Om-gnosis Episode 10: Bengali Fakiri Perspectives on the Yoga, Music, and Devotion of Lalon
For this tenth episode of Om-gnosis, we provide two previously unpublished interviews with Ferdosi Fokirani, an artist from Bangladesh who practiced the Bengali Fakiri yoga of Fakir Lalon Sai (also spelled Lālan) for over four decades, and we include two contextual examples of Bengali Baul (bāul) and Fakiri songs. In the first interview, we ask Ferdosi Fokirani a series of questions while she is alone, and then ask the same questions to her late husband, Shilpi Azim Fokir, who was also a lifetime practitioner, as she sits beside him and contributes. Their responses reveal much about what birth-religion, yoga, tantra, practice (sādhana), and music mean to practitioners who have not been exposed to the many academic discourses and debates surrounding these words and complex ideas over the past several decades. As a result, the interviews offer much material of interest to scholars and practitioners alike who could benefit from learning about regional expressions of yoga among practitioners and devotees of Lalon Sai across both Bangladesh and India.
About Ferdosi Fokirani
Ferdosi Fokirani is an artist from the environs of Kushtia, Bangladesh, who has practiced the Bengali Fakiri human religion (mānab-dharma) of Fakir Lalon Sai for over four decades. Together with her late husband, Shilpi Azim Fakir, she has devoted her life to understanding the deeper meaning behind the songs of Lalon as well as their relationship to the practice of yoga (yoga-sādhana) and the worship of human beings (mānuṣ-bhajan).