teachings, and among his supposed disciples are Kabı ̄r the weaver, Raida ̄s the
leatherworker, Sen the barber, and Dhana the butcher.
Kabı ̄r was a fifteenth-century resident of Banaras and member of the julaha
caste and is the most well-known, particularly for his caustic critiques of all
hypocrisy and social and religious hierarchy. He spares no one – both Hindu and
Muslim religious leaders and the rulers of the land receive no mercy, and he
preaches a path of realization of the One who is beyond all distinctions and
limited human categories – the nirgun.Lord. He cries out:
Brother, were did your two gods come from?
Tell me, who made you mad?
Ra ̄m, Allah, Keshav, Karim, Hari, Hazrat –
So many names.
So many ornaments, all one gold,
It has no double nature.
(Hess and Shukdev Singh 1983, 50–1)Again and again he hammers home the point that we must face death and our
own mortality if we are going to truly live:
Make your own decision.
See for yourself while you live.
Find your own place.
Dead, what house will you have?
(Hess and Shukdev Singh 1983: 68)Instead of doing so, we are tied to our senses like an ox to an oil press going round
and round on the wheel of life, and we live under delusion, like a dog seeing its
own reflection and barking itself to death. And to those who think themselves
more pure than others, he reminds us that all bodies are of the same clay and
the water we drink, whatever its source, has been the bathing place of humans
and animals and passed through corpses and filth on its way to us. And milk?
Trickling through bones, melting through flesh –
Where does milk come from?
That’s what you drink after lunch, pandit.
And you call clay untouchable?
(Hess and Shukdev Singh 1983: 57–8)Who then can claim to be more pure?
Kabı ̄r’s message is strident and his language often coarse, and he is above all
a preacher, denouncing all outward forms of religious practice as salvific in
themselves and calling his hearers into relationship with the One God (Hess and
Shukdev Singh 1983: 7–37). Yet the truth is not easily grasped – we must come
to hear the unstruck sound and to know its untellable story. Kabı ̄r had both
Muslim and Hindu followers, and it is said that at his death they fought over how
to carry out his funeral rites. But when they pulled the cover away, they found
only flowers where his body had been. These they then divided, the Muslims
burying their half and the Hindus burning theirs.
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