Lalon geeti: seven songs of Fakir Lalon, their words and what they mean

The only picture of Lalon drawn while he was alive shows an old man in a chair, bent over a stick, beard to his chest. Jyotirindranath Tagore sketched it on a boat on the Padma in 1889, a year before Lalon died. It is a plain, almost careless drawing. The songs are not careless at all, and they have outlived everything else about him: his birth year, his village and even his religion are still argued over, while the songs are still sung, at his akhra every October and far beyond it.

Seven of them are here. Each one plays from this page, and each is Lalon's by the printed collection of his songs and the reference works; a few more recordings are credited to him only on their uploads, so they are not on this list. With each song come its opening words, our own English rendering, and our reading of what it is saying.

Who was Lalon?

Lalon was a Baul, one of the wandering singers of Bengal whose faith sits outside temple and mosque, and he is regarded as the best known of them all. He lived and taught at an akhra, a gathering place, in Cheuriya, about two kilometres from Kushtia railway station, and he died there on 17 October 1890. Almost everything before that is uncertain. Bengali Wikipedia records three different villages as his birthplace and calls his faith a matter on which researchers disagree; the man himself never said.

He also never wrote a song down. Lalon sang, his followers remembered, and scribes wrote the songs out later, which is why the same song turns up with a word changed from one singer to the next. The words quoted below come from one printed version, Lalon-Gitika, edited by Matilal Das and Piyushkanti Mahapatra and published by Calcutta University in 1958. Lalon died more than a century ago, so his words belong to everyone; the recordings belong to the labels that made them.

Seven Lalon songs, and what they say

1. Khachar bhitor ochin pakhi

খাঁচার ভিতর অচিন পাখী কেমনে আসে যায় / ধরতে পারলে মন-বেড়ী দিতাম তাহার পায়. In our English: how does the unknown bird come and go inside the cage? If I could catch it, I would put the fetters of my mind on its feet. The song is number 299 in Lalon-Gitika.

The cage is the body, and Lalon draws it like a house plan: eight rooms, nine doors shut tight, windows cut here and there, and at the top a hall of mirrors. The bird is whatever lives in it and cannot be held. Call it the self or the soul; Lalon only calls it unknown. Then comes the line that turns the song cold: the cage is made of green bamboo, and green bamboo does not last, so one day it will fall apart and the bird will go somewhere. Lalon asks where. He does not answer.

It is also the Lalon song that walks into the first chapter of a Tagore novel. Rabindranath Tagore's novel Gora, published as a book in 1910, opens on a clear Shraban morning in Calcutta, and within a page a Baul in a long robe is singing this song outside a shop. Binoy, on his balcony, wants to call the man up and write the song down. He is too lazy to, and the tune goes on humming in his head. Anyone who has heard it once knows the feeling.

4:11

Khachar Bhitor Ochin Pakhi

Zee Music Bangla

Snigdhajit Bhowmik sings it for Zee Music Bangla, 2023, in a release credited with Barenya Saha. Just over four minutes, unhurried, close to the way it is sung at an akhra. If you only play one song on this page, play this.

▶ Play hereMore in the Folk mood

2. Shob loke koy Lalon ki jat shongshare

সব লোকে কয়, লালন কি জাত সংসারে। / লালন বলে, জাতির কি রূপ, দেখলাম না এই নজরে. Everyone asks what caste Lalon belongs to in this world. Lalon says: I have never once seen what caste looks like. It is number 54 in Lalon-Gitika.

This is the question people put to him all his life, and he turns it into evidence against itself. Some wear a mala, some a tasbih, he sings, and so they say their castes differ; but at the moment of coming and going, of birth and death, whose caste mark stays on? Then the sharpest lines in the song. Circumcision makes a man a Muslim, so what is the rule for a woman? You know a Brahmin man by his sacred thread; how do you know a Brahmin woman? Either way, the mark only ever worked on half of humanity. He ends by saying he has sunk caste like a fishing float in the market of longing.

4:45

Shob Loke Koy Lalon

Aalo | আলো 🪔

Aritra Dashgupta, on Aalo, 2022, a little under five minutes. The most watched Lalon song we carry after Ami opar hoye, at 4.3 million YouTube views in September 2026.

▶ Play hereMore in the Folk mood

3. Jat gelo jat gelo bole

The title line is the whole joke: people crying that caste is lost, caste is lost. English Wikipedia notes that many of Lalon's songs mock the identity politics that divide people. This is the one that does it with a straight face, letting the panic speak for itself. Put it straight after Shob loke koy and the title gives you the same argument from the other side, in the crowd's own cry.

5:24

Jat Gelo Jat Gelo Bole

Times Music Bangla

Sanjay sings it for Times Music Bangla, 2019. Five and a half minutes, and the one on this list most likely to get a room singing along.

