In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Kabir/Kabir Panth

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Hinduism Kabir/Kabir Panth
by
Vinay Dharwadkar
  • LAST MODIFIED: 20 August 2024
  • DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780195399318-0295

Introduction

To the extent that we can reconstruct him as a historical figure, the poet Kabir probably lived in the first half of the fifteenth century (c. 1398–1448) in or around the city of Banaras (today’s Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh state, North India). His name, of Arabic and Qurʾanic origin, suggests that he was a Muslim, and various legends and hagiographic accounts indicate that he belonged to a community of cotton weavers, traditionally placed low on the Hindu and Indian social hierarchy. A number of prominent poems in the received Kabir text refer to the occupation of handloom weaving, and they include images, themes, and technical details from the weaver’s craft. In fact, notable among the themes are conceptions of God as a Master Weaver; of the universe as stretched out on a vast, divine loom; and of the human self or soul as sheathed in a mystical fabric of the finest weave inside its physical body. The social narrative embedded in this framework, however, is a narrative of poverty and illiteracy, in which the weaver who is denied access to education, writing, and initiation into orthodox religious practice becomes the most powerful poet and visionary of his times, the spiritual superior of the rulers and priests who persecute him for his rebellion and audacity. Kabir, the body of poetry ascribed to him, and the much larger phenomenon associated with his name are significant subjects of research and debate across the humanistic disciplines—from literature and poetics to religious studies, philosophy, social theory, and history—because they are multidimensional. The poetry has circulated in several languages across North India for five or six centuries, and has been canonized in written form as part of the scripture of the Sikh religion (the Guru Granth Sahib), as a founding text of several religious institutions within and on the borders of Hinduism, and as a literary monument in the Punjabi language as well as several branches of Hindi. Kabir is both “literary” and “popular”: he is at once the first major “individualized” author in Hindi literature and probably the most frequently quoted poet in everyday Hindi discourse in modern times. He is the earliest figure in the bhakti movement in Hindi; and he is the first of the sant poets, or poets of the nirguna tradition of North India, a multifaceted tradition of philosophical, theological, and social argument that began to dismantle the structures of classical Hinduism around the fifteenth century, to replace them with a new architecture of ideas. Kabir’s text contains major examples of the genres of poetic satire and philosophical poetry in South Asia; it also offers models of proverb and epigram, oral and performative poetry, and lyric poetry usually set to music. Historically and philosophically, it is the source of a radical conception of secularism in Indian society, and of the reconciliation of polytheistic Hinduism and monotheistic Islam; and, in world literature, it belongs alongside the works of Meister Eckhart, St. Theresa, and St. John of the Cross, as well as The Cloud of Unknowing, to the poetry of “negative theology,” which rejects all anthropomorphic conceptions of god, in favor of a godhead without attributes.

Primary Sources and Principal Translations of Kabir

Kabir’s received poems constitute one of the most heterogeneous bodies of poetry associated with a single author in world literature. Their heterogeneity is manifested on multiple levels: language, literary form, chronology, geographical distribution, institutional canon, and theological position. The poetry reaches us today along four main lines of transmission, the first three of which preserve it in writing. (1) The northern line starts in 1570, in the institutions of Sikhism in Punjab, and incorporates Kabir in the religion’s scriptural text, the Guru Granth Sahib (1708), recorded in the Gurmukhi script of the Punjabi language. (2) The western line starts in 1582 and is maintained by several institutions and communities in Rajasthan, including royal courts, a Vaishnava patronage system, the Dadu Panth, and networks of Niranjani sadhus and Nath yogis. This hybrid line transmits several kinds of large multiauthor anthologies, many containing Kabir’s work; it also preserves versions of the Kabir Granthavali, an anthology with variable content representing the poet as sole author. The 1582–1824 Rajasthani manuscripts are especially heterogeneous: they record Kabir’s poetry mostly in the Devanagari script but in five distinct literary languages—not “dialects”—of the Hindi region, namely Bhojpuri, Avadhi, Braj Bhasha, Rajasthani, and Kauravi or early Khadi Boli; and they contain more poetic forms than the Sikh tradition, including forms from Farsi and in Rekhta (a Hindi-Farsi creole; early Urdu). (3) The third is the eastern line, associated with the Kabir Panth and its centers in Banaras and around what are now Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and Chhattisgarh. This line maintains several versions of the Kabir Bijak; the Phatuha manuscript, the earliest, first becomes publicly accessible only in 1805; the Panth’s Dharamdasi, Bhagatahi, and Chaura versions enter print directly but late, 1868–1989. (4) The fourth line may be characterized approximately as the folk-oral line of transmission. Though identified anecdotally in Muslim and European travelogues and other accounts since the seventeenth century, this line disseminates songs, poems, and aphorisms that start entering the historical record in written form only in the early twentieth century. This dissemination involves individuals, informal groups, communities of lay worshippers, and other noninstitutional participants in urban as well as rural settings across northern India (Punjab to Gujarat and Maharashtra; Rajasthan to West Bengal and Odisha). It minimizes the manuscript and print mediums, and valorizes the spoken word, singing, classical and folk music, performance, and communal congregation, and now extends even to digital, mass-media, and popular-culture forms.

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