Kabir, the Fifteenth-Century Weaver of Banaras, Has Verses in the Guru Granth Sahib, a Sacred Book of His Own in the Bijak, and a Hindu Samadhi and a Muslim Mazar Side by Side at Maghar

Kabir was a weaver in Banaras (Varanasi) in the fifteenth century, and his short verses in everyday Hindi now turn up in three places: the Guru Granth Sahib of the Sikhs, the Bijak, the sacred book of the Kabir Panth, and an English book of 100 songs that Rabindranath Tagore translated in 1915. SikhNet, a Sikh community site, says his hymns and couplets in the Guru Granth Sahib outnumber those of any other of the fifteen Bhagats, the poet-saints the scripture includes beside the Gurus. At Maghar in Uttar Pradesh, the Gorakhpur district website says, a samadhi (a memorial shrine) raised by Hindus and a mazar (a tomb) raised by Muslims stand next to each other.

A weaver who wrote in the speech of the street

Charlotte Vaudeville, writing in the Encyclopedia of Religion, describes Kabir as a Julaha, a low-caste Muslim weaver, born in or near Banaras. The Julahas were probably recent converts to Islam, she writes. Pashaura Singh’s entry in the Encyclopedia of Global Religion agrees on the trade and notes that Kabir names his weaving caste in his own sayings. Singh adds that his background makes it likely he was more or less unable to read and write.

The language was the language of the market. Evelyn Underhill, who introduced Tagore’s translation, wrote that the songs were composed in popular Hindi and not in the literary tongue, and were aimed at ordinary people. Vaudeville calls it a loose form of Old Hindi that may have served as a common speech for wandering holy men.

Linda Hess and Shukdeo Singh, whose translation of about half the Bijak was published by Oxford University Press in 2002, describe Kabir as an oral poet. Other people wrote his words down, and they survived mainly through song. The forms are the sabda or pada (a song) and the sakhi or doha (a two-line couplet), with some ramaini, a third form, in the Bijak.

Francesca Orsini, reviewing Purushottam Agrawal’s 2009 book Akath Kahani Prem Ki, reports his finding that Kabir called himself a julaha, a kori (a weaver caste), or “neither Hindu nor Muslim”. Agrawal also shows, in her summary, that until the nineteenth century only the Kabir Panth argued that Kabir was not born a weaver.

Three different pairs of dates

The dates depend on whom you read. Tradition gives 1398 to 1518, a life of 120 years, according to the Encyclopedia of World Biography and Roger Long’s entry in the Encyclopedia of India. Underhill wrote in 1915 that he was born probably about 1440 and died in 1518. Pashaura Singh dates him to about 1398 to about 1448. Vaudeville says only that he lived in the fifteenth century and that his birth and death dates are uncertain.

His parentage is told in two ways. The Muslim weaving family appears in Vaudeville, Hess and Singh, and Underhill. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Religions and the Encyclopedia of World Biography also record a story of a Brahmin widow’s child raised by a Muslim weaver and his wife. John Bowker, the dictionary’s author, notes that the tale may reflect his mixed origins.

The Prime Minister’s Office marked the 500th anniversary of his death on 28 June 2018, which fits the 1518 that Underhill gives.

Three collections, three communities

The Guru Granth Sahib holds the oldest dated written record of his sayings, Vaudeville writes, in the scripture Guru Arjan compiled in about 1604. Pashaura Singh traces the earliest collection of Kabir’s utterances inside the Adi Granth tradition to the third quarter of the sixteenth century.

SikhNet counts 227 padas (hymns) in 17 ragas (musical modes) and 237 sloks (couplets), and says Guru Nanak first gathered the verses during his first travels, from 1507 to 1515, when he visited Banaras. Long’s entry in the Encyclopedia of India gives a different total, more than 500 verses.

The Bijak is the second collection. Hess and Singh call it the sacred book of the Kabir Panth, the community of his followers. Pashaura Singh writes that it likely took its shape in the seventeenth or eighteenth century. The third is the Kabir Granthavali, which the Dadu Panth reveres and which Vaudeville says the Dadupanthis compiled in about 1600.

Kabir did not found a sect, Vaudeville writes, but followers in Bihar later called themselves Kabirpanthis. The Encyclopedia of World Biography reports a count of about one million members around the year 1900.

In Varanasi, the Kabir Chaura Math is the main memorial. The Ministry of Tourism’s Incredible India page lists the Beejak Mandir, a samadhi and a mazaar for Kabir, a library, and Neeru Teela, which it gives as the resting place of his parents, Neeru and Nima. The same page calls the neighbourhood the musicians’ quarter and the cradle of the Banaras Gharana, a school of classical music. Tuput’s profile of Ustad Bismillah Khan follows another Varanasi musician.

What the verses say

The first song in Tagore’s translation begins, in his English: “O servant, where dost thou seek Me? Lo! I am beside thee.” The God of the song is in no temple, no mosque, no Kaaba and no Kailash, and its closing line calls God the breath of all breath.

