Kabir: The Weaver’s Songs

Description

Book Specification

Item Code:	IHL372
Author:	Vinay Dharwadker
Publisher:	Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd.
Edition:	2003
ISBN:	9780143029687
Pages:	324
Cover:	Paperback
	a53_books
Other Details	7.6 inch X 5.1 inch

Book Description

PENGUIN CLASSICS

THE WEAVER’S SONGS

Vinay Dharwadker was born in Pune in 1954,and was educated at St. Stephen’s College, Delhi University, and the University of Chicago. He is the author of a book of poems, Sunday at the Lodi Gardens (1994),and an editor of The Oxford Anthology of Modern Indian Poetry (1994), a co-editor of The Collected Poems of A. K. Ramanujan (1995), and the general editor of The Collected Essays of A. K. Ramanujan (1999). His other edited books include Cosmopolitan Geographies: New Locations in Literature and Culture (2001). He has published translations of modern Hindi, Marathi, Urdu and Punjabi poetry, as well as essays on literary theory, translation studies and Indian English literature. He teaches Indian languages and literatures at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he also serves as the Director of the Centre for South Asia.

Contents
Translator’s Note	ix
Introduction	1
Kabir, His Poetry and His World
1. The Life of a Weaver	1
2. The Fabric of the Text	25
3. The Thread of Authorship	58
4. The Design of the Poetry	73
The Poems	97
I. ‘Sixty Threads in the Warp’	99
Poems from the Northern Texts
The Final State	101
Body and Self	103
Slander	105
Birth and Light	107
The Senses	109
The Master Weaver	110
Trap	112
Poverty	114
Fable	116
Departure	117
Ant	119
Mosque with Ten Doors	121
The Way	122
Purity	124
Greed	126
The Jewel	128
Allh-Rama	129
II. ‘I’ve Painted My Body Red’	131
Poems from the Western Texts
Wedding	133
Fever	135
The Provider	136
Debate	137
Mother and Son	138
Banaras and Magahar	139
Let Me See You	140
Storm	141
The Love of King Rma	142
Doer and Deed	144
Maya	146
Meditation	148
Sapling and Seed	149
Moth	151
Deadly Business	152
III. ‘The Ganga Drains the Ocean’	155
Poems from the Eastern Texts
Warrior	157
Rama’s Essence	159
The Simple State	161
The Ten Avatars	164
Parting	168
A City Ablaze	169
Holiness and Hell	171
IV. ‘Neither Line Nor Form’	173
A Selection of Aphorisms
Shaloks from the di Granth	175
Skhs from the Kabr Granthaval	177
Skhs from the Bjak	179
V. ‘This Sheet, So Fine, So Fine’	189
A Selection of Songs
Sheet	191
The Flawless One	193
Breath	195
The Bhakta’s Caste	196
Garden	197
The Mystery of Maya	198
Swan	199
Fish	200
The Ineffable	201
Apostasy	202
Allah-and-Rama	203
Neither This Nor That	204
Rain	205
Creation	206
Don’t Stay	208
Notes to the Poems	209
Note on Transliteration	254
Glossary	257
Bibliography	296

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

Kabir’s 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 enigma a 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. Auden’s 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 Kabir’s poetry has stayed alive for more than half a millennium. Yeats himself first encountered a sample of it in Rabindranath Tagore’s translations, which were published in Songs of Kabir in 1915 with an Introduction by Evelyn Underhill. The brief fable of the hams 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. Tagore’s 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, 55-56)

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?

It’s now the morning of consciousness,

let’s leave together.

We won’t be filled with grief and doubt in that place,

the fear of death won’t 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 Tagore’s English, Kabir’s 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 Gregory’s 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, 568-72, 639-42). But some three and a half centuries earlier, a canonical version of Kabir’s 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 God’s 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 Kabir’s 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 parampar 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.

