Kabir Das

Kabir, also called Kabir Das and Bhagat Kabir, was a fifteenth-century Indian mystic poet of Varanasi whose verses helped shape the Bhakti movement and are preserved in three great collections: the Sikh Guru Granth Sahib, the Kabir Panth's Bijak, and the Rajasthani Granthawali. ¹ His dates are traditional and contested — the English article sets out the two scholarly datings of his life as 1398–1448 and 1440–1518, and his Wikidata item carries both 1398 and 1440 as birth values — and the traditional frame, 1398–1518, is the one built here with the variants preserved. ^{1 2} He is recorded in this museum as an honoured contemporary claimed by, and arguing with, every tradition around him.

The accounts of his birth do not agree even with each other. Many followers hold that he appeared as an infant on a lotus flower in the Lahartara pond at Varanasi; other accounts say the infant was found there by a Muslim weaver, Niru, and his wife Nima, who raised him as their child in the julaha weaver quarter of Kabir Chaura. ¹ The Urdu article carries a third form of the story, that he was born to a Brahmin widow who abandoned him by the pond to escape disgrace. ³ What the traditions share is the setting: a child of no certain parentage raised in a Muslim weaver household in Banaras, who became, by the received account, a disciple of the Vaishnava teacher Ramananda — though a rival tradition names the Sufi Shaikh Taqi as his teacher, and the question is part of his contested identity. ¹

Kabir composed his verses in the spoken tongue, Sadhukkadi, and called them banis, utterances: songs and couplets of devotion, mysticism and discipline that called for a loving devotion to a God found within, and dropped the ego as the price of truth. ¹ He was critical of organised religions as such — questioning what he regarded as the meaningless and unethical practices of all religions, primarily the wrong practices he saw in Hinduism and in Islam — and, in Linda Hess's judgement, the picture of him as a synthesizer of the two faiths is a false one: he adopted their terminology and concepts and vigorously criticised them both. ¹ His verses, composed orally and transmitted by voice for two centuries, were gathered in versions that differ considerably; scholars still dispute which couplets are authentically his. ¹

The traditions moved quickly to claim him. The earliest biographical text, the Persian Dabestan-e Mazaheb, calls him a Bairagi, a Vaishnava yogi, and repeatedly a disciple of Ramanand, placing him with the Vaishnava tradition; early texts likewise place him with the Sufi tradition of Islam, and his imagery has been read both as Sufi-influenced and as purely Hindu in vocabulary. ¹ Ronald McGregor states flatly that Kabir left Islam; other scholars trace almost all his ideas to the Hindu tradition; the Kabir panth, founded centuries after his death, recognises him as its founder and numbers its followers in the millions. ¹ In Varanasi two temples dedicated to him stand, one maintained by Hindus and one by Muslims, practising similar worship. ¹ Because these readings do not converge — and because the man himself, as the sources present him, declared his independence from both religions and was threatened by both in his lifetime — his faith is recorded in this museum as unknown, with every reading preserved.

Tradition places his death at Maghar in 1518, and the choice of place is itself his teaching: Maghar was held inauspicious to die in, Kashi salvific, and Kabir is said to have chosen Maghar to deny that geography decides salvation. ² When he died, the Hindus and the Muslims he had inspired each claimed him as theirs. ¹ His largest afterlife is in a scripture not his own: verses attributed to Kabir constitute the largest non-Sikh contribution to the Guru Granth Sahib, and scholars still argue over how far his ideas influenced Guru Nanak, who founded Sikhism in the same century and the same Sant tradition — some placing Nanak's thought fundamentally apart from Kabir's. ¹ Rabindranath Tagore's Songs of Kabir (1915) carried his voice to the wider world. ¹