Another song deals with caste. In the same translation: “It is needless to ask of a saint the caste to which he belongs.” It names the barber, the washerwoman and the carpenter among those who sought God, and says Hindus and Muslims alike reached the same end.

Vaudeville summarises the teaching as a rejection of the idea of two separate religions, of revealed scripture and of yogic exercise, with an inner guru who speaks in the soul. Roger Long adds that Kabir taught a devotion open to all castes and faiths and taught non-violence. Hess and Singh say the poems satirise hypocrisy, greed and violence among the religious, criticise caste and affirm that all people are equal.

Tuput’s article on Hindu and Muslim shared saints places Kabir in the wider devotional world of his time.

A teacher on the ghat steps, and a sultan’s court

Tradition names the Hindu ascetic Ramananda as Kabir’s teacher. Underhill tells the story as the legend has it: Kabir hid on the Ganges steps where Ramananda bathed, the master trod on him unexpectedly and cried “Ram! Ram!”, and Kabir declared that he had received his initiation from the master’s lips. One song in Tagore’s collection says Kabir was revealed in Benares and that Ramananda enlightened him. Vaudeville calls Ramananda Kabir’s putative guru, and Hess and Singh say he is believed to be a disciple. The steps in question belong to the city described in tuput’s guide to the Varanasi ghats.

Underhill also records that after a supposed miracle of healing Kabir was brought before Sultan Sikandar Lodi on a charge of claiming divine powers. The ruler spared him, and Kabir was banished from Benares in about 1495, when he was nearly sixty. Underhill called this the last event in his career of which anything definite was known. The Encyclopedia of World Biography tells the same sequence in brief.

Maghar, and the flowers under the shroud

Underhill states that Kabir died in 1518 at Maghar near Gorakhpur. The district website says the town had a bad name and few wished to come, and that Kabir decided to die there to break a belief about going to hell. It adds that he is believed to have sent word that people should not blindly follow the practice of flocking to Varanasi to reach moksha, liberation from rebirth.

The tradition at Maghar holds that when Hindu and Muslim followers argued over his body, the cloth lifted to show only flowers, which the two communities divided. Underhill reports it, and Vaudeville and the Encyclopedia of World Biography give versions of the same story. In Underhill’s telling the Muslims buried their half at Maghar and the Hindus carried theirs to Benares to be burned.

The district of Sant Kabir Nagar was created on 5 September 1997 and named for the area where Kabir was active, according to its website.

On 28 June 2018 the Prime Minister’s Office reported that Narendra Modi offered floral tributes at the samadhi and a chadar (a cloth offering) at the mazar, and unveiled a plaque for the foundation stone of the Sant Kabir Academy. The release gives the academy’s cost as about Rs 24 crore and its purpose as preserving Kabir’s legacy along with Uttar Pradesh’s regional dialects and folk arts. The PMO’s posts that day add that the plan included training halls for Kabir singing and dance, a research centre and a library, and that a Kabir festival began that day. The release reports the Prime Minister as saying Kabir broke caste barriers and spoke the language of the ordinary rural Indian.

The book that carried him to English readers

Songs of Kabir was published by Macmillan in New York in 1915. Tagore translated, Underhill wrote the introduction, and she described the book as the first time a selection of the songs was offered to English readers. Tagore had won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913, as NobelPrize.org records, and the story of that award and his later return of a knighthood is in tuput’s Tagore article. The Encyclopedia of World Biography adds that the authenticity of the 100 songs in the book has been questioned.

Stamps, films and yatras

India Post issued a Kabir stamp on 1 October 1952, part of a set of six Saints and Poets stamps. Indian Philatelics lists a print run of 15.3 million for the Kabir stamp, whose design is adapted from a painting in the State Museum, Lucknow.

Shabnam Virmani began the Kabir Project journeys in 2002, according to the Bangalore Literature Festival. They have produced four documentary films, a digital archive called Ajab Shahar and a series of urban festivals and rural yatras (journeys).

The Christian Science Monitor reported on 21 November 2023 that his couplets remain common in Hindu, Muslim and Sikh devotional songs. Banaras Hindu University held a conference in late October that year with more than 30 speakers from India, Sri Lanka and South Africa. Gopal Singh Chauhan, who founded the travelling folk festival Rajasthan Kabir Yatra, has worked with Rajasthan police since 2015, after mob violence in Dungargarh. Dalpat Rajpurohit of the University of Texas at Austin told the paper that conservative Hindus admire Kabir as well.

What the manuscripts allow

John Stratton Hawley’s Three Bhakti Voices (Oxford University Press, 2012) goes back to the oldest manuscripts from across North India. Hawley argues that many beliefs and legends about Kabir, Mirabai and Surdas arose long after their deaths. The wording of the poems is unsettled too. In Orsini’s account, Winand Callewaert studied 593 padas in ten early manuscripts, the latest dated 1681, and found only 48 that appear in at least three of them.