Incarnations Read online

  Among the city’s thousands of shrines, dedicated to many different gods and saints, is the Kabir Chaura and mutth. This monastic compound in the heart of the city is built around what is said to be the hut where Kabir lived, the platform where he preached, and his samadhi, a shrine to his mortal remains. On display in one of the rooms is a pair of wooden sandals he supposedly wore.

  Like determining the location of this shrine, most stories about the poet’s life are based on guesswork—or total bakwaas, as a modern-day Kabir might say. By some accounts, he was rescued from the abjection of being born low-caste by a Brahmin whom he had tricked into becoming his guru by tripping him on the ghats that lead down to the river Ganga as the Brahmin went for his morning bath. After Kabir’s death, other stories say, his body was transformed into flowers—ensuring he was neither cremated by Hindus nor buried by Muslims, each of whom claimed him as their own. The only things we know for sure about Kabir, though, are that he was alive in the fifteenth century, composed poetry, came from a caste of Muslim weavers, and lived in Benares. That’s it.

  So, instead of taking the Kabir pilgrimage tour organized by the monastery’s disciples, you might visit Bazardiha, a poor, low-lying neighborhood toward the western flank of the city that floods during the rainy season. The area is populated mostly by Sunni Muslims, who identify themselves by caste, a common practice for communities of different faiths across India. This is Kabir’s lineage: low-caste Ansari, or Julaha, weavers.

  “A weaver’s son / Possessed of a weaver’s / Patience,” Kabir once sang of himself. If those lines almost romanticize the labor, we should remember that, historically, even the name of Kabir’s caste, Julaha, was a slur—basically, shorthand for poverty and ignorance. In Bazardiha, sitting in cramped rooms among men without enough work, you start to hear Kabir’s insistent, urgent tone emerge. Patient weaver’s son? Hardly. His is one of the most impatient, acerbic, fed-up voices in the Indian cultural canon. With Kabir, “there’s no beating about the bush,” Arvind Krishna Mehrotra says. “He’s always haranguing you, catching you by the collar, constantly drawing your attention to certain things—and he wants you to look at them in his way. So there is a great element of the didactic in him—telling you as directly as he can in a language that you will understand.”

  * * *

  You can follow me only if you are prepared to burn your house, Kabir said in another poem. For “house” we might easily read “bridges”: he was an equal-opportunity offender, sparing no one with his scathing tongue. Religious men were particularly mocked—the Hindu pandits and Muslim (or, as they were still referred to back then, “Turk”) mullahs who said that only they could, for a fee, show low-caste individuals the way to God:

  If you say you’re a Brahmin

  Born of a mother who’s a Brahmin,

  Was there a special canal

  Through which you were born?

  And if you say you’re a Turk

  And your mother’s a Turk,

  Why weren’t you circumcised

  Before birth?

  As Mehrotra puts it, “There’s no aspect of religion that Kabir leaves untouched, whether it’s a sacred thread or a place of pilgrimage or a holy book or praying so many times a day.”

  Though born Muslim, today Kabir is one of the most famous sants, or “saints,” of the broadly Hindu movement known as bhakti, which often used poetry and song (composed not in Sanskrit, but in local spoken languages) to upend social orthodoxies. The rise of bhakti devotion in North India paralleled the spread of the Sufi movement in Islam; both embraced the idea of a personal relationship with God. Priests or mullahs didn’t matter; precise ritual didn’t matter; caste didn’t matter. Sincere avowals of faith, no matter how rough-hewn or coarsely spoken, still had the power to reach the ears of God.

  I’m Rama’s slave

  And Rama brought me to

  The slave mart where Rama

  Is the one who buys and sells.

  He puts me up for sale,

  But you can’t buy what’s Rama’s.

  He keeps me off the block.

  Well then I can’t be sold.

  My body’s dead

  My memory’s blank.

  My master’s name, says Kabir,

  Is all I know.

  Woven into bhakti as individual worship were also strands of social protest and even rebellion, and much of what Kabir composed was experienced collectively, by congregations of followers. Most Indians know Kabir’s words—or words that are ascribed to him—through his songs, which have been performed in every possible style, from the incandescent renditions of another independent spirit, the classical vocalist Kumar Gandharva, to the qawwalis of Fareed Ayaz Qawwal, to the smooth Sufi gospel style of Sonam Kalra. The aspect of performance was always central to bhakti and could help instill psychological fortitude in people who had been excluded from other forms of power. For the oppressed in India, as for the slaves of nineteenth-century America, collective singing could be both consolation and a musical assertion of strength in numbers.

  After studying performances of Kabir’s work, Linda Hess believes that the spirit of his poetry is more in song than in texts. Kabir, she notes, made fun of people who were too dependent on books. There is a studied intention in his choice of everyday, simple words, and there’s craft in the rhythmic arrangements he gave them, lifting phrases from ordinary speech into song.

