In life and love
|
The Kabir Festival brought not just the 15th century mystic poet to your doorstep, but also practitioners who haunt you with their sheer passion and faith
|
Photos: Murali Kumar K.
MULTICULTURAL The performers cast a hypnotic spell through their varied readings of Kabir
“Lord, listen to me if you please
not listening is just as fine
But if I don’t sing of you
I can’t be”
These lines of the 12th century mystic poet Akkamahadevi for her lord and beloved Channamallikarjuna set the tone for the just concluded three-day Kabir Festival. At the end of all the talks, discussions, films and exhilarating music, Kabir became “breath inside the breath”, exactly the way he described God.
For the scholars who have studied Kabir closely, he is many things. This 15th Century mystic saint for them was an amalgam of the Hindu and Islam principles. He was also, they believed, someone who saw a constant interaction between the two spiritual principles – the Jeevatma and Paramatma. Of course, they agreed that the doctrines and the philosophy of Kabir have had its social resonances through the ages to now. Kabir, they concurred had touched the conscience of everyone who has had an encounter with him, in a simplicity unsurpassed.
“Kabir, Mahatma Gandhi and Kumar Gandharva — I want to relate the three together,” said the poet Ashok Vajpayee in his talk, “Prayer as resistance”. If Prarthana Sabha was the temple for Mahatma, it was the antarghat (soul) for Kabir, and for Kumar Gandharva it was his music. “Through his rendition of the Nirguni bhajans, Kumar Gandharva was speaking of camaraderie of conscience.” In fact on the birth centenary of the Mahatma, this musician who fervently searched for an idiom of his own, composed a song, “Tum Ekaaki” — celebrating Gandhiji’s daring loneliness. Gandhiji who used prayer as tool to fight the British, became a symbol of fearlessness as well. Kabir, Ashok Vajpayee said, was the pioneer of the politics of critique and interrogation. “Kabir liberated spirituality from organised religion,” he explained. Kumar Gandharv’s “Nirbhay, Nirgun re gaaonga…” came back, with resonances of a wistful longing. The talk was interspersed with Nirguni bhajans rendered by Vijay Sardeshmukh, disciple of Kumar Gandharv. On a deeply meditative mode, they evoked a sense of calm and tranquillity. In fact, through those unembellished multiple utterances of each line of Kabir, the words articulated new meanings; each time the latter bettering the former. “Kumarji had his own definition of the Nirgun. He would say it is what hits you but doesn’t injure you,” recalled Ashok Vajpayee, who has written a biography of the late musician. The shoonya that Kabir speaks of must descend into the singing voice, the late musician would insist.
Kabir never wrote his dohas. True to his Nirgun principles, he believed that everything was beyond the name. So much of Kabir baani, as they exist amidst us, may not be the way Kabir recited it. In a manner most democratic, the dohas are but an expression of all those who blended into the Kabir imagination.
“For a long time we were studying Kabir through the printed word and not through the living world,” said Purushottam Agarwal, former chairperson of language and cultural studies at the JNU. The Kabir experience became different for him when he saw him through the world Kabir inhabited. “Kabir exists in the continuum of the inside and outside,” he explained. Kabir refused to see God as distinct from cosmos, and he held that spiritual was political and universal was specific.
The four Kabir films made by Shabnam Virmani bring many diverse spaces together. Making its beginning in Ayodhya (“Had-Anhad”), the films interrogate notions of geographical boundaries, politics of identity, caste, religion, and nation. Even as they seem separate, they also seamlessly extend into each other, putting Kabir in a territory that is “beyond boundaries”. Private-public, sacred-secular, rural-urban — the films tread these seemingly disparate worlds, but bind them beautifully in a faith that is Kabir.
The highlight of the festival was surely the musicians, who, coming from different parts of India and Pakistan, offered the most movingly prayerful and intimate Kabir. For these musicians who live out Kabir through music, one only fed off the other. They rendered Kabir a personal experience for each one.
Mukhtiyar Ali belted out Kabir in his untamed singing almost recreating the ardour of the whirling dervishes. Whether it was “Mast Kalandar” or “Sant Milan Ko”, he echoed a sincerity of purpose. The singer from Sindh, Shafi Faqir was a fine example of the coming together of classical and folk sensibilities. His refined singing marked by an unmistakable complexity packed in many subtle shades of devotion. Shafi Faqir’s interpretation, the roping in of the unanticipated left one entranced.
If Mahesha Ram’s involved singing left you speechless, Prahlad Tipanya’s songs of conviction was humbling. The show stealer was certainly the qawwali group from Karachi, Fareeduddin Ayaz and party. Their intricate understanding of art and religion, and the manner in which it weaved in elements from various genres of music was incredible.
The Kabir Festival is over, but Kabir stays on….
DEEPA GANESH
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Friday Review
Bangalore
Chennai and Tamil Nadu
Delhi
Hyderabad
Thiruvananthapuram
