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  Songs of Kabir

  Kabir, the North Indian devotional or bhakti poet, was born in Benares (now Varanasi) and lived in the fifteenth century. Next to nothing is known of his life, though many legends surround him. He is said to have been a weaver, and in his resolutely undogmatic and often riddling work he debunks both Hinduism and Islam. The songs of this extraordinary poet, philosopher, and satirist, who believed in a personal god, have been sung and recited by millions throughout North India for half a millennium.

  Arvind Krishna Mehrotra is the author of four books of poetry, the editor of The Oxford India Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets and Collected Poems in English by Arun Kolatkar, and the translator of The Absent Traveller: Prakrit Love Poetry. A volume of his essays, Partial Recall: Essays on Literature and Literary History will be published in 2011. He is a professor of English at the University of Allahabad and lives in Allahabad and Dehra Dun.

  Wendy Doniger [O’Flaherty] graduated from Radcliffe College and received her Ph.D. from Harvard University and her D.Phil. from Oxford University. She is the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago and the author of many books, most recently The Bedtrick: Tales of Sex and Masquerade, The Woman Who Pretended to Be Who She Was, and The Hindus: An Alternative History.

  Songs of Kabir

  Translated and with an introduction by

  Arvind Krishna Mehrotra

  Preface by

  Wendy Doniger

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  Contents

  Cover

  Biographical Notes

  Preface

  Introduction

  Source Texts

  Upside-Down Poems

  Runaway Mind

  Against Pundits and Muezzins

  Is There a Paradise Anyway?

  Waiting to Be Kissed

  The Color of Rama

  Handcuffed to Death

  Beware the Snares

  Questions & Answers

  Acknowledgments

  Index of Songs

  Index of First Lines

  Copyright and More Information

  Preface

  In the half millennium since Kabir is generally presumed to have lived, many stories have been made up to account for the mixture of Hinduism and Islam in his work. Sometimes it is said that Kabir was a Brahmin in a former life, or that he was of divine origin but adopted by Muslim weavers, or that he was adopted by Brahmins who had been forced by some foreigners (perhaps Muslims) to drink water from their hands, making them lose caste and become weavers.[1] All of these stories attempt to drag Kabir over the line from Muslim to Hindu. He once described the two religions disparagingly in terms of the animals that Hindus offered to the goddess Kali and Muslims killed at the end of a pilgrimage: “One slaughters goats, one slaughters cows; they squander their birth in isms.”[2] Not surprisingly, both groups attacked him during his life; more surprisingly, both claimed him after his death. The story that Arvind Krishna Mehrotra tells, of the Muslims wanting to bury him and the Hindus to cremate him, may have been inspired by the poem in which he says:

  Cremation turns you to ashes,

  Burial into a feast

  For an army of worms.

  Your athlete’s body’s only clay,

  A leaky pot,

  A jug with nine holes.

  KG 68

  Many of Kabir’s poems mock the various false dichotomies, beyond cremation versus burial, that people impose upon that jug. His very existence made nonsense of the line between Muslims and Hindus, and he imagined himself erasing both that line and the line between men and women when he said:

  Tell me, wise one,

  How did I become

  A woman from a man?

  ...

  In a Brahmin’s house,

  I become a Brahmin’s wife;

  ...

  In a Turk’s, I read the kalma...

  KG 160

  The line between high and low castes also fell away as he sang:

  Were the Creator

  Concerned about caste,

  We’d arrive in the world

  With a caste mark on the forehead.

  If you say you’re a Brahmin

  Born of a mother who’s a Brahmin,

  Was there a special canal

  Through which you were born?

  And if you say you’re a Turk

  And your mother’s a Turk,

  Why weren’t you circumcised

  Before birth?

  Nobody’s lower-caste;

  The lower castes are everywhere.

  They’re the ones

  Who don’t have Rama on their lips,

  Kabir says.

