There is no evidence that Kabīr ever composed a single work or even wrote a single verse—though a large number of works has been attributed to him by the Kabīr-panthīs, Kabīr's followers. The list of works attributed to Kabīr varies from forty to eighty or more. Though Kabīr's followers believe that Sat Kabīr was omniscient from the age of five, they do not assert that the Prophet himself wrote down the numerous compositions ascribed to him. They hold that he composed them orally and that they were subsequently written by his immediate disciples, among whom they name Surat-Gopāl, Dharmadās and Bhaggojī.

Moreover, Kabīr's social background as a low-caste weaver makes it likely that he was more or less illiterate, or at least that he had no formal teaching in reading and writing. In a couplet found in the Bījak, Kabīr says that he never touched a pen:

Ink or paper, I never touched, nor did I take a pen in hand—
The greatness of the four ages, I have described by word of mouth.

Bī. [Bījak], sā. 187

The written word, holy scriptures in general, be they Veda or Qur'ān, he cordially despises:

Reading book after book the whole world died
          and none ever became learned:
He who can decipher just a syllable of Love,
          he is the true Pandit!

KG[Kabīr Granthāvalī], sā. 33.3

Kabīr's contempt for scriptural authority and contempt for the written word is rooted in the medieval Tantric tradition, especially the Sahajiyā Buddhists and the Nāth-Yogīs, disciples of the famous Master Gorakhnāth.¹ From the early middle ages, perhaps as early as the eight or ninth century, Siddhas and Yogīs, mostly low-caste people, had been preaching their Gospel in the common tongue, bhāṣā, in some form of Western Apabhramsha or old Bengali. Kabīr shared the Siddhas' contempt for the sacred Brahmanical language, Sanskrit, as expressed in a couplet traditionally ascribed to him:

Kabīr, Sanskrit is like well-water
and the Bhāṣā like the live water of the brook!

Like the bānīs (vānīs) ‘utterances’ of the Siddhas and Nāth-yogīs, Kabīr's bānīs are mostly short, pithy utterances, whose terseness is often not exempt from obscurity. The metrical forms in which they are couched are the same as those used by the Siddhas and Nāth-Yogīs of old: essentially distichs called dohās and short rhymed poems known as pads or ramainīs.

The dohā (Skt dogdhaka or dodhaka) appears as the most typical form of Apabhramsha literature. It differs from the Prakrit gāthā, which it has replaced, as the last syllable or each line (ardhalī) is short, whilst it is long in the gāthā, and also because it introduces the rhyme.² This type of rhymed couplet is the principal metre used in the dohā-koṣas composed by the Sahajiyā Buddhists.³ It was equally popular with the Jain Munis in the middle ages, as shown by the Pāhuḍa-dohā of the Jain ascetic Rāmasimha Muni.⁴ In ascetic literature, the dohā appears exclusively in a didactic form—but it has also been used in lyrical compositions in grāmya popular Apabhramsha and in Old Western Rajasthani. The most ancient version of the famous Old Western Rajasthani folk ballad Dholā-mārū-rā dūhā includes a number of popular lyrics entirely composed in such dūhās.⁵ Kabīr himself must have memorized an indefinite number of such dūhās or dohās in the vulgar tongue, which were freely sung and quoted by the common folk. In the Gurū Granth collection of Kabīr's sayings, the dohās attributed to Kabīr and the other Bhagats are called saloku (Skt sloka) i.e. witnesses: one should understand that the couplet is a pithy utterance, ‘witnessing’ to the ultimate Truth. At the same time, the sākhī itself is conceived as the Word (śabda) fallen from the guru's mouth—Himself the true and only Witness to the supreme Reality.⁶

The custom of invoking the witness of a great saint of yore in the last line of a stanza is well-established. It is already found in the Dohā-koṣas and the Caryā-padas composed by the Sahajiyā Siddhas and in the Bānīs of the Nāth-panthīs. In the Caryā-padas, Kānha or Kānhupa, who calls himself ‘naked Kānhilā’, invokes the famous Siddha Jālandhari as his witness. The Siddha invoked as witness may or may not be the poet's own guru, but he is conceived as endowed with perfect knowledge: he embodies the ‘Perfect Guru’ (satguru) who is identical with the supreme divinity or essential Reality. Every sākhī, therefore, implicitly refers to the witness of the Satguru. The last couplet in the Bījak collection says:

The sākhīs are the eyes of Wisdom: understand it in your mind—
Without the sākhīs, there is no end of strife in this world.

