Taking Spirituality beyond Religion
A new book tells us how Kabir was both extraordinary and ordinary, devout and rational
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Purushottam Agrawal’s Kabir, Kabir: The Life and Work of the Early Modern PoetPhilosopher is a translation and extension of the author’s acclaimed 2009 Hindi monograph Akath Kahani Prem Ki: Kabir ki Kavita aur Unka Samay. In this book, the author unravels an archive of Kabir’s legacy, not only through his own poetry but also the words of his disciples, most significantly Anantdas. The renowned philosophersaint-poet who dedicated his life to the practice of Bhakti in the name of Ram, was a most mysterious figure in the history of Bhakti saints as well as the chequered history of HinduMuslim interfaith discourse.
Agrawal, in the first half of the book, complicates popularly known facts about Kabir and illuminates the delicate philosophy that animated a very private man, born in the Muslim weaver family, who continued to live in the householder mode and as a weaver. One of the most interesting things Agrawal shows is Kabir’s fierce preference for solitude—signs of a deeply individualistic, nonsectarian journey towards the divine. The other significant attribute in this portrait is Kabir’s insistence on a constant dialogue between the internal spiritual journey and the need for voluble protest against the injustices in the external world—between the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’.
We find in Agrawal’s book a clear explication of the philosophy of nonsectarian, non-hierarchical religiosity, coupled with the even more difficult edict— that of bringing about a seamless balance of dharma (morality), artha (material resourcefulness), kama (desire) and moksha (eventual liberation). Agrawal delicately highlights Kabir’s use of the term atma-khabr (self-assessment), instead of the term atma-katha (self-revelation). The reader finds a bhakti in Kabir that demands ‘constant reflection’, and a propagation of love that transcends the paradoxical nature of jealousy and sacrifice. We find in this book a curation of Kabir as an “extraordinarily ordinary man”.
While reading, though, I was less interested in the discussion about European origins of modernity, the elaborate discussion of Habermasian public spheres (a discussion that Christian Novetzke and other scholars of Bhakti have also engaged in) and Kabir’s location within the canvas of modernity. As a student of Bhakti studies, I was more interested in the comment on Kabir’s peculiar Bhakti—through the cries of an “anguished soul trying to articulate spirituality beyond religion”—with the component of rational critique built into the practice of passionate submission.
Agrawal throws important light on the various strands in Kabir scholarship in more recent times, but I was left wanting more of a literary history of the rich poetic tradition that we inherit from Kabir. Kabir, Kabir adds to the extensive scholarship on Bhakti and its varied spread across the subcontinent from the 9th to the 18th century, yes, but the book’s significance lies in the archiving of Kabir’s life and personality through the words of his own poetry and those in the hagiographies of his disciples, a curation of Kabir in the shadows. ■
—Atreyee Majumder