Purushottam Agrawal, Akath
Kahani Prem ki: Kabir ki kavita aur unka samay (Love is an unspeakable
tale: Kabir’s poetry and his times). New Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan (2009), pp.
456, Rs. 500
Indian and western
scholars and students of bhakti study the same texts and authors but often
work in separate spheres. They may interact with each other at a personal level
or cite each other’s work, but it is not often that they actually engage with
each other’s scholarship and arguments. Purushottam Agrawal’s long-awaited book
on Kabir, the result of thirty years of study and reflection, engages with both
Hindi and western scholarship on Kabir in a fundamental way, contesting many
long-held assumptions about the most famous bhakti poet-saint of north India. The
book is already making waves in the Hindi world, and it seems important to
discuss his work in an English-language journal, so that the dialogue he has
initiated may continue.
Let me first summarize his main lines of argument. First,
he argues, it is wrong to consider (and champion) Kabir as marginal and
subaltern voice, a brave but failed religious reformer. Kabir was not a
marginal voice but the most popular poet of trading and artisanal
classes, both in his time and in the following centuries, as eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century observers like della Tomba and William Crooke noted. Agrawal
argues that ‘Kabir’s poetry lends a creative foundation and a spiritual idiom
to the social aspirations of traders and artisans. Underpinning these
aspirations is an insistence on the individual (vyaktisatta), and the
demand that an individual be valued on the basis of his individual qualities,
faults and achievements rather than on the basis of his birth’ (p. 49). Nor
were these groups were subaltern in early modern north India, and in order to
prove this point Agrawal musters a host of historical references to the growth
of trade after the first millennium and the growing social importance of
trading and merchant classes. The founder of the Kabir panth was a rich
trader, and the panth spread among artisans and traders from
Chhattisgarh to Bihar and Gujarat, and several prominent sants came from this
background. Metaphors of trade, weaving and dyeing abound in Kabir’s poetry,
and he sometimes called his Lord a rangrez (dyer) or a baniya. The
image of the subaltern sant battling Brahmin hegemony is, Agrawal argues, a
historical anachronism, a product of “colonial Brahminical fantasy.”[1]
In order to read Kabir correctly, then, a fundamental exercise in
deconstruction of the categories of the colonial episteme is needed, and this
is what Agrawal’s book offers in a systematic way.
Take the long-debated issue of whether Kabir was born
a Muslim weaver or simply raised as one. Through a careful reading of all early
modern and modern scholarship on Kabir, Agrawal demonstrates that until the
nineteenth century only the Kabir panth had found it necessary to argue that
Kabir was not born a weaver: after choosing a radical figure like him as
founder, it was then necessary to endow him with a more exalted, indeed divine,
origin. But why did British and Indian modern scholar s of Kabir share this
belief? Because, Agrawal brilliantly argues, colonial modern epistemology views
early modern Indian subjects as mere cyphers of their birth, caste and
religion—thus Kabir must have said what he said because of his background, not
out of choice. ‘Though brought up in a Muslim household’, Shyamsundar Das
stated, ‘the fact that he is steeped in Hindu ideas gestures/hints towards the
fact that Brahmin, or at least Hindu, blood flowed in his veins’ (cit. p. 159).
For Chandrabali Pandey, instead, Kabir was a Muslim by birth and a radical Sufi
by practice. Hazari Prasad Dvivedi set up an elaborate scheme that accounted
for the varied strands of his religious idiom. According to Dvivedi there had
been a caste of Nathpanthi householders in northern and eastern India at the
time who were either weavers or beggars, most of whom did not observe caste
rules and worshipped a formless God. With the coming of Islam they had
gradually converted, and it was in such a family of neo-converted householder jogis
that Kabir was brought up. (The only problem, Agrawal notes, is that Kabir
never called himself a jogi but called himself a julaha, a kori,
or ‘neither Hindu nor Muslim’, p. 163.) But the problem is a more basic one, a
problem of the modern imagination, and it is not limited to Kabir. Why is it so
difficult to imagine that the religious ideas of an early modern individual
were the result of individual choice? ‘It was not necessary to be born or
converted into a religion to be familiar with [e.g.] the Nathpanth—people
searched through study and satsang, they used their discrimination, they
weighed and accepted or rejected it’ (p. 174). So ‘Kabir’s discourse and ideas
(vaicariki) is not bound by genealogy’, Agrawal argues, ‘it is
the outcome of the bold quest of a restless individual, it was an individual,
rational choice’. Kabir was familiar
with current religious idioms (bahushrut, “well-listened”, if not bahu-pathit,
“well-read”, p. 312), but used them creatively to give expression to his own
spiritual journey.
