Songs of the Bauls of Bengal (UNESCO heritage)

We invite you to immerse yourself in the melodies of the Bengal Bauls, filled with mysticism and folklore, together with Ananda Gopal Das Baul. Master Ananda is an artist recognized in India and the West, who has traveled to all continents over nearly 40 years with the traditional Baul music of West Bengal (India).

A Baul is a "singing philosopher" whose scripture, prayer, and philosophical reflections are song. It is precisely because of their unique spiritual content that Baul songs are even included in the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. The emotional charge of the Bauls is a philosopher's "conversation with the heart" (Bengali: Monoshikkha), the teacher, and a deep longing for God. Just as dance is in the Sufi tradition, for the Bauls, song is a medium between heaven and earth, in which one descends into a spiritual trance.

The basis of Baul music is improvisation; no musical session has a pre-set list of songs and depends solely on the bhava that visits the performers – the inner state, mood, and atmosphere.

The guest from India will be accompanied by Kristė Elena Šlajė (vocals, traditional instruments), who lives in India, and Adomas Šimkūnas (bansuri flute).

About the performers:

Ananda Gopal Das Baul is an extraordinary master of his genre, a Baul musician representing not only an authentic musical lineage but also the living folk tradition of West Bengal. In his concerts, the artist demonstrates subtle tenor vocal capabilities and mastery in playing traditional instruments (karatal, khamak, etc.) and delves into the subtleties of the songs of the Bengal region: this includes the colorful Baul music of Birbhum and the melodies of the fakirs of Bangladesh, the folk songs of North Bengal, the rhythmic jhumur style, and the longing bhatiyali songs of the riverbanks. Ananda Gopal Das Baul's biography includes several decades of colorful concerts; the artist has traveled to many European countries, performed at festivals on various continents, and has been particularly beloved in France.

Kristė Elena Šlajė is a VU Asian Studies alumna who became interested in South Asian musical traditions during her Indology studies. Today, she spends more time in India than in Lithuania, where she learns the subtleties of Baul music in the traditional way from her teacher Ananda Gopal Das Baul and by traveling around the region. In 2025–2026, she studied the musical heritage of Rabindranath Tagore at Visva-Bharati University in Santiniketan, West Bengal (India), under the ICCR cultural scholarship program.

Adomas Šimkūnas performs North Indian classical music in the "Dhrupad" style. In 2011, he began learning to play the bansuri flute with master Jean-Christophe Bonnafous (France/India). He has participated many times in masterclasses with the world legend of the bansuri flute, Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia (India). Since 2016, he has been interested in the oldest vocal genre of North Indian classical music, "Dhrupad," and began studying the vocals and bansuri flute of this genre, which he continues to this day, following the Guru–shishya oral tradition with the professor and world-renowned "Dhrupad" tradition vocal master and composer Dr. Pandit Ritwik Sanyal. In this concert, he will accompany the Bengal Baul songs on the bansuri flute.