History · Ch 6 — Bhakti–Sufi Traditions — Changes in Religious Beliefs and Devotional Texts
Weaving a divine fabric: Kabir
Weaving a divine fabric: Kabir
Kabir, who lived around the fourteenth–fifteenth centuries, is one of the most outstanding examples of a poet-saint who emerged from the religious ferment of the time. Historians have painstakingly tried to reconstruct his life and times through two kinds of sources: compositions attributed to him, and later hagiographies (biographies of saints). This task has proved challenging on several counts.
The challenge of Kabir’s verses
Verses ascribed to Kabir survive in three distinct but overlapping manuscript traditions:
- The Kabir Bijak, preserved by the Kabirpanth (the sect of Kabir) in Varanasi and elsewhere in Uttar Pradesh.
- The Kabir Granthavali, associated with the Dadupanth in Rajasthan.
- Many of his compositions are also found in the Adi Granth Sahib (the Sikh scripture).
All these manuscript compilations were made long after Kabir’s death. By the nineteenth century, printed anthologies of verses attributed to him circulated in regions as far apart as Bengal, Gujarat and Maharashtra.
Kabir’s poems survive in several languages and dialects. Some are composed in the special language of nirguna poets, called sant bhasha. Others, known as ulatbansi (upside-down sayings), are written in a form where everyday meanings are inverted. These upside-down sayings hint at the difficulty of capturing the nature of the Ultimate Reality in words — expressions like “the lotus which blooms without flower” or “the fire raging in the ocean” convey a sense of Kabir’s mystical experiences.
The range of traditions Kabir drew on
What is striking is the range of traditions Kabir used to describe the Ultimate Reality:
- From Islam: he called the Ultimate Reality Allah, Khuda, Hazrat and Pir.
- From Vedantic traditions: he used terms like alakh (the unseen), nirakar (formless), Brahman, Atman.
- From yogic traditions: he used terms with mystical connotations such as shabda (sound) or shunya (emptiness).
Kabir’s argument against religious distinctions
In one composition attributed to him, Kabir argues that God is called by many names — Allah, Ram, Karim, Keshav, Hari, Hazrat — but just as gold remains gold whether shaped into rings or bangles, the Divine is one. Distinctions are only words we invent. He criticises those who kill a goat or a cow in the name of religion, wasting their lives in disputation, unable to find the only Ram.
Diverse and conflicting ideas in the poems
The poems attributed to Kabir express diverse and sometimes conflicting ideas:
- Some poems draw on Islamic ideas, using monotheism and iconoclasm to attack Hindu polytheism and idol worship.
- Others use the Sufi concept of zikr and ishq (love) to express the Hindu practice of nam-simaran (remembrance of God’s name).
Were all these composed by Kabir himself? We may never know with certainty, though scholars have tried to analyse language, style and content to establish which verses could be his. What this rich corpus signifies is that Kabir was — and remains — a source of inspiration for those who questioned entrenched religious and social institutions, ideas and practices in their search for the Divine.
Kabir’s legacy and later debates
Kabir’s ideas probably crystallised through dialogue and debate (explicit or implicit) with the traditions of Sufis and yogis in the region of Awadh (part of present-day Uttar Pradesh). His legacy was claimed by several groups, who remembered him and continue to do so. This is most evident in later debates about whether he was a Hindu or a Muslim by birth — debates reflected in hagiographies composed from the seventeenth century onwards, about 200 years after his lifetime. …
Source 10 — The One Lord. A composition attributed to Kabir:
Tell me, brother, how can there be / No one lord of the world but two? / Who led you so astray? / God is called by many names: / Names like Allah, Ram, Karim, Keshav, Hari, and Hazrat. / Gold may be shaped into rings and bangles. / Isn’t it gold all the same? / Distinctions are only words we invent … / Kabir says they are both mistaken. / Neither can find the only Ram. / One kills the goat, the other cows. / They waste their lives in disputation. …
A seventeenth-century Mughal painting shows two roadside musicians performing. One man plays a stringed instrument, likely a rabab or sarod; the other beats a small drum, probably a dholak. They sit on the ground under a tree, with a village or a few simple structures visible in the background. The painting is not a portrait of any specific saint — it is a genre scene, a slice of everyday life in Mughal India.
The textbook places this image directly after its discussion of Kabir and the sant poets. The caption says these are the kind of musicians who sang the compositions of the sants, carrying nirguna devotional poetry to ordinary listeners. That is the key teaching: the figure is not about the painting's artistic merit, but about the medium through which bhakti poetry reached common people. The sants like Kabir composed in sant bhasha and local dialects, not Sanskrit. Their verses were meant to be sung, not read silently. These roadside musicians — illiterate, itinerant, unattached to any temple or court — were the living channels that spread Kabir's words across villages and highways.
Notice what the painting does not show. There is no temple, no mosque, no priest, no guru. The musicians perform in the open, for anyone who stops to listen. This matches the nirguna tradition's rejection of formal religious institutions. The message is that the divine is formless (nirakar) and accessible directly through devotion, not through intermediaries. The musicians themselves are the only "intermediaries" — and they are humble performers, not religious authorities. …