SOURCE: Vaudeville, Charlotte. “Selected Verses.” In A Weaver Named Kabir: Selected Verses with a Detailed Biographical and Historical Introduction, pp. 131-47. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1993.

The measure of authenticity to be attributed to the various recensions of the Kabīr-vānīs or The Sayings of Kabīr, is a particularly vexing one. Scholars agree that Kabīr, born towards the middle of the fifteenth century in Benares or in nearby Magahar, as a Muslim weaver, must have been illiterate—or at most half-literate. It is unlikely that he himself wrote down any of his compositions and even more unlikely that he composed any literary work. His famous utterances, couched in a form of old ‘Hindui’ must, therefore, have been transmitted orally at least one century before they were first written down.¹

This oral mode of transmission naturally let the door wide open to all kinds of alterations, interpolations and additions—so that the number of verses attributed to Kabīr today may well run into the thousands:

Like the leaves of a great tree, like the grains of sand in the Ganga
are the words which came out of Kabīr's mouth.(2)

Besides the numberless oral or written additions to the cherished treasure of Kabīr's Sayings, a number of composed works were attributed to him, especially by the sectarian Kabīr-panthīs, ‘Kabīr's Followers’—a later sect—who claim to have been founded by Kabīr himself, their now divinized Guru.

THE EASTERN TRADITION OF KABīR'S WORDS: BīJAK

The Kabīr-panthīs' treasure is the Khās Granth, whose original manuscript is said to be preserved in the ‘Kabīr Chaurā Maṭh’ (temple) at Benares, the main center of the Kabīr-panthī sect or ‘those who follow the way of Kabīr’. The last book in that compilation, and by far the most revered by the Kabīr-panthīs, is a collection of Kabīr's verses called Bījak, literally ‘seed’ or ‘chart’ of sacred treasures. Several other manuscripts of that famed compilation are still in the possession of the ‘Kabīr Chaurā Maṭh’ and some other maṭhs belonging to other sections of the same sect elsewhere. However, the Mahants or ‘authorities’ of such maṭhs are reluctant to have them published. The ‘original copy’ of the Bījak in daily use and daily worship at the Kabīr-Chaurā maṭh appears to be an old lithographed copy of one of those manuscripts.

Supposed to represent the authentic Kabīr-panthī tradition of Kabīr's verses as prevalent in Eastern Uttar Pradesh and in Central India, the Bījak may be taken as representative of the ‘Eastern’ recension of the Kabīr-vānīs—as opposed to fairly ancient recensions of the same, current in Western India. The Bījak itself has come down to us in two main forms: a longer and a shorter form. Yet, even in its shorter form, the text cannot be accepted as totally genuine, as shown by Parashuram Chaturvedi and other Kabirian scholars: the Bījak not only includes a number of meaningless and obviously corrupt verses, but it also contains numerous references to the elaborate cosmogony and religious beliefs peculiar to the sectarian Kabīr-panthīs themselves.

The ‘Bārābānkī’ edition of Kabīr's Words includes 84 rāmainīs³ and 115 śabdas, followed by an acrostic composition called Bipramacautīsī. Then follow 12 poems called “Kahāra,” “Basant,” “Cancarī,” “Belī,” “Birahulī” and “Hindolā,” evidently modelled on popular types of folk-songs. After the pads or ‘songs’ comes a list of 353 sākhīs or dohās.⁴ The edition also includes a glossary and lists of interpretations relating to symbolical numbers, similies and allegorical allusions, which are found in the Bījak text as it has come down to this day. The ‘Bārābānkī edition’ has been reprinted many times with a modern Hindī paraphrase (ṭīkā): that ṭīkā was the work of a Kabīrpanthī scholar, who called himself Sadhu Abhilashdas.

The collection of satirical verses and paradoxical utterances called ulṭabāmsī in the Bījak are particularly striking. In spirit and style, they match rather well with similar utterances found in the other two main recensions of Kabīr's verses compiled in Northwestern India. But the Bījak verses have been largely interpolated: it has become a separate tradition, which we call the ‘Eastern tradition’ of Kabīr's verses.

