Kabir

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

The birth of Kabir remains shrouded in mystery and legend. One tradition holds that he was born in 1398, which would have made him 120 years old at his death. It is also uncertain who his parents were. According to one legend, his mother was a Brahman who became pregnant after a visit to a Hindu shrine. Because she was unwed, she abandoned Kabir, who was found and adopted by a Muslim weaver. That his early life began as a Muslim there is little doubt, but he was later strongly influenced by a Hindu ascetic, Ramananda.

Although Kabir 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 Brahmans or qāḍīs (judges); meaningless rites of initiation could focus either on the sacred thread or on circumcision. What really counted, for Kabir, 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. Kabir’s principal media of communication were songs called padas and rhymed couplets (dohas) sometimes called “words” (shabdas) or “witnesses” (sakhis). A number of those couplets, and others attributed to Kabir since his death, have come to be commonly used by speakers of North Indian languages.

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Kabir’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 (mystical) lineages, and for Hindus he becomes a Vaishnavite (devotee of the god Vishnu) with universalist leanings. But when one goes back to the poetry that can most reliably be attributed to Kabir, 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 Kabir’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 Kabir Panth, a sect found across northern and central India that draws its members especially, but not exclusively, from the Dalits (formerly known as untouchables). The Kabir Panth regards Kabir as its principal guru or even as a divinity—truth incarnate. The broad range of traditions on which Kabir 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.