by Robert Bly
Still, the regional difference is important, and within the western branch of the “family” of remembered Kabirs one can discern an additional divide. Collections made by the Sikhs differ in their overall tone from those made by Vaishnavas, that is, worshipers of Krishna and Ram and their consorts.3 The Sikh Kabir often sounds like a down-to-earth householder, while the Vaishnava Kabir is more easily swayed by love’s intensity. “Intensity,” in fact, is the term Bly uses to translate bhakti, and of all the poetry collected in the early stages, it is this western, Vaishnava Kabir who bears the closest relationship to his. The Banarsi Kabir is quite different. This is the Kabir remembered and indeed worshiped in the Kabir Panth, “Kabir’s Path,” a mixed community of ascetics and householders, mainly from humble backgrounds, who were responsible for assembling the poetry collected in a volume called the Bijak (“Inventory” of poems or “Guide” to where treasure may be found). Here we find in much purer form the salty, confrontational Kabir, the man of “rough rhetoric,” as Linda Hess has said. He goads, he berates, he challenges. Confident of his own oral capacities, he dismisses anything written on paper along with the self-important personages who present themselves as custodians of those dusty documents. Muslim or Hindu, Qazi or Brahmin, they’re all cut from the same cloth, and yogis are no better—maybe even worse. This Bijak Kabir makes precious little reference to any deities. Ram comes in—but only as a name, a general designation for God—and Krishna, like Shiva, is absent except in jest or in denial. As for goddesses like Durga or Shakti, with their taste for blood-sacrifice, he treats them as enemies.4
Oddly enough, the eastern manuscripts, the ones called Bijak, are much younger than their western counterparts. One might have thought that since Kabir came from Banaras (no dispute about that) the local traditions would have produced a longer record, but they did not. The earliest extant Bijak manuscript dates only to 1805. Perhaps the poor, lower-caste social location of the Kabir Panth—these were his people—made that impossible. In the early centuries, at least, its members would have been far less likely to be literate than those who transmitted the more catholic “western” bhakti strand. Linda Hess and Shukdev Singh estimate that the Kabir Panthis made their first structured, written collections of Kabir poetry—the earliest Bijak —in the late seventeenth century, but there is no record to prove it.5
The first Sikh collection of Kabir poems was apparently made in the early 1570s (the so-called Goindval Pothis)—fifty poems that swelled to two hundred twenty by 1604, when they were inscribed in the Sikhs’ Kartarpur Granth.6 These manuscripts attest to the fact that poems attributed to Kabir were sung alongside compositions of other poets, especially the Sikh Gurus themselves, in congregational worship, as they still are today. The first Vaishnava collection was smaller—fifteen poems, which appear alongside those of other bhakti poets in a manuscript compiled in Fatehpur, near Jaipur (Rajasthan), in 1582.7 The manuscript is constructed in such a way as to make it clear that these poems formed part of a still earlier manuscript that the scribe/editor was bringing into conversation with two others, the latter being much more consistently Vaishnava and oriented especially to Krishna. A subsequent western collection, assembled for the liturgical use of followers of the poet-saint Dadu, who was a cotton-carder, dates to 1614, and a number of other Dadu-Panthi manuscripts anthologizing Kabir appear in the course of the seventeenth century.8 So we see that early on, Kabir found himself in quite diverse company. He was a linchpin in all kinds of anthologies of bhakti verse intended to be sung.
It would be fair to ask how many poems included in Bly’s Kabir can be found in the early manuscripts. This ought to give some sense of how well Bly’s image of Kabir corresponds to the Kabir at least some people knew and loved in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—people who, like us, lived outside Banaras itself. Of the forty-four poems published in the first edition of this book, only a single one appears in the early, dated manuscripts from Fatehpur that form the basis of Winand Callewaert’s The Millennium Kabir Vani—all of them “western” by that token. The golden poem—“Why should we two ever want to part?”—appears in the Rajasthani stream but not the Punjabi. This very low match is not Bly’s fault, of course—if it’s a fault at all. It just means that the Sen/Tagore/Bly lineage can’t rightly be regarded as giving us “the authentic songs” that Tagore and Underhill believed it did.9 It makes us ask again what we might mean by “authentic,” and how much that question really matters.
