Published: 09:10 AM, 29 September 2026
When "Folk" Becomes an Excuse: Protecting Our Heritage in Creative Industries
Suborna Jahan
In 2020, the rapper Badshah released "Genda Phool", a hit built on a Bengali song he credited simply as folk. Ratan Kahar, an elderly singer from Birbhum, said he had written it and had never been credited. Badshah's answer was that Kahar's name was not in any record. Bangladesh has seen the same thing closer to home. Two large Indian labels, Saregama and T-Series released songs by Shah Abdul Karim, the Baul songwriter from Sunamganj without his family's permission. One video presented his song as "traditional". His son took the matter to the Bangladesh Copyright Office.
These disputes show how the word "folk" works in the music business. Once a song is called folk, people treat it as nobody's property, free to sample, rearrange and sell. Sometimes that is simply wrong because the song has a known author. Sometimes the label is accurate and the problem is harder: the song belongs to a community and copyright law has never known what to do with communities.
Why copyright struggles
Copyright protects a work by an identifiable author for a limited term, once it is fixed in some form. Folklore fails nearly every test. A Baul song or a nakshi kantha motif has passed through many hands, has no single author and is often centuries old. Under ordinary rules it sits in the public domain. A label can take a community's song, add a new arrangement and claim copyright in the result, while the community gets nothing, not even a line in the credits.
International law has circled this problem for half a century. Article 15(4) of the Berne Convention, added in 1967, lets states appoint an authority for unpublished works by unknown authors. It was meant for folklore and is rarely used. UNESCO and WIPO drafted model provisions in 1982. WIPO's committee on folklore has been negotiating since 2000. It produced a treaty on genetic resources in 2024, but the text on traditional cultural expressions remains unfinished and is back on the table in Geneva this month.
Some countries have not waited. In Milpurrurru v Indofurn (1994), Australia's Federal Court awarded damages to Aboriginal artists whose designs were copied onto carpets made abroad. The court counted the cultural harm to their communities, not only the money lost. Panama gave the Kuna people collective rights over their mola textiles in 2000. Mexico passed a law in 2022 requiring community consent before Indigenous designs are used commercially.
What Bangladesh has done
Bangladesh moved in 2023. The Copyright Act 2023 gives a full chapter to folk knowledge and folk culture. Commentators note that it requires government authorisation for commercial use of traditional folk expressions, with revenue meant to reach the originating communities. On paper, that puts us ahead of many countries.
Making it work is another matter. Who is the originating community for a song sung on both banks of the Padma, or on both sides of the border? How does the Copyright Office follow the money from a remix streamed on a foreign platform? A chapter in a statute does little until those questions have answers.
The Tangail sari row in early 2024 showed the cost of being unprepared. India's registry granted a geographical indication for "Tangail Saree of Bengal" to a West Bengal weavers' cooperative on 2 January 2024. The application had been pending for years, and nobody from Bangladesh objected. We recognised our own GI only after protests in Tangail. The lesson reaches beyond saris. Heritage that nobody documents and nobody claims is easy to take.
What should come next
Three things would help:
1. Clear rules under the folklore chapter. The government should set out who may license a traditional expression, how license fees are set and how money reaches the community.
2. A national register of folklore. The Copyright Office should build it with Bangla Academy and the Bangladesh Folk Art and Crafts Foundation. It should record songs, designs and crafts and it should name individual creators like Shah Abdul Karim whose work keeps getting passed off as anonymous. A register also becomes evidence when a dispute crosses a border.
3. Pressure in Geneva for a binding international instrument. Much of our heritage is used by foreign companies that our own law cannot easily reach.
None of this should stop artists from drawing on folk traditions. Folk music has always travelled by borrowing and that is how it stays alive. The line runs between borrowing with credit and consent and taking a community's work, stripping off its name and selling it back to the world as nobody's.
Suborna Jahan studies Law in Bangladesh University of Professionals (BUP),
Mirpur Cantonment, Dhaka.