Bī. sā. 353

Being the true fountain of wisdom, the ‘witness’ of the Satguru abolishes the need for all the other pramānas or proofs: it puts an end to vain disputes and arguments, as it substitutes direct evidence transmitted by word of mouth for scriptural evidence. Though sākhīs may be written, a sākhī, by its very nature, is meant to be memorized: it lives in the heart of those whom it has struck and who have been penetrated by its message. Even when couched in the well-defined metrical form of a dohā, the sākhī is not merely a literary genre, but a privileged form of expression—or rather the evocation of the highest truth.

Kabīr is known all over India essentially as a composer of sākhīs and all the main compilations of his verses contain a large number: the Sikh Gurū Granth has 243 sākhīs, the Kabīr-granthāvalī has 811; various editions of the Bījak have from 353 to 445 sākhīs. The smallest collection is that of the Sarbāngī, which includes 181 sākhīs out of a total 337 verses attributed to Kabīr.⁷ But the number of sākhīs attributed to him is much greater. Their number is said to be infinite, as suggested by a verse found in the Bījak itself:

Like the leaves of a great tree, like the grains of sand of the Ganges
Are the words which have come from Kabīr's mouth …

Bī. sā. 261

1. KABīR'S CRYPTIC LANGUAGE

Besides Old Avadhi, the ubiquitous Nāth-panthīs, who considered themselves as the disciples of the ancient Yogī Gorakhnāth, made use of various dialects: especially the Dingal (old Rajasthani) and the Pingal impregnated with old Braj-Bhāṣā. It seems that, in Kabīr's time, Dingal was dominant, as the language of the Buddhist Siddhas. On the other hand, before Kabīr, many Sufis had made use of the old Hindui dialect, mixed with Panjabi and Arabo-Persian vocabulary. It is certain that Kabīr used more than one of those languages, according to his audience and to his own fancy. We must also account for Kabīr's polemicist talent—an extraordinary virtuosity in adapting himself to his audience and in borrowing his adversaries' jargon. We give here a specimen of such blasting, for which he was famous:

O Miyān!(8) Your order is not just:
We are the poor servants of God—and You just seek glory!
Allah is the Master of Religion, He did not order to oppress the poor:
Your Murshīd and your Pīr,(9) tell me, where did they come from?
You observe the Ramzān(10) and you keep spelling prayers—
          but that Kalimā(11) won't earn you heaven:
He who knows Him through the Experience,
          his soul possesses seventy Kaabas(12)

In Kabīr's words, the technical terms of Tantric Haṭh-yoga are already detached from ancient traditional meaning. Tantric Yoga practices, while passing from the ancient Buddhist Siddhas to the Shaivite Nāth-panthīs, have been considerably modified. The mythical founder of the sect, Matsyendra (or Macchendra), followed by the ancient Master Gorakhnāth, appear as reformers. In the writings attributed to him, Gorakhnāth himself does away with exterior practices. He rejects the cult of fancy deities as well as the distinction of castes, and he preaches detachment, chastity and sobriety.

The Goal is to accede to a state of ‘non-conditionment’, ‘pure spontaneity’, leading to Immortality. That mysterious state, or’Country’ described in paradoxical terms, is the sahaj state itself. The word has been variously translated by scholars. Shahidullah chooses ‘l'Inné’, Snellgrove ‘The Innate’; Kwaerne adopts Guenter's translation, ‘The Co-emergent’, based on the literal sense of sahaj.¹³ Essentially, it refers to ‘Transcendence and Immanence, Subject and Object, indivisibly blend’. The Co-emergent is an ontological category: it is the true nature of ‘the World’—all that which can be experienced. It is also that infinite Bliss which the Yogī finally obtains as a permanent condition.

The mysterious Reality which is at the centre of Kabīr's practice or sādhanā is expressed in a rich variety of terms. Some are Islamic terms, such as Allah, Khudā, Hazrat, Pīr and so on. A few come from the Vedantic tradition, negative epithets such as Alakh, Nirākār, Anant, Gunātīt; a few are philosophical notions, such as Brahman, Ātman, Āp, Sār. Other terms are directly borrowed from the Haṭhayoga language and practice, such as Śabda, Anāhad, Sahaj and Śūnya, the last two being key-words:

O Avadhūt! The true Yogī is detached from the world,
He has his dwelling in the sky, He does not see the world,
          seated on the seat of Conscience:
Outwardly, He wears the frock,
          but His soul contemplates the Mirror.
His body, he has burnt in the Fire of Brahman
          and He remains awake in the triple Confluent:
Says Kabīr, such is the King of Yogīs,
          who has immerged Himself in the Sahaj-śūnya.

Sahaj is realized when duality is abolished and the Yogī accedes to transcendental Oneness, in the sahaj-samādhi.