  Like many other early Indian poets, Kabir probably could not read or write. He had to find other means to keep his poetry alive. The metrical word beats of his verses, called padas, made them easily memorizable, which allowed them to be handed from singer to singer, and from community to community—easily memorizable, but also open to improvisation and collective revision. Every singer can bring his own dialect, her own language, to what was supposedly first Kabir’s. Different communities add different nuances; lines are dropped and added, tone is varied. But even as the verses undergo changes in performance, they keep a family resemblance, as blues or jazz performances do.

  Kabir’s verses have traveled across India from Benares westward to Rajasthan, and east to Bengal. They’ve also traveled across the world, translated by major poets. Rabindranath Tagore (32), Ezra Pound, Czesław Miłosz, and Robert Bly have all produced their own versions of Kabir’s verse—though Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s translations are in some way the most audacious. “The same poem has existed in three different manuscript traditions, in three different ways,” Mehrotra says. “That frees the translator from sticking too closely to the original, because at the end of day there is no original.” One of Mehrotra’s boldest translations echoes Kabir’s perennial theme:

  “Me shogun.”

  “Me bigwig.”

  “Me the chief’s son.

  I make the rules here.”

  It’s a load of crap.

  Laughing, skipping,

  Tumbling, they’re all

  Headed for Deathville.

  In the blink

  Of an eye, says Kabir,

  The king will be

  Separated from his kingdom.

  * * *

  In Benares, the weaving community that Kabir came from has been foundering for decades, a decline unrelieved by the growth of India’s national economy. The artisan tradition was first undercut by power looms, then cheap Chinese yarns. What’s left of it today is being further crippled by innovations such as WhatsApp: traders flash the sari designs of Benares weavers to print shops in Surat, which mass-produce saris at a quarter of the price of hand-woven pieces.

  Kabir himself has suffered a similar appropriation. Benares’s Kabir temple and mutth are run by higher-caste Hindus, who have made him one of their own. On the tended grounds of the chaura, you can see life-size plaster statues, burnished in copper-colored paint, of the poet leading a band of his singing followers, preaching and enacting various scenes from the story of his life. This is Kabir as religious figurehead. His devotees have even assembled his words into a holy bo
ok, the Bijak.

  It’s one of the ways radical lives get assimilated. The powerful make a house pet out of the people who mock and excoriate them. But upper-caste Hindus aren’t the only ones who try to pocket Kabir’s memory. Leftists and progressives see him as a radical social critic or messenger of interfaith harmony; lower-caste activists have adopted him as an anticaste evangelist; and still others hear in him the voice of a benign humanist. Mehrotra captures the paradox well: “Every now and then someone comes up and tells you exactly how it is. And what Indians tend to do is they absorb him into the pantheon. Which is exactly what has happened to Kabir. He said as bluntly as he could things about Hindus, Muslims, the caste system—none of it has made any difference to anyone. It’s not that he changed the world.”

  The eastern banks of the Ganga River, opposite the ghats of Kashi, are largely deserted. It’s a swath of sand, some neglected land, and a few fields. The area is known as Katesar, but locals sometimes speak of it as Magahar, a metaphorical reference to the actual town of that name some two hundred kilometers away. It’s considered a place of ill luck. In the Bijak, it’s said that if you die there, you come back as a donkey—exactly the opposite of what happens if you die on the other side of the bank.

  Kabir quite possibly came to these desolate shores when his poetic dissidence got him exiled. Or perhaps he exiled himself here. But then of course, I’m probably making this story up, just as so many others have been made up about Kabir. Still, I imagine him coming here, gazing across the slow-flowing water and thinking about the absurdity of life in the busy world of the city.

  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?

  Today in India, dissenting views are often exiled—forced out of the public sphere by state interference and by religious and social groups within civil society. Claiming offense, these groups make threats to the public order, pressuring courts and authorities to invoke colonial-era restrictions on free speech. Books and documentary films are frequently banned. Publishers are intimidated into censoring their authors. Celebrity voices such as Salman Rushdie’s have been silenced—even, famously, at liberal havens such as the Jaipur festival. Meanwhile, the voices of other writers and thinkers, less well known, are being muffled all over the country. So now perhaps it’s as important as ever to reject reverent incarnations of Kabir and recognize the edgier social critic and skeptic—the one whose verses are rightly woven into the long, rich, often-endangered tradition of dissent in Indian life.

  13

  GURU NANAK

  The Discipline of Deeds

  1469–1539

  Indian religions love their wandering heroes. There’s the Buddha (1), who wandered for six years; Mahavira (2), who doubled that; and the many saints and yogis of Hinduism who meander homeless all across the Indian past. The fifteenth-century founder of the Sikh religion, Guru Nanak, also took to the road—for some twenty-three years. He made it as far afield as Mecca and Medina, and to the mythic mountain Sumeru, meeting emperors and carpenters, sages and thugs along the way—or so say the Janam Sakhis, a collection of hagiographical stories about his life.

  But there’s a crucial difference between Nanak and the Buddha or Mahavira, who renounced their families and communities to find spiritual truth. After Nanak achieved enlightenment, he returned to the fertile fields of his homeland, the Punjab, and made room in his religious life for members of his previous, unenlightened domesticity. For him, devotion did not require asceticism, renunciation, or an attachment to holy men and their institutions, but what scholars of the Sikh religion have called a “disciplined worldliness.”

