Kabir: Communicating the Incommunicable Author(s): Sehdev Kumar Source: India International Centre Quarterly, Vol. 10, No.

2, MEDIA: response and change (JUNE 1983), pp. 206-215 Published by: India International Centre Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23001645 . Accessed: 07/11/2013 08:46
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METAPHYSICAL

COMMUNICATION

Kabir: Sehdev

Communicating Kumar

the Incommunicable*

rivers, there exists a fish that sees with a twin-lensed eye. With one, it surveys the watery depths in which it resides, and with another, it examines the upper world of air and sunshine. In Brazilian The life and vision of the fifteenth-century saint-poet of India Kabir resembles that of this fish: with an unswerving Kabir holds glance, as one unified whole. The the vision of the earth and the heavens greatest Gautama to of Indian mystics and poets, Kabir has been compared Buddha and hailed as 'the father of Hindi literature' and the of religious harmony. Kabir's songs and couplets, which 'patron-saint' are recited to this day with a fervour that is com run into thousands, manded only by those who touch upon the most ardent yearning of man: Love. with an unparalleled Kabir's vision has embraced, intensity, the alike. That is entire spectrum of life in India, spiritual and temporal he is all things to all men. For the socially why for the Indians, troubled as they are by the pain and suffering of millions concerned, who sang against the tyranny Kabir is the oppressed, the who in their own like Mahatma, Gandhi, tongue against spoke a morass of untouchability. For a spiritual seeker, Kabir is great Yogi, a Sat Purusa who shines like a beacon in the blinding storm. For men For the like of whom 'in a thou of letters, Kabir is a poet par excellence, sand years of Hindi literature, there has not been quite another'.1
This article is based Press, Centre. on the author's Canada, The and Vision also of on Kabir, to be a talk delivered published by at the India

of their people, Kabir is a revolutionary of the powerful and the privileged.

McGill-Queens International

Montreal,

206

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INCOMMUNICABLE

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Hailed as an avatar, the incarnate of the Supreme Being, and an 'Indian Luther', a Christian 'influenced by the writings of St. John', there are universal attempts by all religious groups to claim Kabirto be one of their own. Muslims remember him as Kabir Shah, 'the great King'. In fact, Ali Kabir is one of the ninety-nine names given to God in the Koran. Hindus often call him Kabir-das; meaning 'the holy servant'. The Sikhs and the Kabir-panthis, 'the followers of Kabir' remember him as Kabir-Sahib, He is also or 'Master-Kabir'. called Babaji Kabir, baba being a familiar appellation for a man of a Bhagat; For the Sufis, Kabir is a Pir; for the Vaisnavas knowledge. for contemporary Indians, he is an enlightened man whose vision is not marred by orthodoxy or dogma, and is as vibrant today as it has as far back as always been. Even amongst the western missionaries, the eighteenth-century della Marco Padre Italian monk, Capuchin Kabir has aroused an inordinate fascination. Tomba,2

Nevertheless for all the claims made, for the common people of his India, Kabir remains Sant Kabir. It was to them that he addressed the of love. He did so not in Sanskrit, profoundly simple message of the academics but in their own verna and the clerics, language cular: in the various dialects of Hindi. Like the thirteenth-century poetry of Jacopone de Todi in Italy, or Richard Rolle in England, the songs of Kabir are part of the folk-lore of India. They have been sung for five centuries, in fields and temples, and musicians by peasants his sakhis alike. Over this period Kabir's in particular utterances, or the couplets, have assumed much so that a a proverbial ring'so
large number of popular sayings current in Northern and Central

the form of a sakhi attributed to Kabir. ... for the common people of Hindustan, even to this day, Kabir's voice is really vox populi and his sakhis (authentic or not) are constantly quoted as to the highest and most profound truth.'3 real "testimonies" India have taken II Kabir has been called a monist, an advaitist, a pantheist, a trans cendentalism a Sufi, a Nirguni, a Nath-Panthi, a Vaisnav, a Tantric, and There is not a stream of spiritual thought that has so on and on. chord in Kabir. Indeed he encom not somehow found a sympathetic water from all rivers; but them all, like the ocean that receives passes his vision is not circumscribed by any one of them. Like the trans cendental Kabir too

reality that he seeks, beyond names and beyond attributes, If he is to be is not to be caught in any labels or "isms". he as himself, a be he should at suggests name called, all, given any Divine. with the a in love is Kabir a lover. lover, premi,

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that As a sage, Kabir saw much beyond the limited perceptions bind us in our ordinary states of consciousness, as though the spectrum of light that touched his eye was far greater than ours. In his songs sense of trans and couplets, there is an ever-pervasive so of The Other Shore, The Unstruck Music, The Invisible cendence, River. Yet for all these, Kabir is deeply rooted in his own times and the soil that so nourished his him. His metaphors and allegories, satire and his teachings, and yearnings reflect a man his concerns who is as intensely alive to the trials of the people of his class and casteas he is to the joys and ecstasies the universe command for him the same sees the presence of the holy everywhere.