The term Śūnya, the Void, also belongs to the Buddhistic tradition. Without going back as far as the philosopher Nāgārjuna, Śūnya is often mentioned by the Vajrayānī Siddhas. In the Haṭha-Yoga, Śūnya becomes an equivalent of Keval, Brahman, Sahaj, Nirañjan to call the supreme Reality: as in the Gorakh-bānīs:

Śūnya is my Mother, Śūnya is my Father,
Śūnya is Nirañjan, the own of my Own!

For Kabīr and the Nāth-Yogīs, Śūnya is an equivalent of Sahaj—and the two terms are often associated. Śūnya means both the supreme Reality and the’Place’ where the human being (jīvātmā) operates its junction with that Reality:

Kabīr, the Pearl germs in the Fortress whose summit is the Void.

Potions of Immortality play a great part in Tantric theories. Amrt (ambrosia) is conceived as a Liquor flowing from the Moon, i.e. the sahasradal formed by ‘a thousand petals’. The Nāth-yogīs believe that, from the sahasradal, flows a wonderful Liquor: by the blockade of the breath, the Yogī forces the liquor along the suṣumnā-nādī into the sahasradal, where it is drunk by the jīvātmā, the living Soul which then obtains Immortality. Kabīr apparently makes use of that language—but he gives another meaning to words such as rasa, amrta, sahajaras: those terms are now taken in the sense of Rām's Love, or of Rām Himself. The Tantric interpretation is rejected: for the true Saint, Rām himself, is the only Drink of Immortality:

The Shāktas die, and the Saints live
          as their tongue drinks Rām's Liquor!

and:

He got absorbed in Sahaj-rām.

Though the alcoholic practices of the Shāktas are negated, Kabīr enhances the spiritual intoxication produced by that Liquor:

He who has drunk of Rām's Liquor,
          is intoxicated for ever …

The word khumār, or intoxication is borrowed by Kabīr from the language of the Sufis, who have often described that ‘Intoxication of Love’. But the Sufis themselves had borrowed from the Tantrikas such terms as ras and varunī, which they interpret as prem-ras, mystical Love:

He is the true Yogī, who wears his ring in Spirit:
          Night and day, He keeps watch:
In spirit is his posture, in spirit his practice,
          in spirit his litanies, his asceticism, in spirit his words;
In spirit his skull, in spirit his whistle—
          blithely he plays on the flute the silent Music.
He who has reduced his five senses to ashes,
          That One will conquer Lanka, says Kabīr.

Surati is a difficult word to interpret—probably derived from śruti, ‘audition’ (of the unspoken Word). In the Kabīr-granthāvalī, the surati is compared to the Well from which the Water of Love springs up:

Surati is the balancing pole, Absorption is the rope,
          and the Spirit rocks the pulley—
In the Well of the Lotus,
          the Yogī keeps drinking the Liquor of Love.
The Ganga and Yamuna are within the heart,
          and the Yogī has merged in the Sahaj Śūnya—
There Kabīr has built his hideout,
          while holy men look for a Path!

2. KABīR'S OWN LANGUAGE

Kabir's own language and the languages in which his ‘Sayings’ were originally composed have long been a matter of controversy. According to Ahmed Shah, who translated the Bījak into English, Kabīr composed his poetry in the language spoken in his own area, i.e. in Benares and its neighbourhood, in Mirzapur and Gorakhpur.¹⁴ In Gorakhpur, the regional language is Bhojpuri, an Eastern dialect of Hindi, spoken from the Easternmost part of present Uttar Pradesh to the Westernmost part of Bihar and spreading to the North up to the Himalayan border. Grierson argues, however, that there is hardly any trace of the Bhojpuri language in the Bījak.¹⁵ For Grierson, the basic language of the Bījak is old Avadhi, which seems to fit in with an often-quoted sākhī of Kabīr:

bolī hamārī pūraba kī, hami lakhai nahī koī
hama to to soi lakhai, dhura pūraba kā hoy
My language is of the East—none understands me:
He alone understands me who is from the farthest East.

Grierson however remarks that any dialect spoken east of the Braj Bhāṣā area is called ‘Eastern’ in Northern India, and that Avadhi itself is often referred to as pūrbī.¹⁶ Yet the meaning of the above-quoted dohā which both Grierson and Ahmed Shah have taken literally, is far from obvious. A literal interpretation appears hardly plausible: the idea that no one (in the West?) understands Eastern Hindi is a rather flat statement. P. Chaturvedi argues that pūrab dīsā, ‘the Eastern region’, symbolizes the ultimate spiritual stage which is the aim of the Yogis.¹⁷ Kabīr's ‘Eastern’ languages, therefore, means a cryptic language, understandable only to the Yogis and Siddhas who are the dwellers of that mysterious country. Actually, in the Bījak itself, another mention of that far-away land confirms Chaturvedi's interpretation: pūraba dīsā hamsa gati hoī, ‘The Eastern region is the resort of the Hamsa.’(Bi. ra 5.5).

