Indian and western scholars and students of bhakti study the same texts and authors but often work in separate spheres. They may interact with each other at a personal level or cite each other's work, but it is not often that they actually engage with each other's scholarship and arguments. Purushottam Agrawal's long-awaited book on Kabir,Footnote ¹ the result of 30 years of study and reflection, engages with both Hindi and western scholarship on Kabir in a fundamental way, contesting many long-held assumptions about the most famous bhakti poet-saint of north India. Agrawal is well known in India not only as a scholar of modern and medieval literature, for many years a charismatic professor of Hindi literature at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, but also as a ‘militant intellectual’ in Gramsci's sense—a writer, media commentator, and activist against communalism.Footnote ² His previous books in fact were collections of essays (Tīsrā rukh,1996, and Vicār kā anant, 2000) that impressed with his attempt to create the vocabulary for serious intellectual and critical discussion of political and cultural issues in Hindi. His Kabir monograph is already making waves in the Hindi world, and it seems important to discuss his work in an English-language journal, so that the dialogue he has initiated may continue.

The book, in ten chapters, begins with a critical engagement with the colonial episteme (jñānkāṇḍ in Hindi) that prevents us from approaching Kabir in the context of the ‘indigenous modernity’ (deśaj ādhuniktā) of fifteenth and sixteenth-century north India (Chapter 1). Why should modernity be only European? Why is Luther modern and not Kabir (Chaper 2)? Agrawal then goes on to reconsider the early vernacular sources on Kabir's life and the clues in his verses, and proposes a methodology for approaching hagiographies and ‘spurious’ verses (Chapters 3 and 4). Chapter 5 discusses the relationship between Kabir and his Brahmin guru, Ramanand, and argues forcefully in favour of its historical possibility. Next comes a discussion of Kabir's sādhnā, a spiritual practice rather than a new religious path that wove together (the metaphor is inescapable for Kabir the weaver!) poetry, life, and social criticism. Agrawal here draws a genealogy of non-śāstric bhakti that refutes old accusations of intellectual poverty (Chapters 6 and 7). Chapters 8 and 9 engage with the apparent paradox of Kabir's view towards the feminine: on the one hand he condemned women for their greed or ignorance, and on the other hand he wrote passionate song-poems of love in the persona of a woman. In the final chapter Agrawal discusses the elements that together make up the poetic quality of Kabir's verses.

Let me begin by summarizing his main lines of argument. First, he argues, it is wrong to consider (and champion) Kabir as a marginal and subaltern voice, a brave but failed religious reformer. Kabir was not a marginal voice but the most popular poet of trading and artisanal classes, both in his time and in the centuries following. This was noted by eighteenth and nineteenth-century observers like Marco della Tomba and William Crooke. Agrawal argues that

Nor were these groups subaltern in early modern north India. In order to prove this point Agrawal musters a host of historical references to the growth of trade after the first millennium and the growing social importance of trading and the merchant classes. The founder of the Kabir panth was a rich trader, the panth spread among artisans and traders from Chhattisgarh to Bihar and Gujarat, and several prominent sants came from this background. Metaphors of trade, weaving and dyeing abound in Kabir's poetry, and he sometimes called his Lord a rangrez (dyer) or a baniyā. The image of the subaltern (and nowadays adoptive proto-dalit)Footnote ³ sant battling Brahmin hegemony is, Agrawal argues, a historical anachronism, a product of the ‘colonial Brahminical fantasy’ that established Brahmins as the undisputed arbiters of caste and religion in north India as much as elsewhere.Footnote ⁴