At the same time and for similar reasons, Kabir has also come to occupy a position of prominence in world literature. As a fifteenth-century poet concerned with God, the experience of God, and the quest for an equivalent of salvation, he ranks among the foremost Asian and European mystics of the past millennium. As a social thinker, satirist and strong critic of older, established religions, he stands among the major reformers of the period who help define the multifarious transition from the late middle ages to early modernity around the globe (Dvivedi 2000, 170-75; Dass 1991,1-21; Underhill 1915, 1-43).

My principal goal in The Weaver’s Songs is to present readers in the twenty-first century with a fresh, compact yet representative selection of poems attributed to Kabir in reliable English translations, along with a commentary that would enable them to understand the poetry in its historical and cultural contexts. This goal, however, is complicated by the fact that the poems carrying Kabir’s signature-line have reached us in an unusually varied and voluminous form. The complexity of the textual transmission implies that we cannot approach the poet as if he were an individual author, and that we cannot interpret his words, or the words ascribed to him, without working our way through a great deal of historical mediation. But if we comprehend the processes in Indian culture that have configured his poetry over the past five or six centuries, we can begin to appreciate the probable nature of his achievement as well as the structure of his imagination.

This book is divided into four main parts. The first consists of an Introduction entitled ‘Kabir, His Poetry and His World’, which discusses what we know of the poet’s life and circumstances, the transmission of his poetry in the written, musical and oral modes since the century after his death, the issues surrounding the authorship of the poems ascribed to him, and the interpretation of the poetry itself. Since the process of selecting and translating the poems proves to be inseparable from the process of decoding their history and authorship, the Introduction also explains my strategies as editor, translator and critical commentator, and thus offers a comprehensive overview of the subject and method of this book.

The second part contains my translations of one hundred poems preserved in Kabir’s name. The poems are distributed over five sections, with each section representing material from a particular source or set of sources, and the sequence of sections reflecting the interrelations of chronology, poetic form and mode of textual transmission. My choice of poems draws upon ten major sources and categories, and thus covers the broad range of materials found in the tradition as a whole. This is the first book, in fact, to offer a balanced representation of the multiple facets of Kabir’s poetry in English translation.

My translations follow a fairly consistent pattern. For the convenience of readers in English, the translations carry titles (except in the case of the aphorisms), even though the original poems do not. In each rendering, one verse-paragraph in English represents one verse in the original, and therefore constitutes the primary unit of meaning in the process of translation. Since each verse in the original consists of one sentence or one set of interdependent sentences, and the verse-boundary always coincides with a syntactic boundary, my approach to translation differs directly from Walter Benjamin’s, who takes ‘words rather than sentences to be the primary element of the translator’ (Benjamin 1969, 79).

At the end of each translation, I identify the text that I have rendered by citing its first verse or refrain (or both) as well as its source. In the case of my translations from the di Granth and the Goindval Pothis, the first verse precedes the refrain in the original, and I specify the poem’s position in the Granth by rga, shabad number under rga, and page number(s) according to the standard pagination. In the case of poems from the Kabr Granthval, the refrain comes before the first verse; in the instance of the Bjak, I cite only the first verse of a poem, because the source does not specify any refrains; and in the case of poems from the oral and musical traditions, I cite only the refrain. For all the sources other than the di Granth, I identify particular editions of the sources (which are cited in full in the Bibliography at the end of the book), and furnish the necessary page numbers.

The third part of The Weaver’s Songs contains my Notes to the poems. I have provided a separate note for each poem, in which I have listed all the available variants of the original as well as any previous English translations. In addition, each note offers critical comments on the poem itself, as well as explanations of my decisions as a translator, when necessary.

The fourth and final portion of the book consists of a Note on Transliteration, the Glossary and the Bibliography. The Glossary provides a comprehensive list of terms from Indian languages that I have used in the book, together with definitions and explanations. Readers will find it indispensable because I have used a large number of technical and nontechnical Indian words and phrases in the main body of this volume without always pausing to explain them there. The Bibliography contains an alphabetical listing, by author (or by title, in the case of works without specified authors), of the primary and secondary material that I have cited or used in this book, together with annotations on some unusual items.

