In defence of William Dalrymple

In response to http://groups.yahoo.com/group/uttorshuri/message/1679

On 07 Feb 04, historian William Dalrymple ran an article on the Bauls of Bengal. One of the moderators on the Uttorshuri mail group was not exactly sure if the title, 'The song of the holy fools' was an insult or a term of endearment. This should not have needed clarification but here below is my short explanation. Dalrymple's article can be found at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,3605,1141492,00.html

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William Dalrymple was being neither casually insulting nor intentionally patronizing with his choice of title. He explains his use of the word 'fool' about half way through the piece. 'Baul', he suggests, means 'mad' or 'possessed' in Bangla. Likewise, the word 'fool' once meant something similar in English--that is, possessed of the spirits, even suggesting a person who was a conduit for the Almighty. Take, for example, the Fool in Shakespeare's King Lear. Here was a character who babbled a lot, flitting in and out of a story of human treachery and madness, but he was a voice of conscience and foreboding who saw things in worldly events that others didn't. It is this meaning of 'fool', and not the current pejorative version, that Dalrymple invokes. The bauls, he is saying, live in the spaces between polarized religious imaginings and are, because of their non-conformist ways, one step closer to the holy than the rest of us.