The French scholar Charlotte Vaudeville has distinguished a “western tradition” of Kabir—those of the Sikhs and the Dadu Panth —from an eastern tradition. Notice how different Ezra Pound’s translations are from Linda Hess’s. The eastern tradition—the poems of the Bijak—comes off fiercer, more confrontational, and holds an uncompromising poetry nearly unique in its inventiveness. Of the western Kabir, Linda Hess writes that it is “a softer, more emotional Kabir who sings of ecstatic insight, who experiences passionate longing for and tormented separation from a beloved, or who offers himself in utter surrender, as a servant or beggar, to a personified divine master. Often the western poet’s expressions are colored by the terms and forms of the Krishna bhakti (devotional) movement.”
Miracles attended Kabir when alive, and followed him into death. At his funeral a group of Hindus and another of Muslims claimed his remains. The Hindus wanted to cremate him, following their tradition. The Muslims insisted they get his corpse and take it for burial. While Kabir’s carcass lay under a shroud the two groups went from argument to blows. In the scuffle, several people fell and jolted the shroud back. Where Kabir’s corpse had been resting was only a vast heap of marigolds. The two groups divided the flowers, the Hindus burning theirs, the Muslims carting the other half off to their cemetery.
Besides the eastern and western traditions of Kabir there exists for readers of English a third that juts out at an odd angle. This comes from a manuscript that emerged in Bengal in the nineteenth century—poems collected orally by a friend of Rabindranath Tagore. Tagore and Evelyn Underhill, an English writer and pacifist, together translated a hundred poems. Their book has been in print for a century, though the translations read poorly to modern ears. Robert Bly reworked about half of Tagore’s versions into colloquial American English. This third Kabir, Tagore’s and Bly’s (who often sounds like a Sufi), holds a special place. It is the “east meets west” Kabir, a living presence in England and North America these past hundred years.
: MIRABAI
(1498—1550)
Sister, the Dark One won’t speak to me.
Why does this useless body keep breathing?
Another night gone
and no one’s lifted my gown.
He won’t speak to me.
Years pass, not a gesture.
They told me
he’d come when the rains came,
but lightning pierces the clouds,
the clock ticks until daybreak
and I feel the old dread.
Slave to the Dark One,
Mira’s whole life is a long
night of craving.
:AS
He has stained me,
the color of raven he’s stained me.
Beating a clay
two-headed drum at both ends
like a nautch girl I dance
before sadhus.
Back in town I’m called crazy,
drunkard, a love slut—
they incited the prince
who ordered me poisoned
but I drained the cup without missing a step.
Mira’s lord is the true prince,
he stained her the color of raven,
birth after birth
she is his.
:AS
O Mind,
praise the lotus feet that don’t perish!
Consider all things
on heaven and earth—and their doom.
Go off with pilgrims, undertake fasts,
wrangle for wisdom,
trek to Banaras to die,
what’s the use?
Arrogant body just withers,
phenomenal world is a coy parakeet
that flies off at dusk.
Why throw a hermit robe over your shoulders—
yellow rag yogins
are also bewildered,
caught every time in the birth snare.
Dark One, take this girl for your servant.
Then cut the cords and
set her free.
:AS
You pressed Mira’s seal of love
then walked out.
Unable to see you
she’s hopeless,
tossing in bed—gasping her life out.
Dark One, it’s your fault—
I’ll join the yoginis,
I’ll take a blade to my throat in Banaras.
Mira gave herself to you,
you touched her intimate seal
and then left.
:AS
How bitter is carnival day
with my lover off traveling.
O desolate town,
night and day wretched,
my small bed in the attic lies empty.
Rejected and lost
in his absence, stumbling under
the pain.
Must you wander
from country to country? It hurts me.
These fingers ache
counting the days you’ve been gone.
Spring arrives
with its festival games,
the chiming of anklets, drumbeats and flute, a sitar—
yet no beloved visits my gate.
What makes you forget?
Here I stand begging you, Dark One
don’t shame me!
Mira comes to embrace you
birth after birth
still a virgin.
:AS
Over the trees
a crescent moon glides.
The Dark One has gone to dwell in Mathura.
Me, I struggle, caught in a love noose
and yes,
Mira’s lord can lift mountains
but today his passion
seems distant and faint.
:AS
The Dark One’s love-stain
is on her,
other ornaments
Mira sees as mere glitter.
A mark on her forehead,
a bracelet, some prayer beads,
beyond that she wears only
her conduct.