Following R. C. Shukla, most Indian scholars have stressed the heterogeneous character of Kabīr's language, which seems to borrow freely from a variety of dialects. Shukla, however, draws the conclusion that Kabīr's nondescript idiom is essentially based on the idiom used before him by the Nāth-panthī Yogis and other itinerant preachers, and he proposed to call it sādhukkarī bhāṣā, lit. Sādhus' jargon.

The first editor of the Kabīr-granthāvalī, S. S. Das, also stresses the composite character of Kabīr's language, giving examples, in his Introduction, of vānīs composed in Khari Bolī, i.e. old Hindī, and also in Rajasthani and Panjabi, besides Avadhi. For S. S. Das Kabīr's language is panchmel kichrī, ‘a hotch-potch.’¹⁸ Other Indian authors do not give up so easily. The editor of the old Rajasthani ballad, Dholā-Mārū-rā Dūhā, thinks that Kabīr's language is mostly Rajasthani.¹⁹ S. K. Chatterji's opinion is that ‘Kabīr's poems are composed in mixed Hindi (so-called Hindustani) and Braj-bhākhā, with occasional Eastern Hindi (Kosali) and even Bhojpuri forms’.²⁰ The difficulty of the problem is largely due to the uncertainties of the textual tradition: the various recensions of a single verse often exhibit dialectical variations. P. Chaturvedi has shown that the same pad may be found with characteristic Avadhi forms in the Bījak, with more Kharī Bolī in the Gurū Granth and with a few Braj forms in the Kabīr-granthāvali, the latter representing the Dādū-panthī tradition. None of the three main recensions, however, is wholly consistent: all show dialectical variations.

Given the complex linguistic pattern which prevailed in Northern India at the time, it cannot be taken for granted that Kabīr preached only in his own dialect. What could have been Kabīr's dialects? As a resident of Benares and a Muslim, he must have been familiar with at least two idioms besides Hindui: the two regional languages, Avadhi and Bhojpuri. Bhojpuri probably was his home language—but he must also have been familiar with Avadhi or Pūrbī, the language of the Muslim kingdom of Jaunpur, which included Benares. Houlston notes that “in the Eastern Patna and Gaya districts, where the regional language is Magahi, the dialect of South Bihar, Avadhi is used by many Muslims and Kayasthas, who were scribes in the service of the Moslem rulers; also that, in part of Eastern Uttar-Pradesh, where the regional language is Bhojpuri, the Muslims and Kayasthas do speak Avadhi”. But there are good reasons to believe that, in Kabīr's time, the illiterate crowds already used, as a lingua franca, the ancient composite idiom known as Hindui: the language of the bazaar.

The language of the dohās differs from that of the pads and ramainīs. As noted by Barthwal, “the style is more archaic in the dohā, a metre natural to Apabhramsha”. Western dialectal forms (Kharī Bolī, Rajasthani, and some Panjabi forms) are more numerous in the sākhīs, whereas Braj tends to dominate in the pads. The latter can be explained by the very nature of the genre: the pads are lyrics and, already by Kabīr's time, Braj (or pingal) had become the lyrical language par excellence. As to the Rajasthani and Panjabi forms in the sākhīs, Barthwal, like Shukla, is of the opinion that they reflect “the language of renunciates” discourse (sādhukkarī bhāṣā), prevalent at the time. Actually the language of Kabīr's sākhīs resembles the language of the Gorakh-bānīs, the sayings attributed to Gorakhnāth by the Nāth-panthīs.²¹ This nondescript Western idiom is probably inherited from the dohā-kosas described by Chatterji as popular (grāmya) Apabhramsha. An interesting point is that the dialectical difference between the dohās and pads attributed to Kabīr corresponds to the difference noted between the language of the Dohā-koṣas and Caryā-padas composed by the Sahajiyā Siddhas.²²

Though agreeing with Shukla and Barthwal about the influence of the Nāth-panthī language and style on the language of Kabīr's sākhīs, Chaturvedi remarks that many such sākhīs appear directly influenced by folk-songs and ballads in dohās.²³