As the major authoritative collection of Kabīr's verses in the hands of the Kabīr-panthīs, the Bījak early attracted the attention of Western missionaries and scholars, from the nineteenth century onwards. A first attempt at editing and translating some of it in English was made by the Reverend Prem Chand, as early as 1890; another English translation of the Bījak by the Reverend Ahmed Shah, a local clergyman who happened to be a Christian convert, appeared in 1917. None of the first translators were very successful, and the result of their efforts is hardly understandable to the Western reader today. Yet, those early attempts at deciphering and translating Kabīr's purported Sayings were a witness to the newly-awakened interest for his teachings among the first generation of Christian missionaries in India.⁵

AHMED SHAH AND THE BīJAK

Ahmed Shah's own appreciation of Kabīr's religious and philosophical thought in his ‘Introduction’ is fairly balanced. Like other Christian writers before him, he believes that ‘religious toleration and the brotherhood of mankind’ were among the chief lessons that Kabīr had set himself to inculcate—but he does not commit himself on the question of a possible Christian influence. Yet, he underlines Kabīr's originality: “Though thoughts resembling his are to be found in the writings of Hindu philosophers, and also in the words of Muslim Sufis of all ages, yet the presentation of them is peculiarly his own”.⁶

Ahmed Shah admits that Kabīr was brought up as a Muslim Julāhā, but he remarks upon the latter's considerable knowledge of Hindu concepts and practices, as well as of Puranic mythology, relying on a number of passages in the Bījak, which he evidently regards as representing the essence of Kabīr's authentic teachings. On the other hand, Ahmed Shah remarks on the scant knowledge of the doctrines of Islam revealed by Kabīr in the Bījak: for him, “the contrast between Kabīr's intimate acquaintance with Hindu thought, writings and ritual and his purely superficial knowledge of Moslem beliefs revealed in the Bījak are too striking to be ignored”.⁷

The same author, therefore, seeks an explanation for Kabīr's expansive knowledge of Hindu tradition and beliefs in his contact with his purported Guru, Rāmānand, in whose company Kabīr is supposed to have spent a considerable time. In this, he agrees with the Kabīrpanthīs, or ‘those who follow the path of Kabīr’ and also with the Hindu tradition as a whole—in accordance with which he even admits that the weaver Kabīr was born a Hindu! Ahmed Shah suggests that it was because Indian Muslims welcomed Kabīr's efforts in combating idol-worship that they claimed him as a Muslim—and they went so far as acknowledging him as a pīr, a Muslim Sufi or saint, for his self-denying and pious life.⁸

Ahmed Shah's English translation of the Bījak was hailed by Grierson with enthusiasm, not so much for its literary achievement—which was rather poor—as for Kabīr's extraordinary personality:

What a wonderful man Kabīr must have been! A lowly Muslim weaver who by a stratagem gained accession to a Vaishnav community—universally despised and hated by both Mussalman and Hindu, maltreated by the Muslim emperor and persecuted by the Brahmanhood of Benares—with unparalleled audacity he dared to set himself face to face against both Islam and Hinduism, the two religions of the 15th century India, and won through. Each he attacked in its tenderest point—its shibboleths and its rituals—and over both rode triumphant, teaching and converting thousands who became his devoted followers. Not only did he found an eclectic monotheism that survives in India till the present day, but he became the spiritual father of Nānak who founded Sikhism.

THE GURū GRANTH OR ADI GRANTH OF THE SIKHS

The two other ancient and important compilations of Kabīr's verses originated from Northwestern India: in Panjab and Rajasthan. It is apparently in those areas that the Kabīr-yānīs made the greatest impact on both the Hindu and the Muslim masses, and that his teachings were enthusiastically received, assimilated and later written down. Several religious sects were founded in those regions, at least from the sixteenth century onwards, which were directly or indirectly influenced by Kabīr's teachings: such were the Dādūpanthī and the Naranjanī sects of Rajasthan, and the Sikh Panth in the Panjab. The latter, founded by Guru Nānak in the early sixteenth century, evolved into a religion independent from Hinduism proper.

