Kabir

Kabīr,  (born 1440, Varanasi, Jaunpur, India—died 1518, Maghar), iconoclastic Indian poet-saint revered by Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs alike.

The birth of Kabīr (Arabic: “Great”) remains to this day shrouded in mystery and legend. Authorities disagree on both when he was born and who his parents were. One legend proclaims a divine virginal birth. His mother was reputed to have been of the Brahman caste and to have become pregnant after a visit to a Hindu shrine. Because she was unwed, she abandoned Kabīr, who was found and adopted by a Muslim weaver. That his early life began as a Muslim there is no doubt, although he later became influenced by a Hindu ascetic, Ramananda.

Though Kabīr is often depicted in modern times as a harmonizer of Hindu and Muslim belief and practice, it would be more accurate to say that he was equally critical of both, often conceiving them as parallel to one another in their misguided ways. In his view, the mindless, repetitious, prideful habit of declaiming scripture could be visited alike on the sacred Hindu texts, the Vedas, or the Islamic holy book, the Qurʾān; the religious authorities doing so could be Brahmins or Qāzīs; meaningless rites of initiation could focus either on the sacred thread or on circumcision. What really counted for Kabīr was utter fidelity to the one deathless truth of life, which he associated equally with the designations Allah and Ram—the latter understood as a general Hindu name for the divine, not the hero of the Ramayana. Kabīr’s principal media of communication were songs called padas and rhymed couplets (dohas) sometimes called “words” (shabdas) or “witnesses” (sakhis). A number of these couplets, and others attributed to Kabīr since his death, have come to be commonly used by speakers of north Indian languages.

Kabīr’s poetic personality has been variously defined by the religious traditions that revere him, and the same can be said for his hagiography. For Sikhs he is a precursor and interlocutor of Nanak, the founding Sikh Guru (spiritual guide). Muslims place him in Sufi lineages, and for Hindus he becomes a Vaishnava (devotee of the god Vishnu) with universalist leanings. But when one goes back to the poetry that can most reliably be attributed to Kabīr, only two aspects of his life emerge as truly certain: he lived most of his life in Banaras (now Varanasi), and he was a weaver (julaha), one of a low-ranked caste that had become largely Muslim in Kabīr’s time. His humble social station and his own combative reaction to any who would regard it as such have contributed to his celebrity among various other religious movements and helped shape the Kabīr Panth, a sect found across north and central India that draws its members especially but not exclusively from the scheduled castes (formerly known as untouchables). The Kabīr Panth regards Kabir as its principal guru or even as a divinity—truth incarnate. The broad range of traditions on which Kabīr has had an impact is testimony to his massive authority, even for those whose beliefs and practices he criticized so unsparingly. From early on, his presence in anthologies of north Indian bhakti (devotional) poetry is remarkable.

---

Some Muslims in the past tended to view Kab¯ır as a

S: u¯f¯ı, because many of his “words” are somewhat similar to

those of the most liberal and unorthodox Indian S: u¯f¯ıs. Modern Hindus and Muslims tend to see him as the champion

of Hindu-Muslim unity, although Kab¯ır himself expressed

outright rejection of the “two religions” and bitterly castigated their official representatives: pandits and pa¯n: d: es on the

one side, mullas and ka¯zis on the other. For Kab¯ır, there

could be no revealed religion at all—no Veda, no QurDa¯n.

All scriptural authority he emphatically denied, and he

warned people against searching for truth in “holy books”:

“Reading, reading, the whole world died—and no one ever

became learned!”

Actually, Kab¯ır’s notion of God seems to go
beyond the notion of a personal god, despite the fact that he

may call on Ra¯m or Khuda¯


In the same way, though Kab¯ır often speaks of
the satguru(the “perfect guru”) it is clear that he is not alluding to Ra ¯ma¯nand, his putative guru, nor to any human guru.
For Kab¯ır, the satguruis the One who speaks within the soul
itself. Kab¯ır held all yogic exercises to be absurd contortions and
the yogis’ pretention to immortality as utter nonsense.