Agrawal's basic contention that, in order to read Kabir correctly, we need a fundamental exercise in deconstruction of the categories of the colonial episteme is carried through particularly convincingly in relation to the question of Kabir's birth. Much of recent western scholarship on bhakti has moved in the opposite direction, that is, of unravelling the historical personality of famous sants as constructed by early modern and modern hagiographers and critics, in order to instead direct attention towards ‘authorship’ as a collective process that evolved in the course of circulation and transmission. As J. S. Hawley puts it succinctly, ‘There is no way of knowing who Kabir was apart from the history of his reception’.Footnote ⁵ Indeed, Hawley's careful work on Surdas, Mirabai and Kabir, as well as his systematic discussion of the role of the poet's name in bhakti songs and its relation to hagiographical stories and the growth of the poets’ corpus in his seminal article ‘Author and Authority’, have shown how much there is to gain from this approach.Footnote ⁶ More recently, Christian L. Novetzke has explored further the idea of ‘layered authorship’ in the context of the performance tradition of Namdev's poems. While at the centre of the performance is the song of the famous author (the ‘genealogical author’ in Novetzke's terms), the kirtānkar who expertly mixes the song with extemporary oratory and verse is the author of the performance, and the famous sage Narada is the originator of kirtan who ‘authorizes’ it as a form.Footnote ⁷ Agrawal is sensitive to the oral transmission and to what he refuses to reject as spurious compositions in Kabir's name, but he is equally keen not to do away with the historical possibility of ‘a weaver named Kabir’. Taking seriously the historical possibility that a Brahmin like Ramanand and a weaver like Kabir really existed and said at least some of the things that have been attributed to them implies for him imagining an early modern social world that did not conform to the rigid colonial episteme of caste and religion.

Take the long-debated issue of whether Kabir was born a Muslim weaver or was simply raised as one. Through a careful reading of early modern sources and modern scholarship on Kabir, Agrawal demonstrates that until the nineteenth century only the Kabir panth found it necessary to argue that Kabir was not born a Muslim: after choosing a radical figure like him as founder, it was then necessary to endow him with a more exalted, indeed divine, origin.Footnote ⁸ But why did British and Indian modern scholars of Kabir share this belief? Because, Agrawal brilliantly argues, colonial epistemology viewed early modern Indian subjects as mere ciphers of their birth, caste and religion—thus Kabir must have said what he said because of his background, not out of choice. ‘Though brought up in a Muslim household’, Shyamsundar Das stated, ‘the fact that he is steeped in Hindu ideas hints towards the fact that Brahmin, or at least Hindu, blood flowed in his veins’ (cit. p. 159). For Chandrabali Pandey, instead, Kabir was a Muslim by birth and a radical (be-shar‘) Sufi by practice. The great Kabir scholar Hazari Prasad Dwivedi set up an elaborate scheme that accounted for the varied strands of his religious idiom. According to Dwivedi there had been a caste of Nathpanthi householders in northern and eastern India at the time who were either weavers or beggars. Most of them did not observe caste rules and worshipped a formless God. With the coming of Islam they had gradually converted, and it was in such a family of neo-converted householder jogis that Kabir was brought up. The only problem, Agrawal notes, is that Kabir never called himself a jogi but called himself a weaver (julāhā or korī), or ‘neither Hindu nor Muslim’ (p. 163). But the problem is a more basic one, of the modern imagination, and it is not limited to Kabir. Why is it so difficult to imagine that the religious ideas of an early modern individual were the result of individual choice? ‘It was not necessary to be born or converted into a religion to be familiar with [for example] the Nathpanth—people searched through study and satsang, they used their discrimination, they weighed and accepted or rejected it’ (p. 174). So ‘Kabir's discourse and ideas (vaicārikī) is not bound by genealogy’, Agrawal argues, ‘it is the outcome of the bold quest of a restless individual, it was an individual, rational choice’. Kabir was familiar with current religious idioms (he was bahuśrut, ‘well-listened’, if not bahu-pạthit, ‘well-read’, p. 312), but used them creatively to give expression to his own spiritual journey. Are the two strands of enquiry, into ‘authorship’ as a collective process, and of the author as a historical person with definite views and ideas, really incompatible? Does the former dissolve anything we can say with certainty about the latter? Agrawal's book holds on to both strands in a precarious but fruitful balance.