As a matter of fact, the language used by Sant poets, whose works are preserved in the Granth, such as Senā, Pīpā and Ravidās, who may have been Kabīr's younger contemporaries, are composed in a very similar language. Even Nāmdev, who lived in the fourteenth century and hailed from Maharashtra, used this mixed Western dialect in his Hindi hymns recorded in the Granth.²⁴ During the course of the fourteenth to the fifteenth centuries, old Hindui or Kharī Bolī had become to be recognized as a lingua franca fit for the propagation of popular religious teaching—mostly unorthodox and anti-Brahmanical: one may say that Hindui was the language of the Indian ‘Reformation’.²⁵

Kabīr himself being an Easterner, would naturally have mixed some forms of his native dialect into his verses. With Benares situated in the Bhojpuri linguistic area, one would expect to find an admixture of Bhojpuri forms in his sākhīs; actually such forms are rare, whilst there is general evidence of the Avadhi influence. The reason seems to be that the Bhojpuri language was then, and had remained since, merely a spoken dialect without any written literature, a rural idiom to which the dominant Muslims do not seem to have paid attention. It was not so with Avadhi or Pūrbī, which had become, after Persian, the language of the Muslim kingdom of Jaunpur under the Sharqī, (Eastern) dynasty. Like Hindui in the West and in the Deccan, Avadhi, which was already a written language before the time of the Muslim conquest, had begun to be cultivated by the Eastern Sufis, as a means to propagate their own doctrines. Born as a Muslim Julāhā and living about Benares, Kabīr certainly was conversant with the dominant provincial language, Avadhi, and he was probably more familiar with it than with rural Bhojpuri. But there is no reason to suppose that he composed his sākhīs in ṭheṭh (pure) Avadhi: he more probably used a composite language, Hindawi or Hindui. Amīr Khusrau, in his Masnavī, defines the language of the time:

Now in India, every province has a peculiar dialect of its own: There is, for instance, Sindhi, Lahori, Kashmiri, Canarese, (…) and Oudhi (Avadhi). But in Delhi and all around it, the current language is the same Hindawi that has been used in India from ancient times and has been used for all forms of speech.

The language of the aristocratic Khusrau, like that of the poor Julāhā Kabīr, must have been basically the same: good old Hindui, the language of the bazaar, though the language of the heart may still have been Avadhi.

3. THE CONCLUSION OR ‘SIGNATURE’

The dohās and pads being, by their very nature, muktak, i.e. detached, independent verses, their authors often claim ownership by the simple device of introducing their own name in the verses themselves in the last line. This practice, which constitutes a kind of signature, is ancient. It appears already established in the Dohā-koṣ and Caryāpad of old, composed by the ‘Sahajiyā Siddhas’ and the ‘Nāth-panthīs’. In the Dohā-koṣ, we find formulas such as sarahapa bhananti or ‘[the Master] Saraha says’. The formula is called bhanitā or ‘what is said’. In the Tantric Sahajiya and Nath-panthī literature, the bhanitā is not regularly found. In the Caryā-padas, it is found in a more developed form such as ‘Kanha says’, ‘Sarahpā says’. Often, the name of the poet, who is a Siddha, is directly introduced in the line as the subject in a clause, such as: kānha vilasiā āsava-mātā, ‘[The Master] Kānha sports, drunk with liquor’.²⁶

The use of the bhanitā, also called mudrikā,’stamp’, seems to have become generalized in Northern and central India from the fifteenth century onwards, before Kabīr. It is found in the so-called abhangas in archaic Marathi, as well as in the pads of the Northern saint-poets. In the sākhīs, however, the full bhanitā is rarely found: either there is no signature at all, or else the single word kabīr is used at the beginning of the first line of the dohā, rarely of the second.²⁷ It is then used as a ‘stamp’ without having any syntactic function in the clause, which then becomes susceptible of a double interpretation.

4. THE LITERARY LANGUAGES OF THE MUSLIM MEDIEVAL PERIOD

Between the 14th and the 16th centuries A.D., under the influence of the Sufis, especially the Chishtiyas, two Indian vernaculars had emerged as literary languages in Northern and Central India: the highly persianized Dakhani in the Bijapur-Golconde area of the Deccan and the ‘pure’ (ṭheṭh) Avadhi in Eastern Uttar Pradesh—an idiom practically free from Arabo-Persian vocabulary. The former reflected the language of the literate Muslims, the latter was attuned to the ear of educated Hindus. The works composed in those literary dialects had an ecumenical ring, as their Sufi authors were eager to build a bridge between ‘the Two Religions’, Hinduism and Islam, to unite rather than divide. All those works were written in the Persian script, with which literate Hindus, especially the Kayastha caste, had long been familiar.