The teachings of Guru Nānak and the four Gurus who were his immediate successors were gathered into a large compilation which was known as the Ādi Granth, literally ‘The Original Book’. The Ādi Granth, the sacred scripture of the Sikhs, was later called Gurū Granth. It includes a collection of 243 salokus or śloks attributed to Kabīr.⁹ It is a very important document and the only one which can be dated with precision: 1604. The Gurū Granth is free from the Kabīr-panthī sectarian element which imbues a part of the Bījak, and its authenticity is the best established of all. Yet, some pads, especially those which recall Kabīr's miraculous escapes from various attempts on his life, or the legend of the Vaishnav saint and martyr Prahlād, have a hagiographical character. Allusions to the mythical great Bhaktas (devotees) of yore, such as the holy bird Shukdev, the Vaishnav saint and martyr Prahlād and the learned monkey Hanumān, do not fit in with Kabīr's radical rejection of Brahmanical scriptures and Hindu lore.

According to Sikh tradition, the compilation of the Ādi Granth was completed in 1604 and the sacred Book was installed in the Sikh temple at Amritsar by Guru Arjan Singh himself.¹⁰ A second recension of the Granth, including a few additions by Guru Bhai Banno, did not meet with Guru Arjan Singh's approval and remained, therefore, confined to its author's descendants. The third and final recension, including the sayings of the ninth Guru, Tegh Bahādur Singh, was dictated to Mani Bhāi Singh by the tenth Guru of the sect, Govind Singh, who died in 1708 A.D.

Before he died, Guru Govind Singh had passed the ‘Guruship’ of the Sikhs to the Ādi Granth itself, which then became known as the Śrī Gurū Granth Sāhib and was enshrined in the Golden temple at Amritsar. Govind Singh bode the Sikhs henceforth to obey the Granth Sāhib, held as identical with the ‘visible body of the Guru’.¹¹ He is said to have refused to add his own compositions into the sacred Book—the only additions he tolerated being the verses composed by the ninth Guru. The Sikhs consider their Śrī Gurū Granth Sāhib as identical with the original Granth, the Ādi Granth, once compiled in the gurumukhī script by Guru Arjan Singh.

Besides the pads (songs) and the salokus (śloks), taken as an equivalent of dohā, and composed by the Sikh Gurus, the Gurū Granth includes a very large number of verses attributed to a number of ancient, (pre-Nānak), Hindu and Muslim saints: the latter are revered by the Sikhs, as some kind of spiritual precursors to the final revelation embodied in the compositions of Guru Nānak and the first Sikh Gurus. In the Gurū Granth, those saints are called bhagats (bhaktas) or ‘devotees’. The Bhagats are staunch monotheists: they uphold the right type of bhakti or ‘Devotion to the supreme God’, without any concession to idol worship.

The ‘Bhagats’ mentioned in the Gurū Granth belonged to various times, but, as a whole, they may be dated from the fourteenth to the early sixteenth centuries A.D. The tradition gives Jaydev (or Jayadeva) as the earliest, but his time and location remain uncertain. Macauliffe believes that the ‘Jaydev’ who is held as the author of two hymns found in the Granth, is the same as the famed Sanskrit poet who composed the Gīta Govinda, in the second part of the twelfth century A.D.—but this appears very unlikely. As to Rāmānand, a high caste Brahman: according to the Gurū Granth tradition he was born around 1400 AD and lived in the early part of the fifteenth century, so that he may have been Kabīr's own guru, which however is very unlikely.

