I first went to Boral sometime in March 1987. My friends, Paban Das Baul and Mimlu Sen, had just finished performing at a friend's house on Ballygunge Circular Road; the time was 2.30 am, and there were no cabs to be found. I had a car, so they convinced me to drive them to where they were staying at the time. 'But where is this Boral?' I asked, never having heard of it. ' Arre, come, it's not far!' And so we went, through Gol Park, past Jadavpur, the street lights becoming less and less frequent till we reached Garia, after which they disappeared completely. 'Are you sure cars go there?' I asked nervously as we began to bump down a kachcha track. 'Yes, yes, we take taxis here all the time'. Well, Calcutta taxis would go anywhere in daytime, but this was a narrow mud road in pitch darkness, with steep banks sliding into water bodies on both sides. Finally, after what seemed like a long journey deep into the Sunderbans delta, we stopped in the jungle at a curved wall with a gate. This was where Mimlu had inherited a small plot of land from her family. 'Stay the night!' my friends insisted. No way, I told them, I needed to get back home with the family car or my parents would worry. Driving back was, if anything, even more scary, but I was overtaken by adrenalin by then and I gunned the engine over the rocky bumps till I reached the first glimmer of light at what I would later come to know as Garia mor. After that, the drive was reasonably quick, the roads empty of traffic, and I soon reached the familiar shores of Gariahat and Rashbehari, picking up the escort of the dim, bluish street lights we had in those pre-halogen days.

In the February of the next year, Mimlu and Paban set up a Baul Mela at Boral and I found myself there again, this time in daylight. Now one could see that this place was far from being a jungle; what the darkness had hidden were the small houses, interrupted by the occasional, garishly painted, two-storeyed folly, small clusters of shops, bits of farmland. It was still far from the concrete, urban grip of South Calcutta, but it wasn't a village; this was part of the vast hinterland, the penumbra of semi-city habitation that ringed a metropolis that was about to explode beyond its old boundaries. On a lovely, cold winter's day, we began shooting a film on and with the bauls that would take us on a three-year-long journey, right into the interior of Bengal but also outwards with the performers, to Delhi, London and Paris.

Around the time we started shooting, someone pointed out that this Boral was exactly where Satyajit Ray had shot a lot of Pather Panchali, particularly the scenes of the house and the village. In 1988, it was already startling to think that one of the most iconic films about rural India could have been shot so close to Calcutta. Whenever in the early 1950s Ray and Subrata Mitra may have settled on this location, the drop from the urban to the rural would have been precipitous, or, if you like, the climb out of the familiar maze of the city into the dark ramparts of village Bengal extremely steep. Already, the roughly thirty-five intervening years (between '53-'54 when PP was filmed and 1988) had erased almost all traces of the village that could stand in for the gram-Bangla of the late 19th century. Already there was the tracery of electric wires tugged from the main supply towers, already the sound of the TVs leaking Doordarshan News or the latest soap-opera. Even in some of the young locals that gathered to gape at the costume plumery of the bauls and fakirs there was a citified bafflement: who were these strange creatures? What were these weird songs they were singing?

What we didn't fully grasp at the time was that we were filming at a nodal point in the history of Calcutta and Bengal. We were well aware that the old performative traditions were under siege from Bengal's metastasized modernity. We knew that the Left Front and all its member parties had no time for the bauls, the patuas, the bohurupis or the rural puppet theatres; we knew that the attitude of the State's Stalinist cultural commissars towards all these was instrumentalist at best and embedded in a thick carapace of indifference towards not only the traditional performers but towards traditional craftspeople as well. We knew the bauls were constantly under attack from the lumpen, know-nothing Boys' Club culture the Baam Front had so assiduously cultivated all over the state. What we hadn't anticipated was the force-multiplier effect that liberalization would have on all of this. And in 1988, we certainly had no inkling of how the coming wave of Hindu fascism would piggyback on the larger tsunami of the opening up of the economy.

A couple of years later, I was back at Boral, this time just to attend another of the festivals that Mimlu and Paban had struggled to organize. A mixed group of us - men and women - went at night and almost inevitably there was trouble from the local boys - 'Why are you men and women hanging around together like this?' 'Why are the girls smoking?' 'This is Boral, we will not allow all this immoral city behaviour!' All of this carried on the whiff of alcohol-laden breath. All of this not eight kilometres away from the progressive precincts of Jadavpur University - the other Bengal beginning to express its deep-seated resentment.

However, by now, at least a certain understanding of baul music had spread among different strata of people. Our film was probably the first and last local effort to be shot on 16 mm; after that came the joys of VHS, 8 mm and Hi8, and then all the digital image-making systems that followed. By the early 2000s, the internet also provided platforms for all kinds of footage and documentation. Earlier this month, when we reach Boral for the latest festival Mimlu and Paban have organized, the place is impossible to recognize from thirty years ago. Garia mor is almost splitting open with heavy traffic; the shops and showrooms tower over the still narrow road; at Boral, in Mimlu's compound the ranks of taal-gaachh have gone, four-storeyed buildings now look down on the clearing. At the mela, there are the logos of various sponsors, there is a pukka stage with an elaborate thatched roof and even a makeshift film-viewing space where all our films and videos of bauls will be screened. Watching the films is painful - one can't help but start counting all those bauls and sadhus who have died, taking with them their voices, their store of songs and deep esoteric knowledge. In 1988, we knew the coming years would be hard, but we hadn't realized exactly how cruel the future would be, or foreseen the high price the coming thirty years would exact from the already frayed and fragile baul and fakir networks. One by one, we noted the loss: this Khepa, that Baba, that Khepi, that Fakir, all gone too early, mostly before reaching any ripe old age. Early demise, it seems, is now part of the job description of the wandering singer in a way that it wasn't earlier.

It's as if you can see in this one place the abandoned snakeskins of different, succeeding Bengals, or the fossilized traces of various Bengals that no longer exist. In the late 1980s, it was simple enough to blame the communists and the ignorant indifference of the antel bourgeoisie, so enamoured as we were of our Brechts, Dylans and Cohens and so curtained from and befuddled by the subversive, gender-bending, sinuous, religious-barrier breaking music that was flowering right next to us. Now, the blame is harder to apportion, a lot of the old suspects have left the building, having delivered their damage and flown the coop of time. If one sets aside the urge to blame and instead focuses on what needs to be done to keep alive into the future this nutritive thread to the past, who might be the parties who can and will do something? The question seems insurmountable, as hard to navigate as the miasma of traffic that engulfs us on our way back from what is now one corner of South Calcutta to another.