Kabir

Kabir was a poet, mystic and weaver from northern India who lived in Benares (Varanasi) sometime between the late fourteenth or mid-fifteenth century and the early sixteenth. A key figure in the devotional bhakti current within Hinduism, he is today one of the most loved poets of the subcontinent, and his influence reaches Sikhism and the sant tradition. What makes him stand out is his independent voice: he refused to belong to Hinduism, Islam or Sufism, and preferred to speak directly to anyone, regardless of caste, creed or occupation.

The dates of his life remain uncertain. Some historians place him between 1398 and 1448, others between 1440 and 1518. Tradition holds that he was found as a child beside Lahara Tara lake by a Muslim weaving couple, Niru and Nima, although another version makes him the abandoned son of a Brahmin widow. He worked as a weaver and is considered a disciple of the teacher Ramananda, a link that not all scholars accept. According to tradition he married Loi and had two children. He could not read or write, and his poems circulated by word of mouth for generations.

His verses, known as dohas or sakhis, blend several vernacular languages and use plain, highly metaphorical speech. Because they were passed on orally, the collections that survive, such as the Bijak, were written down much later and differ from one another, so specialists still debate which poems are genuinely his. More than five hundred of his verses appear in the Adi Granth, the sacred scripture of Sikhism, which accounts for much of his presence in that tradition.

His thought centres on the relationship between the individual soul and God. He sharply criticised empty ritual, idolatry, asceticism and the caste system, and spared neither Hindus nor Muslims. From Hindu tradition he took reincarnation and the law of karma; from Islam, the idea of a single God. For him the search does not pass through temples or mosques but through sincere devotion, righteous conduct and the surrender of the ego.

The legend of his death captures his position. It is said that Hindus and Muslims quarrelled over his body, and when they lifted the shroud they found flowers, or in another version a book. His followers buried one half and cremated the other. Today his tomb and his memorial stone still stand side by side at Maghar. His influence endures among poets, musicians and writers. Rabindranath Tagore’s English translation, published in 1915, introduced him to the West, and the Kabir panth, which regards him as its founder, continues to this day.