Make-up is worthless
when you’ve gotten truth from a teacher.
O the Dark One has
stained me with love,
and for that some revile me,
others give honor.
I simply wander the road of the sadhus
lost in my songs.
Never stealing,
injuring no one,
who can discredit me?
Do you think I’d step down from an elephant
to ride on the haunch
of an ass?
:AS
The plums tasted
sweet to the unlettered desert-tribe girl,
but what manners! To chew into each!
She was ungainly,
low-caste, ill mannered and dirty,
but the god took the
fruit she’d been sucking.
Why? She knew how to love.
She might not distinguish
splendor from filth
but she’d tasted the nectar of passion.
Might not know any Veda,
but a chariot swept her away.
Now she frolics in heaven, passionately bound to her god.
The Lord of Fallen Fools, says Mira,
will save anyone
who can practice rapture like that.
I myself in a previous birth
was a cow-herding girl
at Gokul.
:AS
Dark One,
how can I sleep?
Since you left my bed
the seconds drag past like epochs,
each moment
a new torrent of pain.
I am no wife,
no lover comes through the darkness—
lamps, houses, no comfort.
On my couch
the embroidered flowers
pierce me like thistles,
I toss through the night.
Yet who would believe my story?
That a lover
bit my hand like a snake,
and the venom bursts through
and I’m dying?
I hear
the peacock’s faraway gospel,
the nightingale’s love song,
the cuckoo—
thickness on thickness folds through the sky,
clouds flash with rain.
Dark One, is there no love
in this world
that such anguish continues?
Mirabai waits for a
glance from your eye.
:AS
Yogin, don’t go—
at your feet a slave girl has fallen.
She lost herself
on the devious path of romance and worship,
no one to guide her.
Now she’s built
an incense and sandalwood pyre
and begs you to light it.
Dark One, don’t go—
when only cinder remains
rub my ash over your body.
Mira asks, Dark One,
can flame twist upon flame?
:AS
The song of the flute, O sister, is madness.
I thought that nothing that was not God could hold me,
But hearing that sound, I lose mind and body,
My heart wholly caught in the net.
O flute, what were your vows, what is your practice?
What power sits by your side?
Even Mira’s Lord is trapped in your seven notes.
:JH
Love has stained my body
to the color of the One Who Holds Up Mountains.
When I dressed in the world’s five fabrics,
I only played hide and seek—
For disguised though I was, the Lifting One caught me.
And seeing his beauty, I offered him all that I am.
Friends, let those whose Beloved is absent write letters—
Mine dwells in the heart, and neither enters nor leaves.
Mira has given herself to her Lord Giridhara.
Day or night, she waits only for him.
:JH
O my friends,
What can you tell me of Love,
Whose pathways are filled with strangeness?
When you offer the Great One your love,
At the first step your body is crushed.
Next be ready to offer your head as his seat.
Be ready to orbit his lamp like a moth giving in to the light,
To live in the deer as she runs toward the hunter’s call,
In the partridge that swallows hot coals for love of the moon,
In the fish that, kept from the sea, happily dies.
Like a bee trapped for life in the closing of the sweet flower,
Mira has offered herself to her Lord.
She says, the single Lotus will swallow you whole.
:JH
Awake to the Name
To be born in a human body is rare,
Don’t throw away the reward of your past good deeds.
Life passes in an instant—the leaf doesn’t go back to the branch.
The ocean of rebirth sweeps up all beings hard,
Pulls them into its cold-running, fierce, implacable currents.
Giridhara, your name is the raft, the one safe-passage over.
Take me quickly.
All the awake ones travel with Mira, singing the name.
She says with them: Get up, stop sleeping—the days of a life
are short.
:JH
The Coffer with the Poisonous Snake
Rana sent a gold coffer of complicated ivory;
But inside a black and green asp was waiting,
“It is a necklace that belonged to a great Queen!”
I put it around my neck; it fit well.
It became a string of lovely pearls, each with a moon inside.
My room then was full of moonlight, as if the full moon
Had found its way in through the open window.
:RB
The Clouds
When I saw the dark clouds, I wept, O Dark One,
I wept at the dark clouds.
Black clouds soared up, and took some yellow along;
rain did fall, some rain fell long.
There was water east of the house, west of the house;
fields all green.
The one I love lives past those fields; rain has fallen
on my body, on my hair, as I wait in the open
door for him.
The Energy that holds up mountains is the energy
Mirabai bows down to.
He lives century after century, and the test I set for
him he has passed.