Similarly, in order to recover a sense of Kabir’s times,
it is important to listen to early modern vernacular voices with respect. Thus
we learn that Anantdas’s description of Namdev as the initiator of bhakti in
the Kali age is an accurate one: Namdev and Ramanand did usher a new kind of
socially open bhakti in the North. And Tulsidas’s dystopia, of Shudras talking
back at Brahmins, unafraid, of bhagats spreading their knowledge to all,
is probably an accurate description of the social mobility of the time, a time
when varnashrama dharma was becoming irrelevant in the North, new castes
were coming up all the time, and pragmatic Brahmins were accommodating them in
the dharmashastras thanks to the “arthshastraisation of dharmashastra” (A. Dayal Mathur).
A
major part of Agrawal’s work in recent years has been a reclaiming of Ramanand,
and an entire chapter is dedicated to him in this book. Ramanand may have been
an elusive figure and contemporary Sanskrit sources are silent about him, but a
few utterances and padas
of a radical nature are well preserved in Hindi
bhakti memory (‘jat-pant puche nahin koi’/
‘Nobody cares for caste’ and ‘Hari ko bajai so Hari ko
hoi’/ ‘Whoever worships Hari is Hari’s.’), just as his
being the guru of Kabir and other fifteenth-century lower-caste sants. However,
because of the colonial/modern jnankand
implicitly trusts Sanskrit sources over vernacular ones, Ramanand became the
victim of a clever move by early twentieth-century Ramanandi activists who
forged a Sanskrit text that pushed him a century earlier and made it
“chronologically impossible” for him to be the guru of Kabir. (English readers
can enjoy the brilliant detective work in Agrawal’s article ‘In Search of
Ramanand: the Guru of Kabir and others’ in I. Banerjee-Dube and S. Dube (eds), From
Ancient to Modern: Religion, Power, and Community in India, OUP Delhi: 2008)
But while some contemporary scholars and activists have viewed the early modern
lineage of Ramanand and Kabir as an attempt to domesticate Kabir, Agrawal
argues quite the opposite: that the ‘traditionally accepted relationship
between Ramanand and Kabir, Pipa, Sen, and Dhanna is proof that one can transcend
one’s one given social identity for a spiritual practice, a sadhna of human consciousness’ (p. 270).
That Ramanand was a Brahmin Vaishnava, a Bairagi who held the spiritual path to
be open to all, is confirmed by the seventeenth century Persian survey of
religions in India, the Dabistan-i Mazahib,
which mentions Kabir immediately after the four Vaishnava sampradayas, as a
‘Bairagi by birth’. According to the Dabistan,
Bairagis call themselves Vaishnavas and say that their path is different from
both the Vedas and the Quran and they are neither Hindus nor Muslims. It also
notes that several Muslims have adopted Bairagi beliefs. In this perspective,
Kabir (and before him Ramanand), far from being exceptions, appear as part of a
broader trend of “open” Vaishnavism (to be distinguished from the smarta Vaishnavism of Tulsidas) that did
not observe caste and viewed itself as “neither Turk nor Hindu”. For Kabir,
Agrawal argues, this statement meant propounding an alternative to
institutionalized dharma,
one that responded to the basic human thirst for spirituality in life. Thus,
while Agrawal traces the historical process by which the Kabir panth transformed Kabir into a dharmaguru, he is very critical of those who
maintain that he wanted to create a new dharma or a new panth. Again the comparison with
Tulsidas is instructive: while dharma is important for Tulsi, it never occurs
in Kabir’s poetry in an affirmative sense. Instead, Kabir used the terms bhagati and anabhai,
anabhau (experience), for his poetry and his life were his
spiritual path; there was no spiritual practice apart from a ‘sahaj life based on love’, and
interconnected and mutually dependent “outer”/social and “inner”/spiritual
dimensions (p. 318).
