Kabir/Kabir Panth
Authors: Dharwadkar Vinay 
Published: August 2024

To the extent that we can reconstruct him as a historical figure, the poet Kabir probably lived in the first half of the fifteenth century (c. 1398–1448) in or around the city of Banaras (today’s Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh state, North India). His name, of Arabic and Qurʾanic origin, suggests that he was a Muslim, and various legends and hagiographic accounts indicate that he belonged to a community of cotton weavers, traditionally placed low on the Hindu and Indian social hierarchy. A number of prominent poems in the received Kabir text refer to the occupation of handloom weaving, and they include images, themes, and technical details from the weaver’s craft. In fact, notable among the themes are conceptions of God as a Master Weaver; of the universe as stretched out on a vast, divine loom; and of the human self or soul as sheathed in a mystical fabric of the finest weave inside its physical body. The social narrative embedded in this framework, however, is a narrative of poverty and illiteracy, in which the weaver who is denied access to education, writing, and initiation into orthodox religious practice becomes the most powerful poet and visionary of his times, the spiritual superior of the rulers and priests who persecute him for his rebellion and audacity. Kabir, the body of poetry ascribed to him, and the much larger phenomenon associated with his name are significant subjects of research and debate across the humanistic disciplines—from literature and poetics to religious studies, philosophy, social theory, and history—because they are multidimensional. The poetry has circulated in several languages across North India for five or six centuries, and has been canonized in written form as part of the scripture of the Sikh religion (the Guru Granth Sahib), as a founding text of several religious institutions within and on the borders of Hinduism, and as a literary monument in the Punjabi language as well as several branches of Hindi. Kabir is both “literary” and “popular”: he is at once the first major “individualized” author in Hindi literature and probably the most frequently quoted poet in everyday Hindi discourse in modern times. He is the earliest figure in the bhakti movement in Hindi; and he is the first of the sant poets, or poets of the nirguna tradition of North India, a multifaceted tradition of philosophical, theological, and social argument that began to dismantle the structures of classical Hinduism around the fifteenth century, to replace them with a new architecture of ideas. Kabir’s text contains major examples of the genres of poetic satire and philosophical poetry in South Asia; it also offers models of proverb and epigram, oral and performative poetry, and lyric poetry usually set to music. Historically and philosophically, it is the source of a radical conception of secularism in Indian society, and of the reconciliation of polytheistic Hinduism and monotheistic Islam; and, in world literature, it belongs alongside the works of Meister Eckhart, St. Theresa, and St. John of the Cross, as well as The Cloud of Unknowing, to the poetry of “negative theology,” which rejects all anthropomorphic conceptions of god, in favor of a godhead without attributes.