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In the liquid borderlands between South and Southeast Asia, where refugees from East Bengal were resettled after the massive Partition-induced displacement, the god Ram is narrated as a great model of filial piety but also as the murderer of a low-caste ascetic. The Vaishnava saint Chaitanya is a divine character but also a reproachable renunciate who abandoned his mother and forced her to beg from door to door. The crocodile is an ideal devotee who caught fish to bring as offering for the religious congregation, justifying the introduction of an otherwise forbidden substance on the altar. Drawing on both ethnographic and literary sources, I use recurrent "bundles of stories" such as these, transmitted and performed by the Matua community on the Andaman Islands, to discuss narratives as a way of knowing and to describe "bricolage thinking" in borderland selves. I interpret the aesthetics and the literary devices used in these narratives as strategies to shape borderland community values. These rely upon past memories and provide for present articulations of resistance. This article suggests that Matua narratives contest political borders by traveling between and connecting fragmented sections of the displaced community through the voices of itinerant preachers, performers, and pilgrims. At the same time, they trespass onto other kinds of borderlands, such as those created by unequal positions of socioeconomic power and those marking the center and periphery of religious hegemony. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the contemporary repertoire of a very popular genre of Bengali folk songs, performed by itinerant singers and practitioners of an esoteric cult known as Bauls. Considering the recent popularization and commercialization of Baul songs and their interference with the urban milieu, the discourse on the authenticity of Baul songs is explored from an inter-disciplinary perspective that embraces orality-literacy studies as well as social studies on cultural tourism, underlining the limits of previous academic works on the subject. This article offers, as an original contribution, the first results of ongoing fieldwork among the disciples of śākta saint and composer of Baul songs known as Bhaba Pagla. Through discussion of the lyrics of songs performed in contemporary Baul festivals, this article argues that the contamination of Baul songs by urban élites and middle-class audiences, far from deteriorating the oral tradition, may enrich the vocabulary of the compositions and reinforce the underlying belief system. Contrarily to the popular and academic view of today's Bauls, that labels the entertaining performer as a corrupted ally of show business, the priority of gānsādhanā (singing as a practice for self-realization) may be interpreted as an efficient way to conceal heterodox esoteric rituals vis-à-vis the increasing interest of cultural tourists in Baul culture and performances, protecting the secrecy of the tradition through an innovative and negotiated version of sandhyā-bhāṣā (twilight-language), the literary device that has accompanied Bengali esoteric songs since their origins. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]