Another chapter in the book is
devoted to a historical and philosophical deconstruction and reconstruction of
the term “bhakti”. While from Panini onwards the term had two basic meanings—affection/devotion
and participation—later the first meaning gained prominence and was the only one
emphasised in bhakti scholarship, which made bhakti a synonym of devotion and
submission to God. Further, critics like Ramchandra Shukla maintained that
while Vaishnava Acharyas developed the knowledge content of bhakti, poets from
the Alvars onwards only spread love and the feeling of bhakti among the people.
Of Nirgun sants he famously argued that they had no knowledge content at all, a
position that Agrawal takes strong opposition to. First of all, he argues,
Kabir resurrected the older meaning of bhakti as participation, and invoked
Narada, the author of the Bhaktisutra,
as his forebear. Narada’s Bhaktisutra
expound love/bhakti as the best way of crossing the ocean of existence; several
bhaktas are named, but it is the gopis who are singled out as the best example
of bhakti. Narada also maintains that bhakti needs no shastric proof, it is
itself the highest shastra. Narada does not oppose the Vedas but neither does
he care for them. Significantly, caste is of no consequence in his bhakti,
unlike Shandilya’s. Moreover, his Bhaktisutra contain
and value poetry and music. Kabir did not call his bhakti “Naradi bhakti” for no reason, but as a
clear sign that he intended to align himself with that tradition of socially
open bhakti and of kavyokt bhakti,
of bhakti expressed through poetry that seeks to create its own autonomous
epistemological and moral departures: ‘Do not think this is a song,’ Kabir
sang, ‘this my thinking on brahma.’
(cit. p. 349). The beauty of kavyokt bhakti (as
opposed to shastrokt bhakti,
bhakti that articulates scriptural,
orthodox position on spiritual and social matters), argues Agrawal, is that it
brings and holds together things that are usually considered separate, like
yoga, enjoyment, song, brahma. The difference between Kabir and
Narada is that Narada did not care for polemics, whereas Kabir was of course a
great polemicist.
No book on Kabir can avoid
discussing the status of the corpus that has come down to us, but again Agrawal
turns this discussion into a broad methodological reflection that includes a
critique of the assumptions underlying colonial/modern textual criticism and a
revaluation of early modern standards and practices. Kabir’s poetry famously
circulated orally (and still does so) before it was written down in different
circles: among the 593 Kabir padas
contained in ten early manuscripts composed between 1570-2 and 1681, Winand
Callewaert in his Millennium Kabir Vani (2000)
could find only 48 shared by at least three manuscripts! None of these “core padas” express strong social
criticism, they are more philosophical reflections and include Kabir’s attempts
to explain to his mother why he has joined the Vaishnava Bairagis (mundiyas). The
emphasis and the almost complete lack of religious and caste polemic is in
accord with the Kabir padas
in the very
earliest manuscript (Pada Suradasa ji ka),
most of which are also found in the later Dadupanthi collections. But fifty
years after Kabir’s death, both Hariram Vyas and Anantdas presented a rather different
picture, of Kabir as the radical “julaha
from Kashi”. While Callewaert’s results
do not match Anantdas’s testimony, at the same time they disturb modern
scholarly understandings of Kabir with their outspoken Vaishnava traits.