:RB
All I Was Doing Was Breathing
Something has reached out and taken in the beams of my eyes.
There is a longing, it is for his body, for every hair of that dark body.
All I was doing was being, and the Dancing Energy came by my house.
His face looks curiously like the moon, I saw it from the side, smiling.
My family says: “Don’t ever see him again!” And they imply things in a low voice.
But my eyes have their own life; they laugh at rules, and know whose they are.
I believe I can bear on my shoulders whatever you want to say of me.
Mira says: Without the energy that lifts mountains, how am I to live?
:RB
The Heat of Midnight Tears
Listen, my friend, this road is the heart opening,
Kissing his feet, resistance broken, tears all night.
If we could reach the Lord through immersion in water,
I would have asked to be born a fish in this life.
If we could reach him through nothing but berries and wild nuts
Then surely the saints would have been monkeys when they came from the womb!
If we could reach him by munching lettuce and dry leaves
Then the goats would surely get to the Holy One before us!
If the worship of stone statues could bring us all the way,
I would have adored a granite mountain years ago.
Mirabai says: The heat of midnight tears will bring you to God.
:RB
Mirabai
THE FIRST ACCOUNT of Mirabai’s life comes from the Bhaktamāla of Nabhadas, a hagiography of North Indian bhakti saints composed around 1600 CE, not long after Mira’s death. It shows how close to her own lifetime she had fired the imagination:
Mira shattered the manacles
of civility, family, and shame.
A latter day gopi, she made love explicit
for the dark Kali Yuga.
Independent, unutterably fearless,
she sang her delight for an
amorous god.
Scoundrels thought her a dangerous presence
and ventured to kill her,
but draining like nectar the poison they sent
she stepped forth unscathed.
Striking the drumskin of devotion
Mira cringed before no one.
Family, civility, gossip—
she shattered the manacles.
She sang praise to her lord the
lifter of mountains.
(AS translation)
Mira was born into a Rajput clan, the Rathors, who ruled the city of Merta, Rajasthan, and its surrounding villages. Her warrior family married her into a substantial nearby clan, the Sisodia Rajputs of Mewar, in an effort to establish a military alliance. But the girl quickly alienated her powerful in-laws. By the Rajput institution of suhag, her religious duties were to be discharged in
unquestioning service to her husband. However, from an early age she believed herself betrothed to Krishna and refused to abide by secular custom. One account says she dutifully touched her mother-in-law’s feet but swept past their image of Kali, the dark goddess, saying she’d long been on most intimate terms with the true Lord, and could not bow to a lump of stone.
Some say her husband was weak-minded, unable or unwilling to force her compliance. It’s thought that he perished on the field of battle shortly after their marriage. All the stories agree, though: Mira had refused intimacy with him—her true husband was Śyām, the “Dark One,” Krishna. As an infant, Mira may have gotten “a true word” from a wandering holy man who whispered briefly into her ear. She now claimed to have been born through the ages—in one song, she has dropped from 84,000 wombs—to love only Śyām. Despite her husband’s death she refused the clothes of a widow, would not sequester herself, and rejected the conventions of widowhood. Instead she often descended from the Sisodia palace to visit local temples where she consorted with sadhus, wandering mendicants, singing and dancing in worship of Śyām.
Her husband’s family was outraged. The prince, or Rana, she refers to in many songs—probably her brother-in-law—both hated and feared her. The stories say he made three attempts on her life, aided by Mira’s mother-in-law. Initially they sent poisoned water, claiming it to be caranāmṛt—holy water used to wash the feet of a Krishna image. In one of her most famous songs, Mira claims that as she danced she “drained the cup without missing a step.”
A second attempt failed as well. The conspirators sent a snake in a basket of fruit, or in a jeweled coffer. When Mira lifted the lid of the basket or box the poisonous asp had turned into a śālgrām, the black fossil ammonite considered all over India to be a manifestation of Krishna.
After a third attempt on her life—palace guards forced her to lie on a bed of iron spikes, but her god turned them to flower petals—Mira fled the palace. All along she’d insisted her true family was the sadhu sang, the company of truth seekers. Now she ran from her life of privilege like a convict going over the wall—a suffocating life of wealth, status, power, luxury, female submission, and royal expectations. For the rest of her life she moved among the family of bhaktas, traveling the roads of North India on a perpetual search for her Giridhara-nāgara, the elegant one—the energy—that lifts mountains.
Love and The Turning Seasons Page 8