▶ Play hereMore in the Folk mood

4. Manush bhojle sonar manush hobi

মানুষ ভজলে সোনার মানুষ হবি। / মানুষ ছেড়ে ক্ষ্যাপারে তুই মূল হারাবি. Worship the human being and you will become a golden human. Leave the human out, you madman, and you lose the root of it all. Number 391 in Lalon-Gitika.

If the first three songs say what does not decide who you are, this one says what does. Manush, the human being, is the Baul word for the divine as well, and Lalon uses it in both senses at once. The same idea sits under moner manush, the person of the heart, that Bauls sing about: the one you are looking for is inside a person, not above one.

4:07

Manush Bhojley

SVF Music

Sahana Bajpaie, SVF Music, 2017. Four minutes, lighter in the hand than the akhra versions, a good way in for a listener new to Lalon.

▶ Play hereMore in the Folk mood

5. Barir kache Arshinagar

আমি একদিনও না দেখিলাম তারে। / আমার বাড়ীর কাছে আরশী নগর / (ও) এক পড়শী বসত করে. I have not seen him even once. Near my house is a city of mirrors, and a neighbour lives there. Number 18 in Lalon-Gitika. A book of Lalon's songs in English is called City of Mirrors, which is what Arshinagar means.

The neighbour has no hands, no feet, no shoulders, no head; he is on the air one moment and on the water the next, and there is deep water all round the village with no shore and no boat, so the singer can long to see him and still have no way to get there. The last line is the one people carry out of the song: he and Lalon live in one place, and still there is a gap of a hundred thousand yojanas between them. Anyone who has lived under one roof with someone and felt that distance will feel this line land. It is the loneliest line in this list, and the nearest thing Lalon wrote to a love song.

3:03

Barir Kache Arshinagar

SVF

Parvathy Baul, in the 2015 upload from Aparna Sen's film Arshinagar, on SVF. Three minutes. Her voice has the grain of the road on it.

▶ Play hereMore in the Folk mood

6. Ami opar hoye bose achhi

I sit here unable to cross. The river is Lalon's other great image after the cage, and he keeps coming back to it; in Lalon-Gitika two songs in a row beg the ferryman of the far shore to take him over. Our reading of the title: here the singer is not on the water at all, only waiting on the bank. It is the longest song on this list, and the one that most rewards being left to play while you do something else.

7:05

Ami Opar Hoye

Aalo | আলো 🪔

Pousali Banerjee, on Aalo, 2021: seven minutes and the most watched Lalon song we carry, at 6.1 million YouTube views in September 2026.

▶ Play hereMore in the Folk mood

7. Milon hobe koto dine

How many days until the meeting? The question in the title is the question under every song above: when will I meet the one I am looking for. Both English and Bengali Wikipedia list it among his best known songs. We put it last because it does not resolve anything. Of all the questions raised between the cage and the city of mirrors, it answers none; it just asks again, which is how Lalon ends most things.

3:38

Milan Hobe Koto Dine

Asha Audio

Pousali Banerjee again, this time for Asha Audio, 2023. Three and a half minutes.

▶ Play hereMore in the Folk mood

Why the caste songs and the bird songs are one argument

Lalon is often heard in two halves: the social reformer who laughed at caste, and the mystic who sang about birds and mirrors, as if two different men had shared one name. Played in this order, the seven songs refuse the split. The caste mark in song two and the cage in song one are the same thing, an outside that people mistake for the inside. The thread, the rosary, the bamboo, the body: all of them fall away at the coming and going. What is left is the unknown bird, the neighbour in the mirror-city, the manush. His argument against caste and his mysticism are one and the same thing, said in the language of the village.

That is also why he travelled so far. UNESCO put the Baul songs on its list of humanity's intangible heritage in 2008, having proclaimed them in 2005, and long before that, in 1992, the American poet Allen Ginsberg wrote a poem called After Lalon. A song that asks what caste the singer is can be understood anywhere people are sorted by what they wear.

How to listen to Lalon

• Once through in the order above, about half an hour. It is built to be heard as a sequence.
• If you have ten minutes: Khachar bhitor ochin pakhi, then Barir kache Arshinagar.
• Bauls sing to the ektara, a one-string drone, and a small drum, the duggi. The recordings here add more; listen for where the ektara still sits under it all.
• Lalon's words change a little from singer to singer. That is not a mistake in the recording. It is how a song lives when nobody wrote it down.

When the seventh song ends, the Folk mood keeps playing Bengal's folk and devotional songs, and the Sufi and qawwali mood is the next room over, where Lalon's other inheritance lives. On Saturday 17 October, somewhere between the Shashthi dhak and the first pandal queue, put Khachar bhitor on once more. It is his day.

Pictures: Lalon's shrine at the akhra in Cheuriya, Kushtia, Bangladesh, in February 2014.: Zaheed Sarwer Khan, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0, cropped

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