I have avoided scholarly footnotes or endnotes because the quantity and complexity of the material on Kabir can be quite overwhelming. Instead, I have used the author-date system of citation, mentioning an author’s name and the year of publication, as well as the relevant page number(s) when necessary, either in the main body of my commentary or in parentheses. In the case of works without specified authors, I have mentioned only their tides and page numbers. Each parenthetical citation appears at the end of a sentence or a paragraph, with multiple citations separated by semicolons. All these items are keyed to the Bibliography at the end of the book.

Italics, diacritical marks, spelling and capitalization raise complicated issues in a book of this sort, and I have simplified them as much as possible. As terms for canons, ‘Veda’, ‘Purna’ and ‘Qurn’ are not italicized, but the titles of particular Purnas, such as the Brahmavaivarta Purna, are. Words from Sanskrit, Hindi and other languages that appear frequently in the booksuch as ‘bhakti’, ‘jti’ and ‘shabad’are not italicized, but words that appear infrequently are printed in italics. Modern personal names and the names of places and institutions, such as ‘Parasanath Tivari’, ‘Banaras’, ‘Rajasthan’ and ‘Dadu Dayal Panth’, do not carry diacritical marks. But other terms, most of which are common nouns, verbs and adjectives, as well as certain proper nouns and the titles of works in Indian and other languages, do contain diacritical marks for the sake of precision and clarity. The system of diacritical marks that I have adopted for the various languages used in this book is explained in the Note on Transliteration. I have also minimized the use of capitals at the beginning of non-English words or phrases, since capitalization is not a feature of the Nagari and Farsi scripts.

My material in this book draws on eleven distinct languages and speech-varieties: Sanskrit, Arabic, Farsi and modern Hindi and Urdu, as well as older forms of Avadhi, Bhojpuri, Braj Bhsh, Rajasthani, Khad Bol and Punjabi. Since all of them, with the sole exception of Bhojpuri, are full-fledged literary languages embedded in distinct written and oral cultures, I have had to adopt three separate systems of transliteration: one for Sanskrit; one for Arabic, Farsi and Urdu together; and one for the other seven languages and speech-varieties as a group. This is especially necessary for the accurate reproduction of the styles of spelling in the older manuscript sources for Kabir. All the non-English words used in the book are listed alphabetically (in the order of the English alphabet) in the Glossary at the end, where I have provided the transliterated spelling in the headword, and have indicated alternative spellings in the accompanying annotation.

The epigraphs for the four sections of my Introduction are taken from Kedarnath Singh’s long poem, ‘Uttar Kabr’, which appeared in his book, Uttar kabr aur anya kavitem, in 1995. Singh, a leading innovator of ‘post-modernist’ Hindi poetry since the 1960s, conceived of the poem in response to a minor incident during a journey that took him through Magahar, the town in north-eastern Uttar Pradesh where Kabir probably passed away. As his own epigraph to the poem explains:

One morning in December 1989, while the train I was on happened to pass through the vicinity of Magahar, my gaze fell unexpectedly on a fairly large building, in front of which hung a sign bearing the name of Kabirdas. Upon asking about it I learnt that the building was a spinning mill established by the government to commemorate Kabir, but now virtually shut downit was supposed to ensure that there would be a constant supply of yarn for the looms in that region full of weavers. Hearing about this, I wondered: How would Kabirdas have responded to this informationhe who, just a short distance from that spot, has been at rest for centuries in his deep samdh on the banks of the River Ami? (Singh 1995, 132)

The poem is cast as a dramatic monologue in Kabir’s voice, and projects him as though he had come back to life in post-modern times. In the passages I have used for my epigraphs, the poet therefore speaks to us across the centuries, in terms that are at once ours and also unmistakably his own.