Who was Kabir?
There is no way of knowing who Kabir was apart from the history of his reception. As we have seen, that history is far from being just a fog, thank goodness, but it does encode a fundamental problem. Even if we grant that the Bijak owes its origins to an oral tradition that goes back much earlier than its manuscripts, how are we to deal with the fact that the western and eastern traditions don’t converge on a single group of poems, a corpus we could then take as representing the “real” Kabir? This will always present us with a puzzle, and a similar set of puzzles emerges when we look at the legends surrounding Kabir’s life—legends that date back to the last years of the sixteenth century. Of course, there are those who say they know the sound of his poetic voice. The great mid-twentieth-century scholar Hazariprasad Dvivedi was a good example, and many people accepted his bhakti version of Kabir, a personality he believed to have been shaped by the teaching Kabir received from his guru, the Brahmin reformer Ramanand.10 Others also know the sound of the master’s voice. The blind Rajasthani performer Birjapuri Maharaj, celebrated for his renditions of Kabir, says, “If a vani (poem) has a deep meaning, then of course it is Kabir’s; if not it is only an imitation.”11 Unfortunately, the Kabir who emerges from this act of determined listening turns out to be substantially different from Dvivedi’s. So it won’t do to say, as another scholar has, that we must “take Kabir at his word and in his context.”12 Which word? Which context?
Let’s start with Ramanand, since he comes up in Bly’s preface and since he is so important to anchoring Kabir in a lineage that will serve to define him. The hilarious story of Kabir’s initiation by Ramanand—Kabir arranged for the great man literally to stumble over him as he made his way to bathe in the Ganges at dawn—is one of the central motifs of his hagiography. “Ram!” shouted Ramanand, and Kabir took it as his initiatory mantra. Tagore found Ramanand in one of the poems he translated from the set provided by Kshitimohan Sen, and it reassured him that this guru-pupil connection was historical fact.13 But alas, a study of the old manuscripts unearths this poem nowhere, nor is Ramanand’s name found in any of the other old poems, as one might have expected if he was so important for Kabir.14
Although the Kabir authority David Lorenzen disagrees, I find no way to resuscitate this connection from the hagiography, either. Ramanand solves too many problems on too little evidence. He supplies the missing link that would relate Kabir’s non-theist “eastern” Banarsi side to the theist bhakti personality so prevalent in manuscripts that show up farther west. He locates Kabir in a specific monastic lineage—the Ramanandis’—while also providing the means for him to have come from a Muslim family, as his name suggests, and then later to be aligned by conversion with a kind of bhakti that at least some Brahmins could call their own. It’s all too neat, and too unechoed in the poems themselves. I have to side with lower-caste critics who think the connection between Ramanand and Kabir was just a pious invention, a way to deny Kabir his roots.15
Much more reliable is the general portrait given of Kabir in about 1600 by the hagiographer Nabhadas in his Bhaktamal (Garland of Saints), even though his commitments too are Vaishnava and even Ramanandi. A 1712 commentary on the Bhaktamal draws in the Ramanand connection, but Nabhadas himself reads quite differently. He says Kabir rejected the Brahmin formulations that defined caste distinctions, along with the six schools of “proper” philosophy and the idea that a man’s life ought to follow a certain sequence. These were the fundaments of a dharma of caste and station (varnashrama dharma)
that had become central to classical Brahminical thinking. According to Nabhadas, Kabir begged to differ. He believed it to be the exact opposite of true dharma if bhakti wasn’t present on the scene.16 His trademark conviction was that organized religion was worthless. “Intensity,” as Bly calls it, was all that mattered.
Given his social location, it’s no surprise Kabir might take this position, and it’s notable that according to Nabhadas, he had no use for caste. As we learn from not a few of his poems, he was a Muslim weaver (julaha), low on the totem pole. No surprise, then, that he should be considered authoritative by communities who tended to share his humble position, and his admirers also included the Jats, Punjabi farmers who were the backbone of the Sikh community and evidently considered themselves outside the pale of varnashrama dharma.17 But let’s not forget that lots of other people evidently also heard the call—Vaishnavas, certainly, and even Brahmins.