Meanwhile the uneducated masses of Northern India went on with their own provincial languages and dialects, to which a lingua franca was superposed out of the necessities of common intercourse, especially between low-caste Hindus and equally low-caste Muslim converts: as we have seen, that lingua franca was Hindui, whose origin was probably anterior to the Muslim conquest and the Muslim predication: a mixed language of Northwestern origin, used by itinerant holy men of various denominations, mostly by the ubiquitous Gorakhnāthi or Nāth-panthī Yogīs. A hybrid language from the start, Hindui easily absorbed the Arabo-Persian vocabulary, with any amount of phonetic variations and deformations. Persianized Hindui, later called’Hindustani’ seems to have been spoken—or at least understood—all over Northwestern India and the Ganges valley, including Bihar and Central India, and also in part of Maharashtra—all regions where the Nāth-panthī propaganda had been active from the tenth century onwards. The very plasticity of old medieval Hindui made it the perfect medium for the spreading of new ideas and new religious values among the down-trodden masses of India: it was the privileged idiom of the anti-Brahmanical propaganda carried on by the Nāth-panthīs and the Sufis with equal fervour. In the Deccan, the Hindui language appears to have been familiar to the unorthodox, bitterly anti-Brahmanical Manbhau (mahānubhāv) sectarians, themselves indebted to the Nāth-panthī predication, though antagonistic to their cult. This is confirmed by the Caupaḍīs (i.e. caupāī) verses of Dāmodar Panḍit, a Manbhau author belonging to the 13-14th century (1237-1316) whose verses were composed as a retort to the philosophy of the Nāth cult.²⁸ According to V. D. Kulkarni, out of 60 verses (caupadī) in that work, 35 are composed in a language which is predominantly the regional language, Marāṭhī—whereas the other 25 represent the language of the Nāth-Siddhas—a language that the author describes as “a harmonic blending of Hindi and Marathi words, without any Arabic or Persian element”.²⁹

The Caupaḍīs of Dāmodar Panḍit testify to the extraordinary plasticity of ‘Hindui’, as used by unorthodox preachers. V. D. Kulkarni notes that the language of the Caupaḍīs is close to the language of the Gorakh Bānīs. Apparently, as a Sādhus' jargon, Hindui could include and assimilate any amount of words borrowed from other Indo-Aryan dialects. The fact that the Caupaḍīs of Dāmodar Panḍit contain no Arabo-Persian vocabulary, suggests that their origin goes back to the pre-Muslim period. Later Manbhau literature is entirely and exclusively composed in Marathi. In spite of its strongly monotheistic trend, the literature of the Marathi abhangas appears more akin to Krishnaite Bhakti than to the religion of the Northern Sants, including the old saint-poet Nāmdev from Maharashtra. Nāmdev, who probably belongs to the fourteenth century, is the author of a large number of abhangas, short devotional poems in medieval Marathi. Though Nāmdev is not a northerner, the Sant tradition invariably names him as Kabīr's predecessor—and the Dādū-panthī themselves name him as the first (i.e. the earliest) of the Northern Sants. He is known to have expressed himself in the lingua franca of the time: old ‘Hindui’. The inclusion of the old saint Nāmdev among the Sant poets of Northern India is based on the sixty-one Hindi hymns attributed to him in the Gurū Granth of the Sikhs. Some poems attributed to Nāmdev are composed in a queer mixture of Hindi and Marathi;³⁰ moreover, a number of pads attributed to Nāmdev in other collections also include Marathi grammatical forms. Nāmdev is the oldest poet in the Sant paramparā: after him, the tradition diverges. The Maharashtrian Sants become more devotional and more vaishnavized, while the old Nāth-panthī, anti-brahmanical trend of thought and Tantric vocabulary is on the wane. The case of Dāmodar Panḍit as well as that of Nāmdev suggests a strong link between the old Hindui language and the rejection of Brahmanical orthodoxy and social establishment. First used as a lingua franca by the Nāth-panthīs to spread their gospel of religious and social rebellion, Hindui remains in use in vast areas in which more developed literary languages already existed, as in Eastern India and in Maharashtra: old Hindui emerges as essentially the language of non-conformity and the Indian medieval Reformation. The Arabo-Persian script becomes the only script available to all, Hindus as well as Muslims, for mundane affairs as well as religious expression—as seen in the premākhyān love tales, in old Avadhi. The ancient devanāgarī script remains the privilege of the Pandits, and the Kaiṭhī script that of the Kayastha scribes, who use it concurrently with the Arabo-Persian script. If the poor Julāhā Kabīr was somewhat acquainted with any script, it could only have been with that Arabo-Persian script.