Kab¯ır’s view of the world is a tragic one. Life is but a
fleeting moment between two deaths in the world of transmigration. Family ties are insignificant and rest on selfinterest. Woman is “a pit of hell.” Death encompasses all:
Living beings are compared to “the parched grain of Death,
some in his mouth, the rest in his lap.” There is no hope,
no escape for man but in his own innermost heart. Man must
search within himself, get rid of pride and egoism, dive within for the “diamond” that is hidden within his own soul.
Then only may the mysterious, ineffable stage be achieved
within the body itself—a mystery that Kab¯ır suggests in
terms of fusion:
When I was, Hari was not.
Now Hari is and I am no more.
For one who has found the hidden “diamond,” for one who
has passed “the unreachable pass,” eternity is achieved. Mortal life seems to linger, though in truth nothing remains but
a fragile appearance. In Kab¯ır’s own words:


The yogin who was there has disappeared:
Ashes alone keep the posture.
In its rugged, terse, fulgurant brilliance, Kab¯ır’s style is
unique. His striking metaphors and powerful rhythms capture the heart of the listener. His scathing attacks on brahmans and the “holy men” of his time have never been forgotten by the downtrodden people of India. Probably no greater
voice had been heard on Indian soil since the time of the
Buddha, whom Kab¯ır resembles in more ways than one. His
pessimistic view of worldly life, his contempt for holy books
and human gurus, his insistent call to inwardness have not
been forgotten. His own brand of mysticism may appear
godless if one takes “God” as a divine personality. In one
sense, Kab¯ır is not only an iconoclast, he may even be called
irreligious—and yet he appears as a master of the “interior
religion.”

Kab¯ır retired into a small tent to die,

and immediately after his death his body disappeared. Nothing was found but a heap of flowers, which was divided between the two parties: The Muslims buried their share of the

flowers on the spot and erected a cenotaph over it; the Hindus cremated their share and later built a sama ¯dhi(memorial

tomb) over it, although most sectarian devotees of Kab¯ır believe the flowers were cremated at the important Kab¯ ır

Chaura¯ Mat: h in Banaras itself. In later times, Kab¯ır’s fame

continued to grow among Hindus. In an attempt to “Hinduize” the saint, devotees told of his having been born miraculously of a brahman virgin widow; she committed the child

to the Ganges, but he was saved and reared by Jula ¯ha¯s

Ramananda, also called Ramanand or Ramadatta   (born c. 1400—died c. 1470), North Indian Brahman (priest), held by his followers (Ramanandis) to be fifth in succession in the lineage of the philosopher-mystic Ramanuja.

According to his hagiography (saint’s life), Ramananda left home as a youth and became a sannyasi(ascetic) before settling in Varanasi (Benares) to study Vedic texts, Ramanuja’s philosophy, and yogic techniques. Having completed his studies, Ramananda began teaching. He adopted the practice of eating with his students, regardless of their caste, but the opposition of his upper-caste companions so angered Ramananda that he left the lineage to found his own sect, the Ramanandis.

Ramananda’s teachings were similar to those of Ramanuja except that he dropped the interdiction on intercaste dining and the strict rule that all teaching and texts used had to be in the Sanskrit language. At his centres in Agra and Varanasi, Ramananda taught in Hindi, the vernacular, because Sanskrit was known only to the upper castes. His original 12 disciples are said to have included at least one woman, members of the lowest castes (including the leatherworker Ravidas), and a Muslim (the mystic Kabīr). The almost complete absence of any reference to Ramananda in poetry attributed to them, however, has caused some scholars to question the historical veracity of this connection.

The connection between the historical Ramananda and the important monastic community (Ramanandis) that claims him as its founder has also been called into question, both by academic scholars and by a group of “radical Ramanandis” in the early 20th century who disputed theBrahman tie with Ramanuja. The history of the present Ramanandi sampradaya (school of religious teaching) apparently does not reach back before the 17th century, but this does nothing to diminish the fact that it is the largest Vaishnava (devotees of the god Vishnu) monastic order in North India today, and perhaps the largest monastic order of any sectarian affiliation throughout the Indian subcontinent.