Book review: Kabir and the Question of Modernity
NB: An excellent review of an excellent book. Purushottam Agrawal has done us a public service. DS
Kabir, the famous religious poet of Varanasi, lived from roughly 1440 CE to 1518 CE. He first became well-known outside of India in 1915 when Rabindranath Tagore published an English translation of 100 songs, or bhajans, attributed to Kabir. Tagore’s translation was based on a collection prepared by the scholar Kshitimohan Sen from various sources. More recent academic studies of Kabir essentially begin with the analysis of his religious ideas made by P D Barthwal and Hazari Prasad Dwivedi in the 1930s and the 1940s. These studies helped initiate a search for old manuscripts containing collections of Kabir’s songs (pad or shabda) and couplets (sakhi) in early Hindi, with the idea that these texts were more likely to be compositions by the historical Kabir, or at least gave a better idea of ideas associated with Kabir.
Kabir, Kabir: The Life and Work of the Early Modern Poet-Philosopher
By Purushottam Agrawal Chennai: Westland
Publications, 2021
Reviewed by David Lorenzen
The main early collections were the Kabir Granthavali of the Dadu Panth of Rajasthan, the Adi Granth of the Sikhs, and the Kabir Bijak of the Kabir Panth. All these texts now have scholarly editions in Hindi and (for all but parts of the Granthavali) English translations.
Since the 1960s, many
studies about Kabir and his followers have been published in Hindi, English,
and other languages. Most of these studies have been written for an academic
audience or for educated followers of the Kabir Panth and the Sikh Panth.
Purushottam Agrawal has broken with this tradition by writing a book about
Kabir in English directed to an audience that includes not only academics but
also a wider educated public. Agrawal’s academic credentials are not in doubt.
He has published scholarly essays on Kabir in both Hindi and English and an
essential book in Hindi titled Akath Kahani Prem ki: Kabir ki Kavita
aur Unka Samay (2009).
Agrawal’s new
book, Kabir, Kabir: The Life and Work of the Early Modern
Poet-Philosopher, builds on his earlier studies, but pushes in new
directions. First, is the autobiography. He begins with the story of his own
life journey and how his appreciation of Kabir grew and developed from
childhood until today. Agrawal was a young student staying at a Vaishnava math in
Gwalior when he first met a Kabir-panthi sadhu. In the years before
entering the university, Agrawal was influenced by Vivekananda and Dayananda
Saraswati and had contacts with Protestant and Catholic churches, a theosophical
lodge, a sufi shrine, Shri Ram Sharma’s “Gayatri Parivar,” and read the
lectures of Rajneesh, the Bahá’ís, and Jiddu Krishnamurti.
In the Jawaharlal
Nehru University, he studied Hindi literature and wrote a PhD thesis on Kabir.
After graduating, he became a teacher in this institution and also did work for
a number of charitable and anti-communal organisations as well as establishing
friendships with a number of sadhus, singers, and academics associated with
Kabir and the Kabir Panth. Along the way, Agrawal also became a public
intellectual and commentator on social and political issues, most notably as a
critic of communalism. With his new book, he uses the insights gained from this
eclectic personal history to explain why Kabir, the legends of his biography,
and the ideas of his songs and verses influenced the history of India and are
relevant even today.
Kabir and
‘Indigenous Modernity’
Kabir’s relation to his reputed guru, Ramananda, is a key issue for Agrawal since he ties it to the concept of early modern modernity. According to Nabhadas’s Bhaktamal, the Brahmin Ramananda was guru to 12 (or 13) important disciples. Among them were five non-Brahmins: Kabir (from a Muslim Julaha family), Raidas (a Chamar), Dhanna (a Jat), Sain (a barber), and Pipa (a Rajput king). Several scholars have denied that Kabir could have been a disciple of Ramananda given his low-caste Muslim background.
Other scholars have accepted that Kabir and Ramananda were likely at least contemporaries, but have used this argument to date Kabir’s death around 1450 (not the traditional 1518). Against the early death date for Kabir, Agrawal showed, in a brilliant 2009 essay, that the supposed early death date for Ramananda on which the claim depends was based on a deliberate forgery by a Ramanandi sadhu scholar. The claim that Kabir (and Raidas, Dhanna, Sain, and Pipa) could not be disciples of a Brahmin guru must contend with the fact that all the relevant early texts, including Ananta Das’s Kabir Parachai (ca 1590) and Nabhadas’s Bhaktamal (ca 1600) claim that Ramananda was Kabir’s guru.
By accepting that
Kabir flourished around 1500 CE and that he was likely a disciple of
Ramananda, Agrawal builds a case that this period saw a significant trend
towards a more open and less caste-dominated form of religion and social
relations than that found earlier. He further argues that this more open
“vernacular or indigenous modernity” was later squelched by European
colonialism and replaced by a more religiously and socially reactionary
“colonial modernity.” This is an important insight and merits serious
consideration. It is also controversial.
