CHAPTER 9
North Indian Hindi
Devotional Literature
Nancy M. Martin
How to trade in rubies and diamonds,
My blessed guru has shown me the way.
Rubies lie scattered in the square –
Worldly people walk over them.
The unknowing cannot discern;
they leave them and walk away.
But those who understand pick them up –
My beloved has shown me the way.
The fly sits in the honey
Bound up in its sticky wings.
So hard to fly away, O Compassionate One,
From the terrible habit of always wanting more.
In this direction a blind man comes;
In the other a blind man is going.
Blind man meets blind man –
Who can show the way?
Everyone is crying, “Ruby, Ruby”;
They all put forward a cloth to receive.
But none unties the knot to see what lies within
And so they are bereft of all.
Everyone is crying, “Ruby, Ruby”;
But no one has tried to see.
Servant Kabı ̄r has looked,
and climbed up beyond birth and death.Though the Hindu saint to whom this song is attributed, Kabı ̄r, was a fifteenth-
century resident of Banaras from a Muslim weaver caste, known for his caustic
critique of both Hindu and Muslim religious leaders and his advocacy of wor-