5. KABīR'S STYLE

Much has been said and written about Kabīr's style. All critics, especially modern ones, have emphasized its extraordinary vigour—a quality in which his verses stand supreme in the Hindi language and perhaps in the whole Indian tradition—as well as its abrasive roughness. Indifferent to ‘literature’, unskilled in the delicate art of ornate poetry, Kabīr cannot be called a kavi, ‘poet’, in the traditional Indian sense. Some Indian scholars would rather consider him as a social reformer and a mystic than as a poet. Not only are Kabīr's verses devoid of all literary ornaments (alamkāra) and figures of speech, but the very bluntness of his expressions, the triviality of his comparisons and his scoffing, are likely to shock the reader or listener whose ears are attuned to the refinements and intricacies of kāvya poetry.

H. P. Dvivedi is not wrong when he argues that “Kabīr found the Hindi language still in infancy, yet put it to severe trial and somewhat attempted to bend it to his needs”. The same scholar calls Kabīr “a dictator of language”; “Language trembles before him, unable to serve him and to comply to his will …” Actually, no scholar who ever read Kabīr in the original could fail to be struck by the unique forcefulness of his style. As noted by W. G. Orr, “for sheer vigour of thought and rugged terseness, no later bhakti writer can be brought into comparison with him”.

More so with Kabīr than with any other Indian author, the peculiar quality of the style seems to reflect an outstanding and somewhat mysterious personality. Indifferent or opposed to traditional beliefs and values, apparently unconcerned with the pleasure or displeasure of his audience, Kabīr fearlessly voices his inner conviction. His blunt language, his bitter irony bespeak ardent indignation—but also a desperate effort to awaken his dumb, sleepy fellow men, unaware of their impending doom.

The heroic striving of the soul awakened by the ‘Satguru's arrow’ to reach the unseen, inaccessible Beloved, the dangers and torments of the spiritual Path, inspire him with stirring words, revealing the depth of his own suffering and despair. On the other hand, the ineffable bliss of Union in that far-away ‘land’, beyond the’impassable Pass’—yet hidden in the depth of man's own soul—the ecstasy of the secret, silent merging into the One, in which all duality is abolished, are evoked in strange, often obscure words, yet endowed—at least for the Indian ear—with an extraordinary power of suggestion.

Even when chaotic and somewhat obscure, Kabīr's style, at least in his well-established sayings, is never dull, never lacking in naturalness and spontaneity, which gives it its inimitable charm. Dvivedi has found suggestive words to evoke Kabīr's style: ‘Tender as a flower, hard as a diamond’. And it is true that Kabīr's best utterances are endowed with a diamond-like quality, the transparency, multi-faceted brilliancy and mysterious glow of pure diamond. If not a learned poet, a kavi in the traditional sense, the little weaver of Benares was indeed a great poet, one of the greatest known in India and elsewhere.

Notes

1. The Sahajiyā Master Kānha says in one of the Caryā-pads: jo managoara ālājālā, āgama pothi iṣṭamālā.

   “What the mind perceives is mere humbug and so are the āgamas (scriptures), the books and the bead-telling”.

   Shahidullah, Les Chants mystiques de Kānha et Saraha: le Dohā-koṣa et les Caryā, Paris, 1928, p. 115, 10.

2. According to the scholar H. P. Dvidevi, Hindī sāhitya kā ādikāl, Patna, 1952, p. 93, the dohā is the first chand, i.e. prosodical form, in which the rhyme was introduced.

3. The Buddhist Saraha himself praises the dohāchanda in these terms: naü naü dohā-saddena na kahabi kimpi goppia.

   “Through ever new dohās, nothing remains hidden” (i.e. all spiritual truth can be expressed in dohās); cf. Shahidullah, op.cit., p. 160, dohā 94.

4. The Pāhuḍa Dohā of Rāmasimha Muni, An Apabhramśa work on Jaina mysticism, ed. Hiralal Jain, Karanja, 1933.

5. On lyrical dohās in late Apabhramsha and in Old Western Rajasthani literature, cf. Ch. Vaudeville, Les Dūhā de Dholā-Mārū, Pondichery, 1962, pp.46-7 and 116-18.

6. Barthwal (NSHP, pp. 223-4) remarks that the terms sākhī and sabad (śabda) meaning ‘witness’ or ‘authoritative word’ (of the Guru) seem to have been originally used as synonyms.

7. According to Tiwārī (KG, Preface, pp. ii-iii), there are no less than 1.579 pads, 5.395 sākhīs and 134 ramainīs attributed to Kabīr in various compilations—and research could probably uncover more!

8. ‘Sir’, addressed to a Muhammedan.

9. ‘Murshid’: a leader, an eminent person.’Pir’: a Muhammedan Saint, a holy man.