One important strand that emerges in early collections of Kabir’s poems tends to get somewhat obscured by the contexts in which they are typically performed, and we need to grant its due before leaving the “historical” Kabir. This is the fundamental debt Kabir owed to a community of yogis called Naths, whose teaching crystallized an approach to the technology of bodily transformation that appears in his poetry time and again.18 It is hatha yoga, the stringent yoga of intense bodily discipline. Bly admits candidly that he steers clear of this dimension, which he refers to as “the whole matter of Sakti energy.” Yet as a system of thought and practice (one that Kabir himself never associates with Sakti), it seems to have been a key element in providing the sense of religious and metaphorical security we always associate with Kabir’s name.
To get a sense of it, let us turn again to the earliest dated manuscript. There we read about a certain upside-down well:
That water, so rare, so beyond being carried—
one cannot get one’s fill.
My thirst is great
and won’t be slaked without Govind.
The well is above,
the rope extends below:
How can the watercarrier
ever hope to draw?
The water level drops,
the waterpot grows heavy.
The five watercarriers
despair.
The water is full
of the teacher’s exhortations.
But one who seeks refuge in Ram
won’t drink—Kabir.19
The rare, unbearable water with which the poem begins almost certainly refers to introjected semen, sent up to the roof of the skull by means of yogic—perhaps Tantric—discipline. Because this water defies gravity, one cannot draw it with the senses (“the five watercarriers”), and for the same reason, one cannot get one’s fill. It is mysteriously heavy: it overtakes the body. Kabir seems to know the whole Nath Yogi routine, the husbanding of kundalini energies, and to be comfortable with it—at least verbally. Then comes the surprise. He says, in closing, that he won’t drink this water. Is he refusing the fulfillment of orgasm and ejaculation, as Tantric practitioners do? No, that’s not what the words say. They say instead that he refuses “the teacher’s exhortations.” He refuses to accept, as the Nath Yogis put it, that
In the circle of ether is an inverted well that is the place of nectar.
He who has a guru drinks his fill; he who has no guru goes thirsty.20
Kabir would rather drink of Ram or Govind (Krishna). Time and again in poems from early manuscripts we meet this Kabir—a stalwart who seems to be bodily adept, a hatha yogi, yet who identifies instead with the subtle inner guru, the True Guru who is also Ram/Govind. It’s a bhakti reading of a Nath Yogi base: a form of ease, spontaneity, and honesty (sahaj) that’s simpler than the product of bodily hydraulics that serves as its primary metaphor. That form of discipline, at least as an end in itself, is not for him.21 No wonder he can speak as he does about the yogis that fill the streets of Banaras:
Go naked if you want,
Put on animal skins.
What does it matter till you see the inward Ram?
If the union yogis seek
Came from roaming about in the buff,
Every deer in the forest would be saved.
If shaving your head
Spelled spiritual success,
Heaven would be filled with sheep.
And brother, if holding back your seed
Earned you a place in paradise,
Eunuchs would be the first to arrive.
Kabir says: Listen brother,
Without the name of Ram
Who has ever won the spirit’s prize?22
Kabir in the stream of translation
We’ve been appealing to the earliest manuscripts in an attempt to approach the Kabir of history, and that’s all we can do. But we’ve also seen that these manuscripts fail to speak in unison. There is no single Kabir. For all the stubborn sure-footedness built into his persona, he floats along on diverse streams of performance and reception.
The range of communities who have embraced Kabir is immense—low-caste and high-caste, ascetics and householders, rickshaw drivers and CEOs, and famously the Muslims and Hindus who are said to have fought over the privilege of disposing of his bodily remains: “We’ll bury them.” “No, we’ll burn them.” As “the apostle of Hindu-Muslim unity” Kabir became Exhibit A in the Indian government’s effort to encourage “national integration,” while simultaneously a place was being made for him in the canon of Urdu literature that Islamic Pakistan wanted officially to claim as its national heritage.23 In 2003 these two streams have converged in a cassette tape in which Gulzaar, the creator of several important Bombay film scripts, presents “Kabir by Abida,” the brightest new star among Sufi performing artists in Pakistan.24 And when human rights organizations staged a musical event in the cavernous sanctuary of the Riverside Church in New York to benefit Muslim victims of Hindu violence in Gujarat, whose verse do you think they sang?
