



Produced by Chetan K. Jain and John B. Hare









SONGS OF KABIR


Translated by Rabindranath Tagore

Introduction by Evelyn Underhill

New York, The Macmillan Company

1915




INTRODUCTION


The poet Kabir, a selection from whose songs is here for the
first time offered to English readers, is one of the most
interesting personalities in the history of Indian mysticism.
Born in or near Benares, of Mohammedan parents, and probably
about the year 1440, he became in early life a disciple of the
celebrated Hindu ascetic Ramananda.  Ramananda had brought to
Northern India the religious revival which Ramanuja, the great
twelfth-century reformer of Brahmanism, had initiated in the
South.  This revival was in part a reaction against the
increasing formalism of the orthodox cult, in part an assertion
of the demands of the heart as against the intense
intellectualism of the Vedanta philosophy, the exaggerated monism
which that philosophy proclaimed.  It took in Ramanuja's
preaching the form of an ardent personal devotion to the God
Vishnu, as representing the personal aspect of the Divine Nature:
that mystical "religion of love" which everywhere makes its
appearance at a certain level of spiritual culture, and which
creeds and philosophies are powerless to kill.

Though such a devotion is indigenous in Hinduism, and finds
expression in many passages of the Bhagavad Gita, there was in
its mediaeval revival a large element of syncretism.  Ramananda,
through whom its spirit is said to have reached Kabir, appears to
have been a man of wide religious culture, and full of missionary
enthusiasm.  Living at the moment in which the impassioned poetry
and deep philosophy of the great Persian mystics, Attar, Sadi,
Jalalu'ddin Rumi, and Hafiz, were exercising a powerful influence
on the religious thought of India, he dreamed of reconciling this
intense and personal Mohammedan mysticism with the traditional
theology of Brahmanism.  Some have regarded both these great
religious leaders as influenced also by Christian thought and
life: but as this is a point upon which competent authorities
hold widely divergent views, its discussion is not attempted here.
We may safely assert, however, that in their teachings, two--perhaps
three--apparently antagonistic streams of intense
spiritual culture met, as Jewish and Hellenistic thought met in
the early Christian Church: and it is one of the outstanding
characteristics of Kabir's genius that he was able in his poems
to fuse them into one.

A great religious reformer, the founder of a sect to which nearly
a million northern Hindus still belong, it is yet supremely as a
mystical poet that Kabir lives for us.  His fate has been that of
many revealers of Reality.  A hater of religious exclusivism, and
seeking above all things to initiate men into the liberty of the
children of God, his followers have honoured his memory by
re-erecting in a new place the barriers which he laboured to cast
down.  But his wonderful songs survive, the spontaneous
expressions of his vision and his love; and it is by these, not
by the didactic teachings associated with his name, that he makes
his immortal appeal to the heart.  In these poems a wide range of
mystical emotion is brought into play: from the loftiest
abstractions, the most otherworldly passion for the Infinite, to
the most intimate and personal realization of God, expressed in
homely metaphors and religious symbols drawn indifferently from
Hindu and Mohammedan belief.  It is impossible to say of their
author that he was Brahman or Sufi, Vedantist or Vaishnavite.
He is, as he says himself, "at once the child of Allah and of Ram."
That Supreme Spirit Whom he knew and adored, and to Whose joyous
friendship he sought to induct the souls of other men, transcended
whilst He included all metaphysical categories, all credal
definitions; yet each contributed something to the description of
that Infinite and Simple Totality Who revealed Himself, according
to their measure, to the faithful lovers of all creeds.

Kab