Lalon says he himself doesn’t know who he is.”
　　Lalon does not fit into the construction of the so called 'bauls' or 'fakirs' as a mystical or spiritual types who deny all worldly affairs in desperate search for a mystical ecstasy of the soul. Such construction is very elite and middle class and premised on the divide between 'modern' and 'spiritual' world. It also conveniently ignores the political and social aspects of Bengal's spiritual movements and depoliticizes the transformative role of 'bhakti' or 'sufi' traditions. This role is still continued and performed by the poet-singers and philosophers in oral traditions of Bangladesh, a cultural reality of Bangladesh that partly explains the emergence of Bangladesh with distinct identity from Pakistan back in 1971. Depicting Lalon as 'baul shomrat' (the Emperor of the Bauls) as projected by elite marginalizes Lalon as a person belonging to a peripheral movement, an outcast, as if he is not a living presence and increasingly occupying the central cultural, intellectual and political space in both side of the border between Bangladesh and India (West Bengal).
　　To understand the Baul, is to understand the state of nothingness associated with his rejection, by which it is not to be construed, as a willing suspension of disbelief, nor a reckless abandonment of responsibility or that of becoming inordinately fatalistic. It is a living quest to go back to the dynamics of where it all began: to our infancy as much as the first moments of creation. It is a quest we cannot undertake without some prodding assistance, albeit to our well charted ‘roots’, if we have one? Clearly, life is a blessed moment of procreation and an extension of the continuous cycle of Mother Nature which rolls on over, when we know all too well, it is also a process that simply cannot be rolled back.