of of eternity. All aspects as he sacramental quality,

The truth of Kabir is that he is a lover, and his whole life is like an epic love-poem. Always yearning for or in embrace of his Beloved, Kabir sings joyously of love and longing, of rapture and separation, of laughter and tears. Kabir's Beloved, however, is not merely another It is the Primal Element that permeates everywhere, 'the Being person. of our being', the Soul of our soul'. of this Be But his experience is as intense and as so rhapsodicaliy in his songs, loved, expressed palpable as any known on the human plane. With Thy Light 0 my Beloved Come into My eyes, 1 shall adore you Forever To contain you Inside me I'll lower my eye-lids So you won't look at another And I shall behold Only

I shall make my eyes into a bridal-chamber In its pupil I shall lay

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KABIR:

COMMUNICATING

THE

INCOMMUNICABLE

2Uy

the bridal bed I'll use my eye-lashes like bamboo curtains, And there, 0 my friend, I shall adore My Beloved. distant remote place, on some himself nountain in the clouds, or in a shrine or a cave, but within ike 'the pupil in the eye', 'the fragrance in the flower'; 'the pearl in the jyster-shell': I send letters to my Lover Kabir's Beloved resides in no As though He were In another land

0 how I forget That He resides here In my eyes In my heart, Receiving messages of my love At all times. Ill The body of poetical work attributed to Kabir is large and varied. it is quite probable that Kabir was more or less illiterate. However, have weaver would as a low-caste Certainly his social background is him to So what is attributed permitted him little formal education. the most likely his banis or 'utterances' from communicated guru's mouth, gurumukha, and written down by his two disciples, Bhagodas and Dharmadas. Kabir's songs and couplets thus are utterances of a In all of Kabir's work, there visionary, rather than literary compositions. is nothing else but an ardent expression of his personal, experiential vision. are no narratives or allegories, or argumentsonly a raw, roaring, his experience of the Divine. mentaries There epics rhapsodic

or fables, com outburst of

unfamiliar with the As such, it is true that at times Kabir seems or is indifferent to the delicate finer subtleties of poetical composition; art of ornate poetry. For some, his style is too rugged and tense to be of the Indian poetical com considered kavya in the traditional sense

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Kabir is 'as tender position. But underneath an occasional roughness, as a flower and as hard as a diamond'.4 The no-nonsense verve of his but poetry may not fully qualify him as a kavi, in the orthodox sense; Kabir was 'undoubtedly a great poet, one of the greatest in India. As a mystical poet, he has probably never been surpassed'.5 poetry thus requires at every step, a higher subjectivity; the of necessity 'seeing the Beloved through the eyes of the lover'. 'Those critics who don't understand this', ProfessorDwivedi asserts,'are merely exhibitionism'.6 wasting the time of their readers through scholastic short banis principally comprise two poetic constructs: or lyrics, known as padas and ramainis; the other distichs called dohas or saloku or sakhis. Sakhi couplets (Sanskrit: sloka) literally means 'witness to the vision'. As direct evidence of the Truth, a sakhi is transmitted by word of mouth. It may be written but a sakhi is meant to be memorized. For a spiritual aspirant, a sakhi is like a call of a morning bird announcing dawn: rhymed are the eyes of wisdom on them Reflect Without their understanding There is no end to anguish. Kabir composed hundreds of padas, it is through his Though sakhis that his legend has come to be. It is said that in Northern or ethical and spiritual truth occasion India, there is no conceivable that has not been expressed to Kabir. Several of in a sakhi ascribed these sakhis have a quality of an aphorism, that of a muhavra or a It may be that a lokokti, so that it is not easy to trace their genesis. common proverb has been used by Kabir, as was his style, to make the ordinary symbolic. Or the name of Kabir has been associated with some age-old proverb, to give it new significance. The sakhis Kabir's Kabir's

underlies the facts'. The richness of Kabir's poetic imagery is that of a saint; the luminosity that pervades his poems is there to illuminate only one idea, the primal element: Love.

