Notions of the Authentic for our use today. Understanding the Baul and understanding ourselves is, if you like, initiated together. I mentioned that a man in a white kurta stands next to the Baul for the time that he sings and that he is both attentive and inattentive to the singer. He provides a due, it seems to me, about Ghatak's attitude towards the Baul; for the filming seems to situate the Baul at the point where the modem subject — with a charismatic personal 8 style — intersects with what Frederic Jameson calls a collective subject: the tellers of tales and singers of songs, for instance, whose tales and songs are not uniquely their own because they are not quite controlled by them; but they are their tales and songs in that it is they who present them to the audience. To some extent rumours spin in the same way: the speakers continue what has been said but interpolate themselves onto the saying. The merits of the Baul are both in continuing what others have begun before him as well as in rendering these songs to this audience, in this social ground, in his special way. Ghatak then sets up a tension between the anonymity of the Baul's song and the singularity of his features: his self-engrossment has as much to do with the song as with himself as performer. It might be worth noting that story-telling forms such as the Panda Vani, and I have Tcejan Bai in mind, have a similar tension. Teejan Bai narrating incidents from the Mahabharata, talks about the battle, stresses her words, holds her gestures, and sends us a smile as performer, as singular artist. She freezes, as it were, the performance for us so that we may register her as the story-teller. The Baul does not fix us with a smile, indeed he hardly even opens his eyes, but the effect of drawing attention to himself is the same. To the extent that he appears self-absorbed he also appears self-appreciative; but his talent does not quarantine him from the others; the attentive/inattentive listener in white is there to demystify the artifice of the Baul's performance. The image of the Baul then pulls in two directions: towards the traditional performer or artisan not separated from his community by the uniqueness of his talent, and towards the modern performer who acknowledges his personal ego as the mark of his individuality, his originality. The Baul, it would appear, appreciates himself as a good vessel, patra, to convey his well-known, well-loved stories. And this sort of appreciation is differently inflected from the authorial mark of the modern artist. In asking Durga to help him through the travails of life, does the Baul perform a choric function? In some senses perhaps he does, but in other senses he does not. For his song is not about adjustment, accommodation, and common sense; being an itinerant his lessons are to do with travelling lightly, of unpacking the baggage of this world, of getting up and going. He does not ask Neeta to take heed; instead he forewarns us of her dispossession, bereavement, and grief, of possible tragedy. Neeta: woman as mother, as daughter, as nurturer, as goddess; woman as constructed by the composition of beliefs that have come down to us; and woman as bearing the burden of such beliefs and what that burden bodes for her. On all this the Baul, as framed and Journal of Arts <& Ideas