Similarly, in order to recover a sense of Kabir's times, it is important to listen to early modern vernacular voices with respect. Thus, according to Agrawal Anantdas's description of Namdev as the initiator of bhakti in the Kali age is an accurate one: Namdev and Ramanand did usher in a new kind of socially open bhakti in the North. And Tulsidas's dystopia, of Shudras talking back at Brahmins, unafraid, of bhagats spreading their knowledge to all, is probably an accurate description of the social mobility of the time, when the varṇāśrama dharma was becoming irrelevant in the North, new castes were coming up all the time, and pragmatic Brahmins were accommodating them in the dharmaśāstras thanks to the ‘secularization of Hindu law’.Footnote ⁹

A major part of Agrawal's work in recent years has been a reclaiming of Ramanand, and an entire chapter is dedicated to him in this book. Ramanand may have been an elusive figure, and contemporary Sanskrit sources are silent about him, but a few utterances and padas of a radical nature are well preserved in Hindi bhakti memory (‘jāt-p t pūche nah koī’/‘Nobody cares about caste’, and ‘Hari ko bhajai so Hari ko hoī’/‘Whoever worships Hari is Hari's’), and so is his being the guru of Kabir and other fifteenth-century low-caste saints.Footnote ¹⁰ However, because the colonial jñānkāṇḍ that informs modern understandings implicitly trusted Sanskrit sources over vernacular ones, Ramanand became the victim of a clever move. In order to prove his direct link to Ramanuja, early twentieth-century Ramanandi activists forged a Sanskrit text that pushed him back a century earlier and made it chronologically impossible for him to be the guru of Kabir.Footnote ¹¹ But while some contemporary scholars and activists have criticized the early modern lineage of Ramanand and Kabir as an attempt to Brahmanize Kabir,Footnote ¹² Agrawal argues quite the opposite. For him the resolute denial that a Brahmin like Ramanand could have been so uncharacteristic as to accept lower caste and Muslim disciples is just proof of the hold of the colonial-modern episteme. Instead, ‘the traditionally accepted relationship between Ramanand and Kabir, Pipa, Sen, and Dhanna is proof that one can transcend one's given social identity for a spiritual practice, a sādhnā, of human consciousness’ (p. 270). That Ramanand was a Brahmin Vaishnava, a Bairagi who held the spiritual path to be open to all, is confirmed by the seventeenth-century Persian survey of religions in India, the Dabistān-i Mazāhib, which mentions Kabir immediately after the four Vaishnava sampradayas as a ‘Bairagi by birth’. According to the Dabistān, Bairagis called themselves Vaishnavas and said that their path was different from both the Vedas and the Quran and that they were neither Hindus nor Muslims. It also noted that several Muslims had adopted Bairagi beliefs. In this perspective, Kabir (and before him Ramanand), far from being exceptions, appear as part of a broader trend of ‘open’ Vaishnavism (to be distinguished from the smārta Vaishnavism of Tulsidas) that did not observe caste and viewed itself as ‘neither Turk nor Hindu’.Footnote ¹³

The statement ‘neither Turk nor Hindu’ is one that resounded from several quarters in early modern India, and every utterance requires attention to the specific point it wanted to make. For Kabir, Agrawal argues, this statement meant propounding an alternative to institutionalized dharma, one that responded to the basic human thirst for spirituality in life. Thus, while Agrawal traces the historical process by which the Kabir panth transformed Kabir into a dharmaguru, he is very critical of those who maintain that this is what Kabir himself set out to do. Again the comparison with Tulsidas is instructive: while dharma is important for Tulsi, the term never occurs in Kabir's poetry in an affirmative sense. Instead, Kabir used the terms bhagati and anabhai, anabhau (experience), for his poetry and his life were his spiritual path. There was no spiritual practice apart from a ‘sahaj life based on love’, and mutually connected and dependent ‘outer’/social and ‘inner’/spiritual dimensions (p. 318).