Farquhar believes that Rāmānand belonged to an ancient Ramaite sect in South India, and that he was the author of the Adhyātma Rāmāyan. Neither Grierson nor Parashuram Chaturvedi, however, accept Farquhar's view about Rāmānand—the latter being sometimes represented as Kabīr's own guru, and sometimes as a dealer of magic spells. The present Rāmānandīs, as high caste Brahmans, composed books in Sanskrit.¹² Two Hindī pads compiled by the Dādū-panthī Rajab, are found in the Sarvādngī and one of them found its way in the Gurū Granth.¹³

SOME PARTICULARITIES OF THE GURū GRANTH

In the Gurū Granth, as written by the scribe Bhāi Gurdās under Guru Arjan's dictation, the words were not divided off, as is customary in Indian manuscripts. Modern editions are now printed under the supervision of the Gurudvārā at Amritsar, both in the Gurmukhī and the Nāgarī characters. In all those editions, the original disposition is rigorously kept—but for the division of the words: the verse numbering and even the page numbering always remain the same. The cutting of the words, however, appears sometimes doubtful. Another difficulty stems out of the composition of the Gurū Granth itself, whose intricacies make it difficult for the non-initiate to discover and pick out the verses of the Bhagats—or, for that matter, of any particular Guru. Indication of the page number is, therefore, necessary when referring to a particular verse.

In the Gurū Granth, the distichs (dohās), called salokus (Skt ślok) are found listed together in a continuous series, without any classification according to the theme—and the saloku-list occurs after the pads of the last rāg.¹⁴ In the treatment of the dohās, the Gurū Granth recension agrees with the Bījak (in which the dohās are called sākhīs, lit. ‘witnesses’), but it contrasts with the Kabīr-granthāvalī recension, in which the sākhīs are classified into angas or chapters, according to the subject-matter.

As to the poems (pads) Gurū Granth, they are found classified under thirty-one different rāgs, or musical modes, beginning with sirī rāgu (Śrī rāg) and ending with jaijāvantī rāgu. At the end of each rāg, the poems to be sung by the Bhagats in that particular rāg are listed immediately after the last of the poems composed by the Sikh Gurus.

The near totality of the salokus attributed to Kabīr in the Gurū Granth begin with the name of the presumed author, Kabīr, accompanied by the so-called bhanitā ‘Says Kabīr’.

It is apparently to alleviate the difficulties encountered by non-specialists, and to make the Gurū Granth collection of Kabīr's verses available to Indian students that R. K. Varma published a collection of his verses, entitled Sant Kabīr (Allahabad, 1947), together with an Introduction in Hindī.¹⁵

Within the collection of poems attributed to the Bhagats in the Gurū Granth, the ‘Words of the Bhagat Kabīr’ are invariably listed first, Kabīr taking precedence even over the older saint Nāmdev.

As we have seen, poems attributed to Kabīr in the Gurū Granth are found classified in seventeen different rāgs. As to the longer compositiòns attributed to him, they are found at the end of gaurī rāgu, the second and the longest section in the whole of the Gurū Granth. A composition in the form of an acrostic poem called Bāvan akharī, literally ‘The fifty-two letters’, also includes tithi (list of lunar dates) and vār, or ‘Weekdays’. What makes the use of the Gurū Granth even more puzzling to the non-initiate is the confusion in terms. Short poems known as pads in Hindī poetical tradition are also referred to as either śabda or pāürī, the latter literally meaning the ‘rung of a ladder’. But various compositions with a given rāg are classified according to the number of pads they include, as dupade (two pads), tipade (three pads) and so on—the longest being the aṣṭapadī (eight pads) and the solhā (sixteen pads).

Most of the pads attributed to Kabīr in the Gurū Granth are made of two to four stanzas, including a refrain. Each given stanza is made of either two long lines rhyming together or four short lines and two rhymes.