  KG 182

  Many of the sants (North Indian bhakti saints) who straddled Hinduism and Islam were both low-caste and rural, such as Ravidas who was a pariah leatherworker (Chamar), Dadu a cotton-carder, Sena a barber.[3] Not all bhaktas (passionate devotees of individual gods) were of low caste,[4] but Kabir was, and many stories are told about his challenges to the caste system. For instance:

  One day Kabir and some other disciples of Ramananda arrived at Totadari leading a buffalo that carried their blankets and cooking materials. Ramanuja’s spiritual descendants at Totadari were all Brahmans and were very careful to observe the rules of caste purity in bathing, cooking, and eating. If even the shadow of an Untouchable fell on their cooking places, they would not eat. They accepted that Kabir should eat with them but wanted him to sit in a separate line (pangat). Since to insist on this would be impolite, they devised a pretext to exclude him: “Whoever can recite the verses of the Veda should sit and eat in our line; whoever cannot recite the Veda should sit apart.” Since low-caste persons have no right to recite the Veda, this should have solved their problem. All the Brahmans recited a few verses from the Veda. Finally it came Kabir’s turn. He put a hand on the head of the buffalo and said, “Listen, buffalo! Hurry up and recite well some of the Veda!” The buffalo began to recite. Everyone was astonished and begged Kabir to forgive them.[5]

  The strongest testimony to Kabir’s attitude to caste comes from his own poetry, for he regarded caste as irrelevant to liberation.[6] But Kabir was not a revolutionary in any political or even social sense. Iconoclastic, yes; anti-institutional, to be sure; poor and low in status, you bet—but not concerned about putting an end to poverty. His goal was spiritual rather than economic or political liberation: “Only she who’s free from delusion” is truly free.[7] For the dichotomy that Kabir strove most to erase was the illusory line between the true god “without qualities” (nir-guna in the Sanskrit terminology, nir-gun in Hindi) and the vision of a god with perceptible qualities (sa-guna or sa-gun), a vision that the true god himself projected among us through his power of illusion (maya). (Sufi mysticism, which heavily influenced the North Indian tradition, may have taught Kabir, or at least encouraged in him, the emphasis on the abstract aspect of god.[8]) Thus, though Kabir calls his god Rama (significantly, not Allah), his Rama is not the sa-guna Hindu Rama who marries Sita and kills Ravana or has any of the features or adventures that the Hindu Rama has; he is simply god. The perceptible qualities (gunas) are things that the leaky jug is made of. The sa-guna god is in the details,[9] which envelop the indescribable nir-guna god and thus reveal him, as the invisible man could only be seen when he was dressed in a hat and coat. The human details, the metaphors and images from the lives of the worshippers that animate Kabir’s poems, are all around the god but not of him.

  These details often resonate with traditional Indian literary and religious tropes. The husband and wife who are in the same bed but don’t meet (KG 11) provide a natural metapho
r for our inability to recognize the god who is always with us, but it also draws upon a classical trope of Indian erotic and religious poetry: the unloved wife, the abandoned lover. The idea that a person is “a walking / Mosque” (KG 129) is a Muslim version of the belief expressed by the South Indian Hindu sect of Virashaivas, from the twelfth century on, that there is no need for temples since the worshipper is all the temple that the bhakti god requires. “The tricky customer” (KG 19) echoes the Telugu poems set in the mouths of courtesans whose customer is god, and a tricky god at that.[10] The “ropes of maya” (KG 52) are often mistaken for serpents in Indian philosophy. “Hari, the thug, / Has thugged us all” (KG 49) is an anachronistic reference to the nineteenth-century Thugs, worshippers of Kali who garroted their victims; but here the thug is maya, and once you catch him out he no longer deludes you. “Even death’s bludgeon / About to crush your head / Won’t wake you up” (KG 62) evokes the assertion by some Indian philosophers that we must awaken from the dream that is the material world, and the assertion by others that the goal of enlightenment is simply to realize that we cannot possibly awaken from that dream. The equine metaphor—

  Put the bit in its mouth,

  The saddle on its back,

  Your foot in the stirrup,

  And ride your wild runaway mind

  All the way to heaven.

  KG 81

  reworks an idea expressed in the Katha Upanishad, several centuries BCE, that the senses must be harnessed, yoked, like horses.

