Lisa Knight's engaging and superbly accessible ethnography, Contradictory Lives, fills a lacuna in academic studies on Bauls and offers a signal contribution to the growing field of women and ethnography through its deft analysis of the lives and practices of female Bauls in eastern India and Bangladesh. Her book breaks new ground in Baul scholarship by complicating dominant representations of the concept “bâul,” showing through the vantage point of the Baul women with whom she worked that “the term bâul remains fluid and unbounded” (p. 14). Knight expertly demonstrates that what being a Baul means to the women she met is linked to the geographical regions in which Baul women live and travel; the religious identities (Hindu or Muslim) they emphasize before and after their initiations into the Baul community; age and marital status; their publicly recognized status as professional singers; and, most significantly, the competing and conflicting expectations...

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