The refrain itself, rahāü, is usually made of two short lines, or one short and one long line rhyming together. The refrain is invariably included in the first stanza and is never numbered separately, so that it constitutes either the two first lines or the two last lines of the poem. All those peculiarities, plus a number of unwarranted variations within the general pattern, may well drive the non-specialist (and even the specialist) to despair, and drive him to resort to the Macauliffe translation! Yet those short, naive utterances have a charm of their own:

O Madhao! In water, I couldn't quench my thirst:
          in that water, a huge fire has sprung up
You are the Water, and I, the little sea-fish,
          in water I live, yet, for Water I pine!

THE KABīR-GRANTHāVALī RECENSION

The so-called Kabīr-granthāvalī recension essentially coincides with the Dādū-panthī tradition of Kabīr's sayings—a tradition which developed in Rajasthan, and may also be called the ‘Rajasthani’ recension of the Kabīr-vānīs. This tradition goes back to Dādū-Dayāl, a low-caste Muslim like Kabīr. He was a dhuniyā or cotton-carder from Ahmedabad, who settled in Rajasthan and flourished in the second half of the sixteenth century. The recorded vānīs of Dādū Dayāl show a close dependence on Kabīr's thought and style. Besides Kabīr, their purported founder, the Dādū-panthīs hold Nāmdev, Ravidās and Haridās as their most revered saints.

The Pañc-vānī literature composed by the Dādū-panthīs of Rajasthan is based on the words of the ‘Five Saints’ among whom the most prominent (apart from the founder Dādū himself) is Kabīr. It was found that the two manuscripts on which Shyam Sundar Das based his edition of the Kabīr-granthāvalī closely followed the texts found in the Pañc-vānīs of Rajasthan. Both, therefore, are considered as belonging to the same tradition.¹⁶

The standard edition of the so-called Kabīr-granthāvalī is the above-mentioned S. S. Das edition (often referred to in India as ‘the Sabhā edition’), which was reprinted a number of times. This edition, which we have referred to as KG1 includes 811 sākhīs (or dohās) classified into 59 angas, ‘parts’ or ‘chapters’, whose length may vary from 2 to 62 sākhīs. The KG1 pad collection, placed after the sākhīs, includes 403 pads, classified under 16 rāgs—each of which may include any number of pads. The third and last section of KG1 also includes a very large number of ramainīs: a case of inflation galopante! It is not possible to ascertain the number of such ramainīs and the so-called pads within the ramainīs are not numbered.

Clearly, the ‘standard edition’ of the Kabīr-granthāvalī (KG1) compiled by S. S. Das was of little value: the editor had done little more than reproducing his first manuscript (ka), adding in the footnotes the extra verses found in the second manuscript (kha). In the Appendix are listed the verses (sākhīs, pads and ramainīs) found in the Gurū Granth and nowhere else. But references to the text are not given.

Though the first of the two manuscripts on which S. S. Das based the 1928 edition is not as ancient as he himself thought, it is a valuable manuscript which, when compared with the Pañc-vānī manuscripts, gives a fair idea of the contents of the Dādū-panthī or Rajasthani tradition of the Kabīr-vānīs. The comparison, however, was not undertaken by S. S. Das himself and the title he gave to his edition: Kabīr-granthāvalī, was somewhat misleading, since it only gave the text of the first Nāgarī Pracārinī Sabhā manuscript, with variant readings found in the second manuscript in the footnotes. This edition, which for a long time, remained the only printed text of the main tradition of Kabīr's verses, was reprinted a number of times. Later, different ṭīkās or paraphrases of the S. S. Das text appeared, published by various Indian scholars. None of such ṭīkās, unfortunately, is of much help.