For Kabir, this wisdom was as concrete and as real as one's own heart-beat. He referred to it like a lover and a child: 'so drunk am I ...', 'the fragrance that resides in the flower', 'the music that emanates from a thousand-stringed and vina', 'the dance of abandon 'the rain of pearls', 'the laughter of children on the sea ecstasy', 'the oil in the seed'. All images shore', 'the clay-pot on the wheel', real and concrete but all alluding to the 'mythopoetic reference that

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His vision of love, Kabir said, is beyond even his own poems and all the metaphors that they employ. By lifting poetry thus from the realm of the ordinary human consciousness, Kabir made it truly the voice of gods. To do so, he employed many concrete symbols and myths and metaphors; convey the 'total otherness but often even they seemed of the holy'. IV On many such occasions there is a clear breakdown of all lan of absurdity' that renders guage, as Kabir resorts to the 'language Sometimes itself to no understanding, there is an easy or otherwise. 'a lotus that blossoms without contrariness: inversion, an obvious 'the son of 'a in the a river that is drowned barren boat', water', Such modes sand'. of 'the out of have oil woman', expression oozing been called inadequate to

of inversion'. There have been ultabamsis, 'the language utterances but they remain valiant attempts to 'decode'such use of is some This 'absurd' or elusive. language largely paradoxical the times referred to as sandhabhasa: the'twilight language', language that mediates, like twilight, between light and darkness. It is not merely an allegorical quality may be a deliberate style; its absurd enigmatic nature of mystical experience. attempt to allude to the transcendental several is found even in the early vedic of language Indeed such 'non-use' and the Nath-Panthis, both with Sidhas literature; and the Sahejiya influence on Kabir, use this approach elaborate extensively. with all its allegorical limitations of language, richness, is primarily been expressed whose by all those knowledge artists no less than the lovers and the mystics. experientialthe Kabir's ultabamsis thus call our attentionnot so much to their absurd and contradictory nature, but to the futility of words to express the Experience of the 'Beyond and the Beyond'. The

have

the incommu Though Kabir was perhaps illiterate, to communicate of words and mixed them nicable, he played with sounds and nuances the way in which a painter mixes colours. The result, in some cases, is a form of mantra, the words his sakhis then become extraordinary; In the sakhi No. 'momentary deity'. following 4, for instance, attention but man ka may be paid to the word manka which means a bead, is 'of the heart'. Again in sakhi No. 8, lal means 'child', but lali is These two sakhis are amongst the most celebrated illumination. of Kabir's compositions, where he becomes gloriously both the word and the medium.

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SEHDEV

KUMAR

1. So drunk am I with the presence

of my Beloved all ambivalence That my is gone Forever 0 Kabir A potter's bowl

Once baked in the fire is not turned On the wheel again. 2. I shall make my body into a clay-lamp, My soul, its wick And my blood Oil Ah, the light of this lamp Would reveal the face of my Beloved To me. 3. The guru is a potter And the pupil a pot 0 dear brother How it hurts when he thumps from the outside, But see How delicately he supports from the inside, So a beautiful pot may be created. *4. For eons You have been moving the beads in your hand, Yet nothing

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KABIR:

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THE

INCOMMUNICABLE

has moved in your heart 0 my friend Leave aside the beads Open your hands Let the heart Turn. 5. Sand and stone They have piled, And they call it A mosque And there How like a hawker The priest shouts the name of Allah
j4s though

God were deaf. 6. If by worshipping a stone-idol one could see The face of the Lord one might as well worship a mountain Or better still Why not a grind-stone? It grinds the grain And feeds the world. 7. Scriptures You have read all, 0 Pandit But like a parrot in a cage, You only recite them to others, Without understanding Without practice.

8.

Everywhere My eyes turn I see

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His illumination 0 my friends When I reach out to touch it 1 too Become part of the illumination. 9. I am Like a day-pitcher Floating in the river Water inside, water outside Now suddenly with the touch of the guru The pitcher is broken Inside Outside 0 friends It's all One! 10. The musk is in its navel Yet oblivious of the source of fragrance The deer wanders All over the forest in its search 0 seeker The Holy One too resides within; How unaware we are of it! 11. Just as the oil is hidden in the seed and the spark in the stone 0 seeker Thy Master too Resides within Open your eyes And see.

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KABIR:

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INCOMMUNICABLE

12.

The presence of God is like grains of sugar in a pile of sand, An elephant can't pick them But an ant Knows the way 0 Kabir, listen: Truth is very subtle Be humble to seek it.

NOTES 1. 2. H.P. Padre 18th

AND

REFERENCES 4th ed.

Dwivedi, Marco

Kabir, della

Bombay,

1953, p. 217. twenty Cabir years during the or Satnam Kabir, mid also

century; he known as Gyan-Sagar. Vaudeville, op.

stayed in India for almost translated into Italian the Satnans

Tomba

3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Ch.

Kabir,

Vol

I, Oxford,

1974,

p. 147.

Dwivedi, Vaudeville, ibid., For a

cit., p. 162. cit., p. 70.

op.

p. 212. detailed discussion on Allahabad, ultabamsis, 1978, see Dwivedi, op. cit., pp. 80-94; N.

Tiwari, 8. Dwivedi,

Kabir-bani-sudha, op. cit., p. 223.

pp. 115-117.

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