I first studied and translated Kabir in 1983-86 at the University of Chicago at the suggestion of A.K. Ramanujan. I presented some of my early work to audiences at the University of Chicago (1987) and Columbia University (1994). Six of these translations appeared in Religions of India in Practice (1995), edited by Donald S. Lopez,Jr.; my thanks to Princeton University Press for permission to use them here. I am also grateful to Namvar Singh for recommending me for this project. At Penguin India, my thanks go to Kamini Mahadevan for her unfailing tact, patience and enthusiasm; and to Kalpana Joshi and her colleagues for their extraordinary care with the editing, design and production. This book, too, is for Aparna Dharwadker, and for our children, Aneesha and Sachin.

INTRODUCTION

Kabir, His Poetry and His World

1. The Life of a Weaver

And now . . .
it’s the same bank of the Ami
where I stand upright again
with Infinity wrapped
in a small, poor man’s bundle
slung over my shoulder. . . .

Who has survived
who hasn’t?

And even the one who has survived
how much of him is left
at his own proper location
in his own proper time? . . .

Kedarnath Singh,’Uttar Kabr’ (1995), pp. 133,137

The historical figure we know as Kabir probably lived in the eastern half of north India in the fifteenth century. For the past 200 years or so, the Kabir Panth, one of the religious organizations associated with his name, has assigned him an extraordinary lifespan from 1398 to 1518. Ever since the British orientalist H. H. Wilson published his pioneering essays on the subject in English in 1828 and 1832, modern scholars have sought to find more plausible dates for Kabir.

In 1950, and then again in 1964, the distinguished Hindi literary historian Parashuram Chaturvedi sifted through several decades of debate and several bodies of evidence to conclude that the poet most probably lived between the late fourteenth and mid-fifteenth centuries (84570). The American historian of religions David N. Lorenzen reopened the discussion in 1991, when he used Anantadas’s Kabr Parach, a text composed around 1625 and affiliated with the Ramananda Sampradaya, together with historical accounts of Raja Vir Singh, an early sixteenth-century ruler of Baghelkhand, to argue that Kabir may actually have flourished around the year 1500 (9-18). However, two detailed studies by Gurinder Singh Mann and one by Pashaura Singh, all dealing with the textual history of the di Granth and published between 1996 and 2001, have demonstrated once more that the poet was a predecessor and not a contemporary of Guru Nanak (1469-1539), the founder of Sikhism. The information we now have about the formation of Sikh scripture and Kabir’s place in it strongly supports the claim that he was born in or about 1398 and died around 1448, just before the mid-point of the fifteenth century.

The poetry preserved in Kabir’s name in the older surviving manuscripts indicates that he spent the greater portion of his life in Banaras. Known by the ancient name of Kashi as well as the modern Sanskritised name of Varanasi, Banaras has long been identified as ‘Shiva’s city’, one of the principal sacred sites on the Hindu map of the subcontinent. While most sources agree that the poet grew up, underwent an apprenticeship, and eventually practised an occupation in Banaras, some suggest that his birth and death may have occurred elsewhere. In all likelihood, Kabir spent a part of his life or passed his final days in the town of Magahar, which now lies in Basti district, approximately 15 miles west of Gorakhpur and 100 miles north of Banaras. A poem with his signature-line that appears as shabad 15 in Rga Gau in the di Granth (as compiled in 1604) seems to confirm the story that Banaras and Magahar constituted the two ‘ends’ of his life:

Now tell me,

Rma, what’s my future trajectory?

I’ve renounced Banaras:

Like a fish out of water,

stranded on a bank,

I’m left without the austerities

of my previous births.

I’ve squandered my whole life in Shiva’s city:

now that it’s time to die,

I’ve risen and come to Magahar. . . .

Kashi, Magahar: for a thoughtful man,

they’re one and the same.

My devotion’s depleted:

how will it land me on the other shore?