Another important compilation of Kabīr's verses is that found in the Sarbāngī of the poet Rajab, from Sanganer in Rajasthan, who was the foremost disciple of Dādū Dayāl in the middle of the sixteenth century. The Sarbāngī compilation includes sayings of sixty-six Siddhas and saints, whose verses are divided, according to the subject, into 144 angas (chapters). The collection of verses found in the Sarbāngī includes 337 verses: though it is much shorter than the Pañc-vānī manuscripts, it clearly belongs to the same tradition. The Sarbāngī seems to contain an epitome of what is generally called the Dādū-panthī or Rajasthani tradition of Kabīr's verses.¹⁷

The first, and so far the sole attempt at a critical edition of Kabīr's verses, was the work of a young scholar of the Allahabad University, Dr. Parasnath Tiwārī. His edition was first published in 1961, by the University of Allahabad under the same title: Kabīr-granthāvalī. It is the P. N. Tiwārī edition of the Kabīr-granthāvalī that we refer to as KG2.¹⁸ The method adopted by the author was to retain and include, in his own edition, all the verses he found in two or more independent pāṭhs, (i.e. readings), giving the references in the footnotes and classifying the numerous variants found in the texts. This enormously painstaking effort was only partly successful: some of the eleven pāṭhs obviously were not worth much (especially the older printed compilations)—and not to be treated on a par with the Bījak, the Gurū Granth and the best manuscripts in the Rajasthani tradition. This methodological error led to the acceptance, in KG2, of a large number of verses of doubtful authenticity.

The comparison of the three recensions of the Kabīr vānīs, namely the Eastern recension (represented by the Bījak) and the two Western recensions, (namely the Panjabi Gurū Granth) and the Rajasthani (called Kabīr-granṭhāvalī) recensions, clearly brings out the fact that, on the whole, the tradition of the sākhīs and śloks of Kabīr, is better established and more coherent than that of his pads. The comparison between the three recensions also brings out the fact that, the shorter the poem, the more likely it is to be found in two—or even in all the three recensions. This tends to confirm the presumption that the original verses composed by Kabīr were either in the form of distichs (sākhīs or śloks), or in the form of short compositions (pads), probably not exceeding four or five rhyming verses, in which the first or the last line was used as a refrain. It becomes clear that the longer poems found in one or the other of the three recensions are either spurious or heavily interpolated.

In the Bījak and the Gurū Granth, the dohās (whether called sākhī or saloku) are found jumbled together without any apparent order. In the Dādū-panthī or Rajasthani recession, they are classified into angas, i.e. ‘chapters’, according to the subject matter—such as ‘Guru kau ang’, ‘Viraha kau ang’ etc. P. Chaturvedi is of the opinion that this division might have been an innovation introduced by Rajjab.¹⁹ Yet precedents can be found in ancient Indian literatures: in the Dhammapada, a Pali text belonging to the Buddhist canon, the so-called gāthās are classified into vaggos (Skt varga) according to the subject. In Indian medieval poetry, the short lyrics known as pads are traditionally classified according to the rāg, the type of melody in which they are to be sung. In the Gurū Granth, each rāg includes first the pads composed by Guru Nanak—by far the longest list—then the words composed by the other Sikh Gurus, and finally those composed by holy men, the Bhagats. In the Bījak, the poems, called sabads (śabdas), meaning ‘holy utterances’, are also chanted, though the rāg is not indicated in the text. The ‘Dādū-panthī’ or Rajasthani tradition seems to hesitate: the pads are sometimes classified under a particular rāg, as in the Gurū Granth, and sometimes treated as non-musical utterances. The Bījak includes a large number of so-called ‘Ramainīs’ and ‘Shabads’ (śabda) composed in the caupāī metre. Such ramainīs mostly appear in didactic compositions. Besides the sākhīs, śabdas and ramainīs, the Bījak includes a few long poems with particular rhythms, named after popular folksongs and dances, such as Basant, Camcar (or Carcari) and Hindola: those songs are meant to impart spiritual teachings in the form of simple village songs or short rhymed ballads. It is difficult to ascertain whether such compositions can be ascribed to Kabīr. They are only found in the Bījak.

