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Kabir (c. 15th century) medieval Hindi saint-poet

Kabir, a poor, illiterate man, was one of the great

saint-poets of northern India. He is revered by

Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs, although his work

includes much social and religious criticism of

Islam and Hinduism.

The poet was born in BENARES (Varanasi) into

a weaver family who had recently converted to

Islam. As with other poet-saints such as RAM-

PRASAD and TUKARAM, the actual details of his life

are not known for certain; it is not even known

which of the poems attributed to him were

authentically his. Indian poet-saints, particularly

those who relied upon song to communicate, very

quickly became legendary figures, the possessions

of everyone. More important than the concrete

details of these people’s lives or the verses that

may be authentically theirs is the collective imagi-

nation of them, which makes them part of the

cultural consciousness and makes their writings a

collective possession.

It is understood from his verses that Kabir

was illiterate, but in India this is less important

than in the bibliophilic West. Real Indian tra-

dition, the culture that occupied the center of

Indian consciousness, was always oral and aural

first. Written texts were the abode of scholars and

pundits but less important for the transmission

of tradition.

Kabir was the disciple of the GURU Ramananda,

a famous c. 15th-century teacher. A story tells

how Kabir, a convert to Islam, tricked this ortho-

dox Hindu into accepting him as a student. Kabir

is said to have lain upon the steps that the guru

always took in the morning to do his bathing and

ablutions in the river. Tripping in the dark over

the supine Kabir, the guru in fear uttered, “Ram!

Ram!” This is, in fact, a MANTRA in and of itself, and

so the crafty Kabir insisted he must be accepted as

a disciple since he had heard the guru’s mantra.

(It should be added that Kabir’s understanding of

the mantra RAMA is not an orthodox one. For him

the word did not designate the AVATA R of VISHNU

of that name, but was a divine “name” that leads

one to an undifferentiated ADVAITA (non-dual)

consciousness.)

There exists a story, probably apocryphal and

invented by Hindus, that Kabir was actually born

of a BRAHMIN woman and set afloat in a basket

on a pond to be found by a Muslim couple. Both

Hindus and Muslims still claim Kabir as their

own (while his words are included in the sacred

books of the Sikhs, the Guru GRANTH SAHIB.) It is

said that when Kabir died, Muslims and Hindus

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