The connection between Kabir and Magahar, however, is more than poetic. Since at least the late seventeenth century, residents of the town have claimed that the poet was either buried on its outskirts, or entered his samdh there. One colonial account indicates that a local nawab named Bijli Khan built a mausoleum at that location on the banks of the river Ami in 1450, and that Fidai Khan, a nawab from outside the region, repaired it around 1567 (Keay 1931, 9597). Whether these two men invested their resources in the monument specifically to commemorate the poet remains uncertain, but as recently as 1985 the Sunni Vaqf Board of Lucknow possessed a deed dated 169899, which ‘registers the gift of the village Kabirpura Karmua for the upkeep of the Muslim tomb of Shah Kabir’ in Magahar (Lorenzen 1991,17). The honorific title ‘Shah’ mentioned in the document suggests that the building may already have come to be regarded during Aurangzeb s reign as the dargh of a sufi pr. This is broadly consistent with the fact documented in Abdul Haq Dehlavi’s Akhbal-Akhyr (composed between 1590 and 1619) and Mohsin Fani’s Dahistn-i Mazhib (mid-seventeenth century), that Indian sufis in the Agra, Delhi and Kashmir regions were reading Kabir’s poetry during the reigns of Jahangir and Shah Jahan. The tradition has continued throughout the colonial and post-independence periods, with a family of hereditary Muslim caretakers maintaining the mausoleum as a place of sufi worship and pilgrimage down to the present.

The position of Magahar in the poet’s biography, however, is complicated by two disparate factors. On the one hand, descriptions and photographs published by the missionaries G. H. Wescott (1907) and F. E. Keay (1931) and the contemporary Hindi scholar Shukdev Singh (1981), among others, show that the old Muslim tomb in Magahar stands next to a Hindu-style temple, which supposedly memorializes the spot where he entered his samdh, and is maintained by sdhus belonging to the Kabir Chaur Math of Banaras. On the other hand, as early as 1598, Ab’l Fazl, the author of the ‘n-i Akbar, the official chronicle of Akbar’s reign, recorded the existence of two other samdhs for Kabir: one at Ratanpur, now a dozen miles from Bilaspur, in Chattisgarh, and another at Puri-Jagannath, in Orissa, both maintained by the Dharamdasi branch of the Kabir Panth from the seventeenth or eighteenth century onwards (Vaudeville 1974, 33-35).

Whether Kabir was born and died in Banaras, or in Magahar or elsewhere, the poetry attributed to him and the discourse that has accumulated around it consistently claim that he belonged to the community of weavers in the Banaras-Magahar region. Nita Kumar’s ethnographic and historical work on Banaras in the 1980s has confirmed afresh that weavers have lived and worked in the city for the greater part of the past 1,000 years. Banaras has been famous for its silk and cotton weaving since early modern times, if not earlier, and remains a centre of international distinction for this craft, alongside such cities as Dhaka and Kanchipuram. Until the early twentieth century, Banarasi weavers produced their high-quality silk and cotton fabrics on hand looms that seem to have undergone little technological change over the previous seven or eight centuries. Even after the introduction of the jacquard machine and the Hattersley domestic loom around 1928, they have continued to practise their craft in ways that may go back to the beginning of the last millennium. Silk weaving, especially for saris, is still done on looms installed in krakhns or workshops in weaver’s homes, and work-patterns in modern family businesses remain centred around the personalities of their master weavers, whose individual styles combine labour and leisure, technical skill and commercial acumen, and moodiness and imagination in different measures (Kumar 1989,147-52).

One of the Kabir poems in the di Granthshabad 54 in Rga Gau, preserved since the first decade of the seventeenth centurycaptures the general atmosphere of a Banarasi weavers workshop with great precision, even though its primary theme is more abstract and enigmatic:

The weaver thought,
Let me weave
a body jot my self
but he couldn’t have his wish,
and left his house
in great frustration.

Nine yards, ten yards,
twen