  Think of the self as a rider in a chariot that is the body; the intellect is the charioteer, and the mind the reins. The senses are the horses and the paths around them are the objects of the senses. The senses do not obey a man who cannot control his mind, as bad horses disdain the charioteer; such a man continues to be subject to reincarnation. But the senses obey a man whose mind is always under control, as good horses heed the charioteer; such a man reaches the end of the journey.[11]

  Other images take off in an entirely new direction. The son of a widow (KG 64) is the lowest sort of bastard in Indian culture, since widows are not supposed to remarry; and the son of a barren woman is the standard philosophical trope for a logical impossibility (if she has a son, she is not barren). But Kabir does not merely borrow this image; he transforms it into a special poetic trope of something impossible, called twilight language or upside-down language, as in the poem that mentions, amid other upside-down images, “a mother delivered / After her son was” (KG 116). Mehrotra includes four poems specifically in this genre (KG 116, KG 120, KG 137, KG 138), which conjure up for us predominantly animal images: a lion keeping watch over cows, a cat carrying away a dog, pregnant bulls, barren cows, jackals that play with lions, and a buffalo sitting on a horse.

  There are also other upside-down images with older philosophical lineages, such as:

  A tree with its branches in the earth,

  Its roots in the sky;

  A tree with flowering roots.

  KG 116

  This image is taken straight from the Katha Upanishad: “Its roots above, its branches below, this is the eternal banyan tree.”[12] And it is quoted in the Bhagavad Gita: “They say the banyan tree is imperishable, its roots above, its branches below.”[13] The banyan in reality is an upside-down tree, which grows branches that return down to the earth again and again and become the roots and trunks of new trees with new branches so that eventually you have a forest of a banyan tree, and you no longer know which was the original trunk. The Upanishad uses the image of the banyan to represent the divine substance (brahman) from which all living creatures take root. Kabir puts the banyan into a new context to represent his god who is as ineffable, as nir-guna, as the god of the Katha Upanishad but also a god with qualities (sa-guna) that one can, indeed must, love.

  Kabir similarly transforms the ancient Hindu image of the mare who lives deep in the sea and holds in her mouth the fire that will emerge at doomsday to destroy the universe. In one more or less right-side-up poem, Kabir uses this image simply to express the soul burning for god: “There’s a fire / Raging in the ocean” (KG 9). But in the upside-down poems, the statement that “Water catches fire” (KG 137) or “The sea’s ablaze” (KG 138), now regarded as a logical impossibility, is explicitly said to be part of a “Topsy-turvy Veda” (KG 137).

  In one poem, Kabir poses a sharp metaphysical question:

  Who’s it you call husband?

  Or call wife?

  Who’s it you call son?

  Or call father?

  KG 49

  These questions are somewhat reminiscent of Arjuna’s apology to Krishna, in the Bhagavad Gita, after he has seen the god’s terrifying cosmic form and says, “I was so stupid to call you my pal, Krishna of the Yadavas.”[14] But they are even more strongly evocative of the scene in the Bhagavata Purana when Yashoda, the mother of Krishna (who is here just a small boy), looks into his mouth and sees “the whole universe, with the far corners of the sky, and the wind, and lightning, and the orb of the Earth with its mountains and oceans, and the moon and stars, and space itself; and her own village and herself.” Then she becomes frightened and confused, thinking, “Is this a dream or an illusion fabricated by God? Or is it a delusion in my own mind? For God’s power of delusion inspires in me such false beliefs as, ‘I exist,’ ‘This is my husband,’ ‘This is my son.’”[15]

  Not only does Kabir turn conventional images into upside-down images, but upside-down images also pervade the corpus of his more conventional poetry. Consider this poem:

  Chewing slowly,

  Only after I’d eaten

  My grandmother,

  Mother,

  Son-in-law,

  Two brothers-in-law,

  And father-in-law

  (His big family included)

  In that order,

  And had for dessert

  The town’s inhabitants,

  Did I find, says Kabir,

  The beloved that I’ve become

  One with.