Experience has shown us that the greatest hurdle to be confronted by Kabirian scholars is the lingering uncertainly about the relative value and degree of authenticity to be accorded to any given verse. Another hurdle consists in the non-existence of cross-references between the main recensions: for instance, a Hindī scholar trying to read the Kabīr śloks in the Gurū Granth text has no way of knowing if a particular verse is found anywhere else attributed to Kabīr, and under which form. If he manages to lay his hand on the KG2 edition, he cannot ascertain whether a particular verse finds a correspondent in the Gurū Granth or in the Bījak recensions, since lists of the few verses common to all the three recensions are nowhere to be found.

In presenting in a single volume the three principal texts of the Kabīr-vānīs, our intention has been to make those treasures available to the scholars concerned and to all ‘Friends of Kabīr’. But such a compilation would have been of limited value without fairly reliable Concordance-Tables. The author, therefore, endeavoured to establish such Concordances, which are printed at the end of the volume.

We sincerely hope that our endeavour will not be in vain and that it will encourage Indologists with an interest in Indo-Aryan literatures and/or medieval Hinduism to attempt a direct approach to the Sayings of Kabīr, the most quoted—and also the most misquoted—of all the great Indian poets and mystics.

Notes

1. Cf. P. N. Tiwārī, Kabīr-vānī-sangraha, Allahabad, 1970, p. 120.

2. Bī. sā. 261.

3. 84 is a sacred number in Indian tradition.

4. Sākhī means ‘testimony’: it is an equivalent of ślok or saloku, a two-lines utterance; dohā, or duhā, an equivalent of sākhī, means ‘a couplet’.

5. K. F. Keay, as well as other Christian missionaries did not believe that Kabīr himself came into contact with Christians or knew anything of Christian teachings, but he considered as ‘almost certain’ that the Bhakti movement as a whole, to which (according to him) Kabīr belonged, was influenced by Christian ideas. His views were accepted by George Grierson. See F. E. Keay, Kabīr and his Followers, Calcutta, 1931, p. 172.

6. Ahmad Shah, The Bijak of Kabir, Hamirpur, 1917, p. 36.

7. Ibidem, p. 40.

8. The desperate efforts of Ahmed Shah, himself Muslim-born, and some others, to prove that Kabīr was indeed Hindu-born, appears puzzling. But the fact is that, as a convert, it is more difficult to be a Hindu convert than a Muslim convert, at least in India.

9. The 243 salokus attributed to Kabīr in the Gurū Granth (pp. 1364-1377) are immediately followed by the 130 salokus attributed to the famous saint Shaykh Farīd (pp. 1377-1384).

10. Cf. Teja Singh and Ganda Singh, A Short History of the Sikhs, vol. 1, p. 33.

11. Quoted in S. S. Kolhi, A Critical Study of the Ādi Granth, Delhi, repr. 1976, p. 19.

12. Cf. Vaudeville, Haripāṭh, pp. 74-76, ‘Nivrtti et la Religion du Nom’. In the Maharashtrian tradition, Rāmānand is supposed to have been the Guru of Viṭṭhalpanth, (Jñāneshvar's father) in Kashi.

13. Basant, 1, p. 1195.

14. Rāg or rāgu refers to a specific mode of singing.

15. Unfortunately, the comparison of R. K. Varma with the text shows a fantastic amount of copying—or printing—mistakes. As to the added ṭīkā, it is only a popular one, and the author made no attempt to elucidate the obscure passages in the text. Moreover, references to the relevant page numbers in the Gurū Granth (1364-1377) are missing.

16. The date ascribed by S. S. Das to his first manuscript (ka) has been disproved (Vaudeville: 1974, pp. 19-20), but it is a valuable manuscript of the so-called Rajasthani tradition.

17. Four manuscripts have been critically studied and partially translated into English by Winand M. Callewaert: The Sarvāngī of the Dādūpanthī Rajab, Leuven, 1978. The Sarvāngī means: ‘all the angas’, brought together by Rajab.

18. In opposition to the S. S. Das edition: KG1.

19. Chaturvedi, KSP, p. 78.