If Kabir remains a signal presence along the Muslim-Hindu faultline, he is no less important in ongoing debates about social inequality, caste discrimination, and the overall coherence of Indian society. B. R. Ambedkar, the Columbia-educated Dalit (erstwhile “untouchable”) who became principal architect of India’s constitution and served throughout his life as the leading force in struggles to abolish caste and untouchability, used to mention Kabir as one of his prominent forebears.25 By contrast Hazariprasad Dvivedi, one of the country’s leading literary critics, insisted that Kabir learned his bhakti from a forward-thinking Brahmin in a moment of ultimate self-transformation. Far from being a voice of dissent, he exemplified for Dvivedi the common humanity that could and ought to flower in a single broad stream of Indian culture that made social and religious differences irrelevant. In a moment that galvanized intellectual Delhi in the late 1990S, the Dalit critic Dharmavir struck back. This Dvivedi thing, he said, turning Kabir into a Hindu and giving him good manners by subjugating him to a Brahmin, was all hogwash.26
So where do we put Bly in this controversial global-historical mishmash? Clearly his lineage binds him to Tagore, and that tends to make his Kabir hover at a safe distance from any sectarian or social fray. After all, Bly could strip away Tagore’s upholstery, but he was still left to choose among the pieces of furniture that Tagore had first selected. He was evidently less than thrilled with some of these. Compositions that required too much background; that seemed too long-winded; that were constructed as insoluble puzzles; that savored too much of drinking, madness, cosmology, or servitude; that were polluted by verbal whiffs of Christianity such as “salvation” or “deliverance”—all these went out the window. Even the relatively few examples of poems in which Kabir challenged the relevance of social distinctions were consigned to the dustbin, along with poems that pointed to the importance of good company. What emerges is a Kabir who stands for self-reliance (like Emerson), principled disobedience (like Thoreau), and a set of practices that honors the meeting of mind and body and cele
brates the intense emotions that connect them (like Bly himself?).
Some of this instinctive editing on Bly’s part takes us much farther than Tagore in getting a feel for the Kabir we meet in earlier collections of his poetry than the one Sen provided for Tagore. And that goes a long way toward explaining how Bly could play such a crucial role in making Kabir a global household name. But the rest was achieved by poetic genius and by taking a fair number of chances—as Kabir evidently did himself.
A few newcomers mount the stage as Bly digs in and imagines what Kabir might have said to speakers of English living five hundred years after his death. The vocabulary of sadness and pain—that old Buddhist word dukkha—is distinctively Americanized as “spiritual flatness” and “constant depression.” Banaras and Mathura are transformed into places Americans might more likely have heard of—Calcutta and Tibet—and Tagore’s “bowers and groves,” still anchored in India, become “canyons and pine mountains.” The Rockies? Almost every Indic word gets translated. Tagore’s yogi (and Kabir’s) becomes a “spiritual athlete,” and “the Supreme Brahma” comes out as “the Secret One inside us.” Sound matters a lot. Puran kuran may trip off the tongue in the original Hindi, but Tagore’s literal rendering, “the Purana and the Koran,” is far too flat for Bly. Better we should see them as “the Sacred Books of the East”! Kabir, especially the Banarsi Kabir, had fun with his audiences, and Bly has fun with his.27
Sometimes you have to wonder if maybe he’s gone too far. Because the discriminating chakor bird is said to survive only on moonbeams, Bly gives it a try as an owl. That works well in the West but Indians may rebel, since for them the owl is a symbol of blank-eyed stupidity. A diamond changes to a ruby. In a valiant effort to give the leaf of a lotus its due, Bly calls the flower itself a “water rhubarb.” As for the Hindu forehead mark so ubiquitously familiar in India, it comes out looking like “weird designs.” The drone instrument tambura, which Tagore couldn’t resist calling a lyre (because it accompanies the voice? because of the way it’s held?), goes a step farther and emerges as a dulcimer. And the beautiful Guest who weaves in and out of Kabir is even more elusive than Bly makes him seem. He’s cobbled together from various sources in Tagore’s translations and is nowhere to be found in originals—truly a guest!28