  KGG 3.25

  What does it mean to say that the poet has eaten all these people? On the human level, it is unthinkable, upside down. But on the divine level the idea of devouring one’s in-laws echoes the Bhagavad Gita, in which the god Krishna reveals himself in an epiphany as the gaping mouth of doomsday, devouring everyone, and Arjuna cries out, “I see your mouths with jagged tusks, and I see all of these warriors rushing blindly into your gaping mouths, like moths rushing to their death in a blazing fire. Some stick in the gaps between your teeth, and their heads are ground to powder.”[16] (That’s when he says, I’m sorry I called you my pal, Krishna.) And there is a South Indian myth in which the god Shiva appears in disguise to demand that his devotees cook and eat their son with him (they kill and cook the child but Shiva restores him before they eat him).[17] On both levels, the human and the divine, the cannibalistic image is a shock, and this is Kabir’s intention: to shock us into changing our lives.[18]

  Upside-down language also takes the form of incomprehensible riddles, unanswerable riddles rather like Lewis Carroll’s (“Why is a raven like a writing desk?”[19]):

  The question that’s killing me, says Kabir,

  Is whether the pilgrim

  Or the pilgrim town is greater?

  KG 27

  Riddles in Hinduism are not child’s play but the serious, sometimes fatal business of religion. The Rig Veda (the most ancient Sanskrit text, c. 1500 BCE) abounds in serious riddles, often in upside-down language, such as “Seven sisters call out to the place where the seven names of the cows are hidden. Who saw the newborn one, the one with bones who was brought forth by the boneless one?”[20] This tradition continues throughout the history of Indian literature. It is at the heart of the series of riddles that a forest deity asks of the heroes in the Mahabharata (such as, “What is swifter than the wind?” “The mind”[21]); four of the brothers fail to answer and die, and the fifth answers the riddles and revives his brothers. Life-or-death riddles drive t
he basic plot of the collections of the Sanskrit and Hindi tales called Twenty-five Tales of the Vampire (also known as Vikram and the Vampire[22]), also a matter of life and death. Mehrotra’s wonderful phrase “killing me” therefore has both a figurative and a literal meaning, the latter made possible by the slang.

  Slang, neologisms, and anachronisms in Mehrotra’s translations are a brilliant means of conveying much of the shock effect that upside-down language would have had upon Kabir’s fifteenth-century audiences. I have in mind such phrases as “Smelling of aftershave” (MK 41); “I’m handcuffed to death” (KG 44); “you blew it,” “sticky spunk,” and “death already / Has you by the balls” (KG 60); “Should be in Sing Sing” (KG 64); “to screw up your life” (KG 73); “Headed for Deathville” (KGG 3.53); “wipe the bootlicker’s smile / Off your face” (KG 77); Ram as “the chemical on your tongue” (KG 78); “dreadlocked rastas” and “Faber poets” (KG 85); “What’s your problem, muezzin?” (KG 129); “I’m the only / Dimwit in town” and “extra chromosome” (KGG 1.146); “bedroom eyes” (KG 138); and, finally, “bullshit” (KG 179). Mehrotra here is reinventing an upside-down language (upside down in time—how could Kabir have known about chromosomes?) to say what cannot otherwise be said about god and caste and Hindu-Muslim conflict. In this he is doing something like what Toni Morrison and Judith Butler did to reinvent English in order to say what could not otherwise be said about racism and about sexism. All three are revolutionaries, challenging the very heart of darkness of all prejudice: language.

  For twilight language is shocking, the medieval equivalent of slang, a strong vernacular, and obscenity in our day. Where Kabir dug down into the past of his own traditions to find images that he then transformed in shocking ways, Mehrotra tries to push the poems as far as he can toward Americanese, in the direction of the language that comes most naturally to him (“speeding to Chinook,” as in the epigraph to poem KGG 3.6), also in shocking ways. It makes for a most exhilarating mix. And so, in addition to all the other good reasons for using contemporary language, which Mehrotra lays out so elegantly in his introduction, here is another reason. The banausic quality of slang, its banal and specific power in both colloquial language (“make ends meet” in KG 12) and vocabulary (“borax” in KG 18), when juxtaposed with Kabir’s stark metaphysical speculations, replicates his juxtaposition of everyday sa-guna details with nir-guna abstractions. The colloquialisms keep jerking the reader into the familiar only to be jerked back into the unfamiliar world of Kabir, and then back again. The extraordinary range of registers in Mehrotra’s poetic language re-creates, in our day, the shock effect of Kabir’s upside-down language in the fifteenth century.