In search of Kabir

Article by S. BAGESHREE

A three-day Festival of Kabir in Bangalore celebrates the mystic poet’s vision.

Quest for an eclectic truth: Pakistan singer Fariduddin Ayaz and festival organiser Shabnam Virmani (below).

Everywhere I see my community

Everywhere a festive gathering

I am in all, all are in me

I am alone, among many.

Kabir, Saint-poet of 15th Century

Scene One: After the screening of “Had-Anhad”, Shabnam Virmani’s film on Kabir, a college student at Anekal, a town adjoining Bangalore, earnestly asked: “Tell me, was Kabir a Hindu or a Muslim?” A young girl hesitantly got up and said: “Don’t you think the message of Kabir and this film is that we should go beyond this question?”

Scene Two: In another of Shabnam’s four films on Kabir, “Chalo Hamara Des”, American Kabir scholar Linda Hess talks of the parallels between her work on the poet and her personal faith in Zen Buddhism.

Scene Three: On the concluding day of the three-day Festival of Kabir organised by Shabnam and her team at Srishti School of Design in Bangalore, a girl ran up the dais and danced to the intoxicating rhythm of the qawwali of Fariduddin Ayaz from Karachi in Pakistan.

Seekers of the mystic poet were of multiple hues at the Festival of Kabir and so were the answers (or in some cases questions) they found in his philosophy and poetry.

Shabnam’s films are at one level physical and metaphysical journeys across the sub-continent in search of Kabir’s diverse traditions and at another level the film-maker’s own personal quest for the mystic as a solace in troubled times. Her experience as a resident of Ahmedabad in the post-Godhra riots formed the trigger for her exploration of Kabir for “inner peace”, away from “dualistic positions” of hate and counter-hate. The films weave together folk singers and classical musicians, social activists who see Kabir as an iconoclastic and Kabir Panthis who have built religious institutions around him, an American scholar on Kabir and a street vendor who has his own take on the poet… As the films move between boundaries of the mind and the terrain, each of the many worldviews and traditions stands out, and yet, the films bring them together in a wonderful cohesion.

Different journeys

Well-known poet and scholar Ashok Vajpayee, who spoke at the festival, said that Kabir and other Bhakti-Sufi poets, offered “politics of interrogation and critique.” He drew parallels between Gandhiji, Kabir and musician Kumar Gandharva as people who dared question established notions in different ways, through politics, philosophy and music. Kabir scholar Purushottam Aggrawal argued that Kabir’s fundamental quest was love rather than iconoclasm, though social activists tend to emphasise the latter. At the reading of Kannada dalit poetry organised as part of the festival, poet Du. Saraswati said that Kabir’s songs and the entire Festival of Kabir were “notes of love” as opposed to the politically-loaded “campaign against terrorism” for college students sponsored by the Karnataka Government, which was going on parallel to this event.

The richest diversity of Kabir traditions was mirrored in the musical performances at the festival, which brought together musicians from different parts of India and Pakistan. Mukhtiyar Ali, folk singer from Rajasthan who described his singing style as “jangli”, was quite the rock star of the festival with a visible fan following. Shafi Fakir, folk singer from Sindh in Pakistan, offered a brilliant confluence of folk and classical sensibilities. The music of both Prahlad Tipanya and Vijay Sardeshmukh were meditative and humbling, but while the former is rooted in the folk tradition of Malwa, the latter gives the same tradition a completely classical interpretation. Fareeduddin Ayaz, the qawwal from Karachi, took musical experience to a new height, to a state of trance. As Tipanya evocatively put it, “Kabir is a flow from which many fill their pots.” The question-answer session with Shabnam and the artistes threw up some interesting debates around Kabir’s relevance today. Can one confront the rioters in Gujarat or their political masterminds with Kabir’s humanist, non-dual position or has the politics of divisiveness gone too far for such appeals to conscience to work?
Relevance today

Another member of the audience intervened to say that Kabir, who lived in another time and political context, cannot provide single-point solution to all the political questions of today. Speaking to the students at Anekal, Kannada writer S.G. Siddaramiah said that we need to keep alive “Kabir conscience” not as a one-stop shop for communal amity and peace, but as one of the many important voices of sanity. Kabir’s poetry and philosophy cut through divisiveness and orthodoxy like a bolt of lightening. In one of the scenes of “Had-Anhad”, Ayaz advises Shabnam not to “just make a project out of Kabir.” Speaking to the audience in Bangalore, he said that Kabir is like a huge elephant and all his seekers are blind men trying to make sense of the form by clinging to one part each. “I am hanging on to the one leg, and Shabnam to one tusk,” he said, obliterating any notion of hierarchy between seekers of Kabir. One could well imagine the students from Anekal, the whirling girl at the festival and Linda hanging on to different parts of the same elephant!


How would Kabir himself react to being compared to an elephant? Would he laugh and say he is but an ant? After all, in one of his most intricately crafted dohas, he describes his Nirgun god as one “who listens intently to the sound of anklets on an ant’s feet.”

(Log on to www.kabirproject.org for more details on the project.)