  The writer and diplomat Navtej Sarna recounts a well-known story that captures something of Nanak’s philosophy and personality:

  He’s supposed to have met a large number of very wise siddhas, the old spiritual sages who have gone away and have been meditating in the Himalayas for years and years. And they ask him, “Child, what is the situation down in the world?” So he said, “What can there be? If all the wise men have come here, what do you expect to be happening there?” So, from this you can see that his belief was that this world is a real world, and you have to seek salvation within it. There is no other world to seek salvation in. That is cowardliness—renunciation of this world. You have to seek salvation through your living.

  Nanak insisted that religious beliefs are not just to be felt in this world, but should change it. As a result, his life and afterlife, through the religion he founded, have often challenged India’s other communities of faith, including at times that most modern one—the nation.

  * * *

  Nanak was known during his lifetime as Baba Nanak (the title of guru came later). He was born in 1469 into a relatively well-to-do family. His father was possibly an accountant, and Nanak’s education may have included Persian (the signifier of a superior education at the time), taught to him by a Muslim tutor. He later wrote hundreds of beautiful hymns and poems in his own language, Punjabi, drawing on Persian and Arabic words—verses that often combine poetry, spiritual striving, and agricultural labor into hardworking metaphors:

  As a team of oxen we are driven

  By the ploughman, our teacher.

  By the furrows made are thus writ

  Our actions—on the earth, our paper.

  The sweat of labour is as beads

  Falling by the ploughman as seeds sown.

  We reap according to our measure.

  Some for ourselves to keep, some to others give.

  O Nanak, this is the way to truly live.

  The Punjab lands that inspired much of his verse were not the isolated, parochial village communities of popular imagination. Invaders, commercial riches, and ideas were continuously passing through: from India’s northwest toward the Gangetic Plains, a steady flow of culture and conquest. During Nanak’s lifetime, the central Asian warlord Babur, a descendant of Timur, or Tamerlane, swept across the Punjab, captured Delhi from the Lodhi dynasty in 1526, and declared himself the first of the Mughal rulers of India.

  A mix of religious sects and teachers also swirled through the Punjab, inspiring new experiments in belief and practice. Sufi Islam flourished in cities such as Lahore and Multan, though most people remained followers of various forms of Hinduism. Besides Shiva worship, there were sects of yogis known as Naths, who drew on tantric traditions. Bhakti movements associated with sants such as Kabir (12) were also popular.

  In some legends, Kabir was an influence on, or even a teacher of, Nanak. That wasn’t actually the case, but the two certainly shared a terse disdain for religious authorities of all stripes. As one of Nanak’s verses puts it:

  The Qazi tells untruths and eats filth,

  The Brahmin kills and takes a holy bath,

  The blind yogi knows not the true way,

  All three make for mankind’s ruin.

  Even the way Nanak dressed had a religiously polemical edge. According to Navtej Sarna, he wore the long, loose shirt of a Muslim dervish, but in the ocher color of a Hindu sannyasi; around his waist he tied a white cloth belt, like a fakir; around his neck hung a bone necklace. Unlike many other Indian religious figures who went barefoot, he wore sandals, each a different kind and color. He topped the outfit off with a Sufi Qalandar cap partially covered by a flat, short turban. It was a sartorial farrago that seems to have been styled to bewilder, perhaps even provoke.

  Philosophically, however, Nanak was no bricoleur. In one of his most famous sayings, he proclaimed, “Na ko Hindu hai na ko Mussalman”—“There is neither Hindu nor Muslim.” That could be heard as a pulling down of barriers between the faiths, even a message of reconciliation, and it has become common to interpret Nanak’s teachings as aimed
at a synthesis of the two major religions of the subcontinent. That’s not so: he was turning his back on both, in order to create something new. As he expressed it in another well-known aphorism, “Neither the Veda nor the Kateb [the book of the Qur’an] knows the mystery.”

  Nanak, like Kabir, believed in a universal God that was nirankar, without form. This formless divinity could nevertheless be discovered, almost like an inner voice, operating within us all. One of Nanak’s most powerful verses points toward this presence. “There is but one God, true is His Name,” begins the Mul Mantra of Nanak’s Japji, verses to be recited, without music, at daybreak.

  The Creator, fearless, without rancour,

  Timeless, unborn, self-existent

  By God’s grace he is known

  Meditate on Him

  He was true

  In the beginning, in the primal time …

  Yet where Kabir remained at heart a rebel and a critic, and where both Sufism and many of the bhakti movements of his time centered on personal devotion and salvation, Nanak brought into being a belief system that required of its followers not just worship but social action, and the creation of a community of belief and works.

  * * *

  Indians can be notoriously fussy about food—what’s in it, who cooked it, who served it. The concern is rooted in the caste system, with its fearful taboos about purity and pollution, and its humiliating rules about who can and can’t prepare food and who is allowed to eat together. Despite decades of reform efforts, in rural and urban India today there remain upper-caste people who will break a cup if a Dalit has touched it. Eating a meal cooked by a Dalit or someone from a different religion? Unthinkable still for many Indians.