10. Ramzān: the ninth month of the Muhammedan year, in which fast should be observed from early dawn, to sunset.

11. Kalimā: the sacred formula of the Muslim faith: Allah is God and Muhammad is his Prophet.

12. Kaaba: the sacred square building at Mecca, visited by all Muslim pilgrims.

13. ‘Co-emergent’ may also be interpreted as’Essential’.

14. Ahmed Shah, [ed., The Bījak of Kabīr, Baptist Mission, Cawnpore, 1911], p. 29.

15. G. Grierson, The Bijak of Kabir, JRAS, 1918, p. 152.

16. B. R. Saksena's opinion in the matter is cautiously stated: ‘Pūrbī means “Eastern” and is sometimes used for Avadhi and at others for Bhojpuri. It may well be a suitable name of Eastern Hindi to distinguish it from Western Hindi.’ Evolution of Avadhi, Allahabad, 1937, p. 2.

17. P. Chaturvedi, KSP, pp. 209-10; see also D. V. Bharati, Siddha-sāhitya, Allahabad, 1965, pp. 447-8.

18. KG I, Intr., pp. 71-75.

19. Dholā-mārū-rā-dūhā, eds. Ram Simha, S. K. Parik and N. D. Svami, Benares V. S. 1991 (1934), pp. 167-8.

20. A review of conflicting opinions about Kabīr's language is found in P. Chaturvedi, KSP, pp. 208ff.

21. Cf. Nāth siddho kī bāniyå, ed. H. P. Dvivedi, Benares, Vi.S. 2014, 1957 A.D.

22. S. K. Chatterji (ODBL, vol. 1, Calcutta, 1926, pp. 112-13) characterizes the language of the Dohā-koṣas as a king of Western (Sauraseni) Apabhramsha and the language of the Caryā-pad as “a form of old Bengali”.

23. Among those Southern Indian Sufis, Shah Burhanuddin, who flourished at Bijapur and who might have been Kabīr's contemporary, wrote a short work called Sukh-sahelā which had the vocabulary and metres of ‘Hindu Hindi’. S. K. Chatterji (Indo-Aryan and Hindi [Calcutta: Firma K. L. Mukhopadhyay, 1960], p. 206) writes that the Hindi found in the Sukh-sahelā “is very like the Hindi we find in Kabīr's poems and in the works of the Saints”.

24. The dates of Nāmdev, who in the North is given as Rāmānand's disciple and in Maharashtra as a contemporary of Jñāneshvar, remain uncertain. Besides, the Maharashtrian tradition knows more than one ‘Namdev’; cf. P. Machve, Hindī aur marāṭhī kā nirgun sant-kāvya, Benares, 1962; see also Bhandarkar, VS, pp. 124 ff. The Hindi hymns of Nāmdev have been edited, in Hindi, with a substantial Introduction by Bhagirath Mishra and R.N. Maurya: Sant Nāmdev kī hindī padāvalī, Poona, 1964. A critical edition and English translation has been prepared by Winand M. Callewaert & Mukund Lath, The Hindī Songs of Nāmdev, Leuven, 1989, 432 p.

25. Vaudeville, Kabīr's language and languages: Hindui as the Language of Non-conformity, Madison University, 1987.

26. Quoted in R. Sankrityayan, Hindī kāvya dhārā, Allahabad, 1945, p. 151.

27. In the Gurū Granth, the word kabīra is regularly added at the beginning of each saloku (śloka) without consideration for the rhythm. We have omitted it in translation.

28. V. D. Kulkarni, ‘The Caupaḍīs of Dāmodar Panḍit’.

29. A few Arabo-Persian words, however, are found in the Hindi pads and also in the Marathi abhangas, attributed to saint Nāmdev.

30. The Hindi hymns of Nāmdev have been edited with a substantial Introduction by Bhagirath Mishra and R. N. Maurya: Sant Nāmdev kī hindī padāvalī, Poona, 1964; for the mixed language, see pads 15, 20, 31, 34. See also Callewaert-Lath:1989.

Abbreviations

JRAS: Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society

KG: Kabīr Granthāvalī, ed. P. N. Tiwari, Prayāg, 1961.

KSP: P. Chaturvedi, Kabīr sāhitya kī parakh, Prayāg, Vi.S. 2011.

NSHP: P. D. Barthwal, The Nirguna School of Hindi Poetry, Benares, 1936.

ODBL: S. K. Chatterji, The Origin and Development of the Bengali Language, 2 vols., Calcutta, 1926.

VS: R. G. Bhandarkar, Vaiṣnavism, Śaivism and Minor Religious Systems, Collected Works, iv, Poona, 1929.