In a chapter that seems directed particularly at the Hindi critical tradition, Agrawal then embarks on a historical and philosophical deconstruction and reconstruction of the term ‘bhakti’. While from Panini onwards the term had two basic meanings—affection/devotion and participation—later on the first meaning gained prominence and was the only one emphasized in bhakti scholarship, which made it a synonym of devotion and submission to God. Furthermore, critics like Ramchandra Shukla maintained that, whilst Vaishnava Acharyas developed the knowledge content of bhakti, poets from the Alvars onwards only spread love and the feeling of bhakti amongst the people.Footnote ¹⁴ Of Nirgun sants Shukla famously argued that they had no knowledge content at all, a position to which Agrawal strongly objects (p. 345). Taking up a reference to ‘nāradī bhagati’ in one of Kabir's poems, Agrawal argues that Kabir resurrected the older meaning of bhakti as participation and invoked Narada, the author of the Bhaktisūtra, as his forebear. Narada's Bhaktisūtra expounds love/bhakti as the best way to cross the ocean of existence; while he names several bhaktas, it is the gopis who are singled out as the best example of bhakti. Narada also maintained that bhakti needs no śāstric proof, it is itself the highest śāstra. Narada did not oppose the Vedas but neither did he care for them. Significantly, caste is of no consequence in his bhakti, unlike Shandilya's. Moreover, his Bhaktisūtra contains and values poetry and music. Kabir did not call his bhakti ‘nāradī bhakti’ by chance but as a clear sign that he intended to align himself with that tradition of socially open bhakti and of kāvyokt bhakti, of bhakti expressed through poetry that seeks to create its own autonomous epistemological and moral departures: ‘Do not think this is a song’, Kabir sang, ‘think of this as my thinking on brahma’ (cit. p. 349). The beauty of kāvyokt bhakti (as opposed to śāstrokt bhakti, bhakti that articulates the scriptural, orthodox position on spiritual and social matters), argues Agrawal, is that it brings and holds together things that are usually considered separate, like yoga, enjoyment, song, brahma. In this perspective, the word pada (foot), can bring together singing (tihi kārana padu racai kabīrā/That's why Kabir makes poems) and, as Hawley put it, ‘the state of being located in reference to’ Hari (as in hari padu biralā budai koī/Hari's state is rare), that is, ‘the place where the world of speech and the world of being converge’.Footnote ¹⁵ The difference between Kabir and Narada is that Narada did not care for polemics, whereas Kabir was of course a great polemicist.

No book on Kabir can avoid discussing the status of the corpus that has come down to us, but again Agrawal turns this discussion into a broad methodological reflection that includes a critique of the assumptions underlying colonial and modern textual criticism and a revaluation of early modern standards and practices. Kabir's poetry famously circulated orally (and still does so) before it was written down in different circles: among the 593 Kabir padas contained in ten early manuscripts composed between 1570–1572 and 1681, Winand Callewaert in his Millennium Kabīr vānī Footnote ¹⁶ could find only 48 shared by at least three manuscripts! None of these ‘core padas’ express strong social criticism. They are more philosophical reflections and include Kabir's attempts to explain to his mother why he has joined the Vaishnava Bairagis (muṇḍiyās). The Vaishnava tinge and the almost complete lack of religious and caste polemic accords with the Kabir padas found in the very earliest manuscripts (Pada Suradāsa jī kā), most of which are also found in the later Dadupanthi collections.Footnote ¹⁷ But 50 years after Kabir's death, both Hariram Vyas and Anantdas presented a rather different picture, of Kabir as ‘the radical ‘julāhā from Kashi’. While Callewaert's results do not match Anantdas's testimony, with their outspoken Vaishnava traits they also disturb modern scholarly understandings of Kabir. Agrawal's view is that, while the findings of historical philology must be acknowledged (and as he argued earlier there is no reason to reject Kabir's ‘Vaishnava’ padas), one needs to respect orality and the oral tradition more since, as he puts it, ‘Kabir's compositions exist in the interface between oral and written’ (p. 218), a fact that remains true of him and of other poets like Namdev and Mira even today. The diversity of voices and of emphases—of strong criticism, of a woman's love and longing, cryptic ulạtb sīs, Vaishnava symbols and stories—found in the 593 padas of Callewaert's edition need not be rejected.Footnote ¹⁸ Part of this diversity can be traced back to Kabir's own ‘poetic bhakti’, and partly to the space that his name created for other poets to dedicate his compositions to him (what Agrawal calls up-racnāẽ, ‘sub-compositions’). About early modern textual practices he makes two important points: first, that while some traditions were more restrictive and only included Kabir compositions that accorded with their own views (like the Ādi Granth Footnote ¹⁹ and the Bījak), others were more catholic, though they may have been careful about historical anachronisms (for example, rejecting words like mughal that referred to a later period). Second, early modern textual scholarship had its own standards when it came to accepting or rejecting Kabir compositions, standards derived from the early modern basic understanding of Kabir exemplified by Nabhadas's Bhaktamāl: (a) that it was not a sin for Kabir to argue with the caste system, (b) that he did not believe in the six philosophical systems, and (c) that he spoke with one voice to all.

