Kabir - Kabir: the weavers songs

Kabirs poems have circulated in several languages across north India for the past five or six centuries, and he is probably the most frequently quoted poet in the modern Hindi world. He nevertheless remains an enigmaa shadowy presence behind the poetry, a voice, a simulacrum, a form of imagination constantly eluding our grasp. After nearly 200 years of scholarly research on his life and work, he appears to be a singer who has disappeared into his songs: he has ceased to be a person, and has become a whole climate of opinion instead. In fact, in W. H. Audens words memorializing W. B. Yeats in 1939, he is the type of poet whose death was kept from his poems, and who literally became his admirers (Auden 1991, 275, 247).

These remote echoes from the twentieth century are significant because they are symptoms of the ways in which Kabirs poetry has stayed alive for more than half a millennium. Yeats himself first encountered a sample of it in Rabindranath Tagores translations, which were published in Songs of Kabir in 1915 with an Introduction by Evelyn Underhill. The brief fable of the has in the twelfth song in that book must have resonated strongly with the Irish poet, for its symbolism of the soul as a swan or a bird on a journey beyond the human and natural realms seems to have influenced his conception of The Wild Swans at Coole shortly afterwards. Tagores translation was prosaic and speculative, but it conveyed enough of the ideawhich the Kabir tradition had borrowed from older Indian and Persian traditionsto have an impact on Yeats.

Tell me, O Swan, your ancient tale.

From what land do you come, O Swan? to what shore will
you fly?

Where would you take your rest, O Swan, and what do you
seek?

Even this morning, O Swan, awake, arise, follow me!

There is a land where no doubt nor sorrow have rule: where ,
the terror of Death is no more.

There the woods of spring are a-bloom, and the fragrant
scent He is I is borne on the wind:

There the bee of the heart is deeply immersed, and desires no
other joy. (Tagore 1915, 5556)

A more attentive rendering of the kind I offer in this volume reveals that the poem is lighter, more lyrical and suggestive, than the older version indicates:

Dear Swan,
talk of ancient things.

What country have you come from,
what shore will you alight on?

Where have you stopped and rested,
what goal have you set your heart on?

Its now the morning of consciousness,
lets leave together.

We wont be filled with grief and doubt in that place,
the fear of death wont strike us there.

Here the forests of desire are in bloom,
their fragrance assails us straight ahead.

A place that ensnares the beetles of the heart
can offer no hope of happiness.

Despite the opacity of Tagores English, Kabirs song conveyed its mood to Yeats quite precisely, and induced him to create an analogous atmosphere when he wrote about the mysterious, beautiful swans on the lake at Coole Park, Lady Gregorys estate in Galway, in 1916.

The resonances of the poetry associated with Kabir in modern times are not only poetic but also philosophical and conceptual. In the 1960s, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes and Julia Kristeva, among others in France, discovered that the words texte and text contain the metaphor of textile, allowing us to view a text as a woven fabric, and hence as an instance of textuality; a group of texts as an interwoven continuum, and hence as an embodiment of intertextuality; and even the world as a continuous text, and hence as a vast fabrication or ideological construct (Makaryk 1993, 56872, 63942). But some three and a half centuries earlier, a canonical version of Kabirs poems had already conceived of God as a Master Weaver, and the universe as an interlacing of warp and weft on His divine loom. More presciently, the poems had imagined the human body itself as Gods handiwork in the form of a fine-spun cotton sheet, in a world where reality is nothing but illusion.

It was an allegorical image of astonishing acuity. Medical science, for example, now tells us that when the fertilized human egg begins to divide and replicate in the womb, it first generates a flat sheet of cells, one cell thick, that rolls itself into a cylinder to form the tube of the spine, around which the embryo then builds itself with layers of tissue. For the Kabir text fixed in the early seventeenth century, the human body is always already a kosha, an envelope, woven on the loom of procreation like a sheet of diaphanous muslin, to be wrapped around mind, consciousness and self. The penetrating quality of such conceptions has repeatedly renewed the poetic power of Kabirs verse, raising it to the level of a perpetually modern classic.

In the course of the twentieth century, Kabir has come to be construed as an individual author in the modern sense of the term, and to occupy a position of primacy in the history of Indian literatures and religions. He is widely regarded as the first major poet in the Hindi language; as the earliest author of the bhakti movement in Hindi literature; and as the di sant, the first and predominant figure, in the sant parapar 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, and to replace them with a new architecture of ideas. Moreover, Kabir is a primary influence on the early Sikh Gurus, and hence plays an important role in the formation of Sikhism as a distinctive, antithetical religion.