No one can deny that the modern world has both positive and negative features. What is less clear is whether or not virtually all these features are aspects of something called “modernity.” Is everything modern an aspect of modernity? The German philosopher Jürgen Habermas limits the concept to three aspects of the modern world that are mostly positive: science and technology, a theoretically impartial justice system, and a secular artistic culture. With regard to India, historians associated with the subaltern school, most notably Partha Chatterjee and Dipesh Chakrabarty, have described colonial modernity as an essentially distorted, deformed, and negative form of modernity and European modernity as something more positive, or at least less deformed.
This view also
implicitly accepts that everything in the modern world, positive or negative,
is an aspect of modernity. Here, Agrawal seems to be mostly in agreement. What
he adds to the discussion is the identification of an indigenous, more
positive, and less deformed form of modernity in India itself. This indigenous
modernity he identifies with the religious and social movement often
called nirguni. This movement was initiated principally by
Kabir and his followers and further developed by religious groups such as the
Dadu Panth and the Sikh Panth.
What Agrawal needed to
explore in more depth are the contributions to indigenous modernity by Indian
political leaders of the 16th and 17th centuries, most notably Akbar, and by
Sufi and Ismaili writers of the same period. Previously, Agrawal published a
study (2018) of the early Hindi romance Padmavat by Malik
Muhammad Jayasi. In the future, he will hopefully integrate these political and
literary developments more fully into the discussion of vernacular modernity.
Kabir beyond
Arbitrary Labels
A further analysis of
the affinities between the nirguni thinkers, and Sufi and Ismaili thinkers
could also clarify the role Islam played in the formation of the nirguni
movement. Various scholars have claimed that the nirgunis were strongly
influenced by Sufis. Kabir himself was of course raised in a Muslim family and
evidently had contact with Sufi preachers, most notably an elusive Sheikh Taqi.
Like most recent academic scholars and like religious intellectuals from
nirguni groups, Agrawal argues that Kabir had his strongest affinity with
Vaishnava Hindus.
The concept of
religious syncretism is rightly rejected as a crude scissors-and-paste
formulation. Agrawal strongly denies that Kabir’s ideas were determined by the
influence wielded by his family, a family that Hazari Prasad Dwivedi and other
scholars have suggested were recent converts to Islam from a Nath Yogi sect.
Other scholars, many directly associated with the Kabir Panth, have seen
Kabir’s nirguni ideas as based principally on Advaita Vedanta. Agrawal insists
that Kabir created a religious and social synthesis that was not a
scissors-and-paste syncretism nor was it directly determined by his own family
background. Kabir instead integrated his wide life experiences into a new and
original social and religious vision (p 158).
Was he a Nath panthi,
because his ancestors were recent converts from that tradition, even if they
later described themselves as Muslims? And since he is supposed to have had
Hindu blood in his veins, could Hindus claim Kabir? Well, others argue, he must
have been Sufi because he was born Muslim. What apparently cannot be considered
is that Kabir did not want to be straitjacketed by arbitrary labels and had
decided to follow his own path.
Agrawal also stresses
that Kabir should not be looked at as simply a new-age, anti-intellectual, anti-rational,
emotional mystic. Kabir does, of course, attack traditional intellectuals like
pandits, yogis, and qazis and their rote reliance on their religious books,
including the Vedas and the Koran. Kabir also preaches the search for a
mystical awareness of a divine spirit within the human body. Agrawal likens
Kabir’s intellectual discernment, in both religious and social spheres, to
Immanuel Kant’s idea of Enlightenment, with its motto of sapere
aude! (Dare to know!). Kabir’s efforts are described as vivek, a
process of courageous, hard-won intellectual evolution, “how human knowledge
and wisdom come to be” (p 166).
Retrieving Kabir’s
Legacy Today
Three religious groups in India that owe much to Kabir are the Kabir Panth, the Dadu Panth, and the Sikh Panth. Today the first two are in clear decline despite the efforts of a few organic intellectuals to strengthen their public base, including the leader of the Kabir Chaura, Acharya Vivekdas; the Kabir panthi scholar Abhilash Das; the Dadu Panthi scholar Narayandas; Kabir singers such as Prahlad Singh Tipania; and academics like Shukdeo Singh and Linda Hess.
Otherwise, what
Agrawal calls the public sphere of bhakti has largely been taken over by
religious showmen like Sathya Sai Baba and Ramdev, and Gurmeet Singh who offer
little of Kabir’s critical social and spiritual message. Kabir’s original
message does need to be updated, adapted, and made accessible and made more directly
relevant to today’s public. Purushottam Agrawal has made a valiant and
convincing effort to do just this.
Text of David Lorenzen's review of Kabir Kabir: (EPW, May 2022)
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Beware of the Avalanche of Stupidity Threatening to Bury Us All
Kabir’s search for solitude resembles our search for privacy in totalitarian times
Pratap
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Purushottam Agrawal - Lost in translation
सत्यपाल डांग को याद करते हुए.. RIP comrade Satyapal Dang - homage to
a great man
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