This summary does not begin to do justice to the many themes and aspects of this rich and comprehensive book, which in its own way ‘provincializes Europe’ in terms of colonial and modern understandings of caste, religion, the individual, society, and history in India. At the same time, through the familiar figure of Kabir it introduces Hindi readers to many of the important current intellectual and historical debates around early modernity, the colonial episteme, cosmopolitan and vernacular. By presenting the debate and then carefully arguing in favour of or against each position—with a good dose of Hindi sarcasm at times—Agrawal presents not just a scholarly study but also makes an important intellectual intervention. But while this is a long and conceptually rich book, one wishes that some basic concepts and arguments had been articulated more fully.

For example, given that merchant groups (at least in north India today) are not exactly known for their radicalism or fair-play, how is it that Kabir's call for ‘spiritual fair-play’ (p. 26) embodied the aspirations of artisanal and trading classes? The point is made strongly and often, but the assumption underlying it—that merchants and artisans everywhere have supported socially egalitarian ideologies—does not in itself constitute an argument. In a more narrow historical sense, the question remains about what it was in fifteenth-century north India that gave traders and artisans such confidence (the evidence about the prominence of trade comes from a very wide chronological and geographical spectrum). The apparently sudden emergence of a strong voice like Kabir's in late-fifteenth century Sultanate Banaras (about which we know so little), and of a host of early modern vernacular sources celebrating the lives and reproducing the songs of sants in the following century, raises a historical question that the relative weakness of north Indian Brahmins in the late Sultanates period does not quite begin to explain. If, to borrow Sheldon Pollock's phrase, ‘choosing a language for literary text production most importantly implies affiliating with an existing sociotextual community, or summoning a potential community into being, and thus has defining social significations’, as well as ‘equally, defining political significations’,Footnote ²⁰ what kind of social and political significations did singing and writing in the vernacular have in the case of sants like Kabir?

Another question relates to the argument that Kabir's ‘ghar’ and ‘amarpur’ (the house as inner space) is a utopia, a place of fantasy (pp. 413 ff.). What kind of utopia is it, how can it be articulated more explicitly? Similarly, Agrawal employs the notion of a ‘Bhakti public sphere’ (bhakti kā lokvṛtt, p. 49). While entirely sympathetic with this notion, one would have liked him to expound it more and discuss its various discursive and institutional aspects and implications, within the context first of late Sultanate and then of Mughal north India. Kāvyokt bhakti is another felicitous formulation, but it would have been good to see it developed in its technical aspects, just as Ken Bryant did for Surdas's poems in terms of performance and epiphany and Linda Hess in terms of ‘Kabir's rough rhetoric’.Footnote ²¹ How do Kabir's dohās, padas and ramainīs actually ‘work’ as ‘thinking about brahma’? Also, while the author's re-evaluation of Ramanand is utterly convincing, there is only one sentence about the relationship between him and Kabir that, ‘if one bears in mind the Hindi Ramanand, one can hear strong echoes of Ramanand in Kabir's compositions’ (p. 270). It is true that Ramanand's Hindi compositions express a Nirgun sensibility and can easily be mistaken as Kabir's own, as Agrawal found out through an experiment, but it would have been good to see whether there is a direct echo of terms, metaphors, arguments, and whether and how Kabir goes beyond Ramanand. Finally, while modern understandings of religion are usefully deconstructed, the world of Islam in north India is practically absent from this rich picture of religious and spiritual life of Bhakti. Enough material for another book?