Agrawal’s view is that while the findings of historical philology must be
acknowledged (and as he argued earlier there is no reason to reject Kabir’s “Vaishnava”
padas), one also has to respect
orality and the oral tradition more since, as he puts it, ‘Kabir’s compositions
exist in the interface between oral and written’ (p. 218), a fact true even
today. The diversity of voices and emphasis—of strong criticism, of a woman’s
love and longing, ulatbamsis,
Vaishnava symbols and stories—found in the 593 padas
of Callewaert’s edition need not be rejected. It can be traced back to Kabir’s
own poetic bhakti, as well as to the space that his name created for other
poets to dedicate his compositions to him (what Agrawal calls up-rachnaen, “sub-compositions”). About early
modern textual practices he makes two important points: first, that while some
traditions were more restrictive and only included Kabir compositions that
accorded with their own views (like the Adigranth and
the Bijak), others
were more catholic, though they may have been careful about historical
anachronisms (e.g. the presence of words like mughal);
second, that early modern textual scholarship had its own standards when coming
to accept or reject Kabir compositions, derived from the early modern basic
understanding of Kabir: (a) that it was not a sin for Kabir to argue with the
caste system, (b) that he did not believe in the six philosophical systems, (c)
and that he spoke with one voice to all.
This summary does not begin to do justice to the many
themes and aspects of this rich and comprehensive book, which in its own way “provincializes
Europe” in terms of colonial/modern understandings of caste, religion, the
individual, society, and history in India. At the same time, through the
familiar figure of Kabir it introduces Hindi readers to many of the important
current intellectual and historical debates, carefully arguing in favour or
against each position. For all these reasons this book is not just a scholarly
study but an important intellectual intervention. But while this is a long and
conceptually rich book, one wishes that some basic concepts and arguments had
been articulated more fully. For example, given that merchant groups (at least
in north India today) are not exactly known for their radicalism or fair-play,
how is it that Kabir’s call for “spiritual fair-play” embodied the aspirations
of artisanal and trading classes? The point is made strongly and often, but the
assumption underlying it (that merchants and artisans everywhere have supported
socially egalitarian ideologies) does not in itself make an argument. In a more
narrow historical sense, the question remains about what was it in
fifteenth-century north India that gave traders and artisans such confidence
(the evidence about the prominence of trade comes from a very wide chronological
and geographical spectrum). Another question relates to the argument that the “ghar”
and “amarpur” of Kabir (i.e. the house as inner space) is a utopia, a
place of fantasy. What kind of utopia is it, how can it be articulated more
explicitly? Similarly, Agrawal employs the notion of a “Bhakti public sphere”.
While entirely sympathetic with this notion, one would have liked him to
expound it more and discuss its various discursive and institutional aspects
and implications, within the context first of late Sultanate and then of Mughal
north India. Kavyokt bhakti is another felicitous formulation, but it
would have been good to see it worked through in its technical aspects, just as
Ken Bryant did for Surdas’s poems in terms of performance and epiphany. How do
Kabir’s dohas, padas and ramainis actually “work” as
“thinking about brahma”? Also, while the author’s re-evaluation of
Ramanand is utterly convincing, there is only one sentence about the relationship
between him and Kabir, that ‘if one bears in mind the Hindi Ramanand, one can
hear strong echoes of Ramanand in Kabir’s compositions’ (p. 270). It is true
that Ramanand’s Hindi compositions express a Nirgun sensibility and can easily
be mistaken as Kabir’s own, as Agrawal found out through an experiment, but it would
have been good to see whether there is a direct echo (of terms, metaphors,
arguments), and whether and how Kabir goes beyond Ramanand. Finally, while
modern understandings of religion are usefully deconstructed, the world of
Islam in north India is practically absent from this rich picture of religious
and spiritual life of Bhakti. Enough material for another book?
Francesca Orsini
SOAS
May 2010
[1] ‘If colonial power was creating famine, colonial epistemology (jnankand)
was creating a famine of memory. If colonial power was destroying trade,
colonial epistemology was systematically destroying the memory of the role
trade had played in Indian history, and proving instead that Indian society had
always run on the basis of caste, the jajmani system and oriental
despotism.’ (p. 123)
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