Raibeshe

Though it might be a mundane sentiment, I often feel the best side of travelling is in the discovery of things that you had no idea even existed before you set out. It's always satisfying to know that the world is larger than a guide book. This is an example - a local tradition I'm not even sure how to classify.

A few weeks after I arrived here, a good friend and Sri Lankan dancer piqued my interest by mentioning the existence of a particular folk tradition called "raibeshe", native to the Birbhum district of West Bengal in which Santiniketan is located. Although usually described as a folk dance, listed here (in the last paragraph) among others of northern India, its appearance was more that of a martial art. Even though neither dance nor martial arts are subjects I know much about, I was intrigued, possessed by the vague idea of some kind of undiscovered Bengali capoeira (the Afro-Brazilian fighting style thought to have been "disguised" as a dance in order to protect its slave practitioners from punishment).

According to the people I've asked here, the origin of raibeshe is almost as peculiar. The dacoits of West Bengal, bandits feared and romanticised in equal measure, were traditionally regarded as constituting a "profession", known as dacoity, having elevated house-breaking and highwaymanship to fine arts. Raibeshe is thought to have originated as a kind of dacoits' training programme, a method both to maintain fitness during the idle periods between their criminal deeds and to cultivate the physical skills - many of them co-operative and almost resembling military tactics - that were necessary to ensure success in consummating their crimes. Another source locates the art's origin among the "lathiyals" or members of the zamindars' (Indian feudal landowners') private armies; but the two may not contradict each other anyway. According to this fascinating period account, translated from the Bengali, zamindars under the Mughals were unable to stop their militia from criminal activity, and with the arrival of the Raj, soldiers discharged by zamindars turned en masse to dacoity. In the opening section of his great novel Pather Panchali (1929), the Bengali writer Bibhutibhushan makes an even closer and more scandalous connection: of the zamindars of early-19th century Bengal he alleges, "Many a wealthy family of those days built up its fortune by dacoity; indeed every student of ancient history knows that the wealth of most of the Bengali zamindars today is derived from the gold and jewels that their ancestors looted."

As a latter-day zamindar, Rabindranath Tagore is said to have been interested in the remnants of dacoit culture persisting in the area around Santiniketan (the village lying directly west of the Santiniketan-Bolpur road, Bhubandanga ("Bhubon's land"), takes its name from a famous bandit). He even encouraged, as part of the physical side of his education programmes, the cultivation of the dacoits' stilt-walking technique - the bamboo ron-pa or "battle legs", designed for the flat plains of Bengal as they were independently for certain regions of Europe, that allowed fleeing dacoits to cover ground at tremendous speeds. It was however Gurusaday Dutt, a contemporary of Tagore's, even more deeply engaged than the poet in village social projects and the preservation of traditional Bengali culture, who counts as the "discoverer" in 1930 of raibeshe, on which he published a considerable quantity of material in Bengali and some in English (which I haven't yet been able to consult here - update pending, I hope). Weirdly, the year after this he travelled to England and met Cecil Sharp, the discoverer of morris dancing, which seems to have spurred on his own folk revivalist efforts.

The "dance" itself couldn't be less like morris - apart from the fact that both use wooden sticks. A day or so after Durga Puja I had the chance to see a performance in the nearby village of Raipur by a local group, "Binuria Raibeshe", run by a friend of the above-mentioned Sri Lankan dancer. How "authentic" the performance I saw really was, I'm not qualified to judge. In this variant, it was certainly less of a dance and more of an acrobatic display. What was clear was that this was a home-grown, amateur cultural form, still practised for the sake of exercise, alertness and a kind of team spirit by villagers in the hours they could spare from the day's work. Though the group leader was a driver for of one of the university faculty, many of the others were apparently day-labourers. The only concession to slick presentation was the red and yellow sports kit. In performance the result was impressively athletic and ingenious by turns, as these photos hopefully show. (Apologies for the dimness of some of the images - the performance went on into the evening and my camera flash could only achieve so much!) Some stunts did look rather as if they had been borrowed from a circus, for instance twirling a flaming brand -

- or diving headfirst through a ring of fire -

None of this is especially unusual, although impressive considering the performers were not professionals. The pyramid-building exercises seemed to me at first to belong to this category, until it occurred to me that they might well have had a criminal use too: standing on the shoulders, or in one case, head, of his accomplice(s) would allow a dacoit to gain quick access to an upper storey.

Other poses demonstrated sheer strength -



or incorporated aesthetic compositions based on religious imagery (Vishnu seated on a lotus):




The most interesting displays, since most obviously related to the art's origin, were those involving squeezing through confined spaces (originally in order to break into a house). Here Baban the group leader - well-built and not at all the slenderest of the group - crawls under a bamboo lathi on whose ends two of his colleagues are standing. The only space available is whatever Baban can create for himself by forcing the stick to flex:


Another vertical variant involves a hoop, with one person standing upright inside it and the other wriggling head down through the remaining space, as if crawling through a pipe or a hole in a roof:




Finally there was stick-fighting, the core martial element, which apparently went off less well at this performance than in others:

An impartial observer might have thought this not much as a purely physical display, compared to something like the Shaolin monks, but I was quite caught up in the atmosphere of village excitement generated by the performance - and at the same time fascinated to imagine its distant origins in India's feudal past.