It's hard to find one Kabir. He lives in many oral traditions, several social contexts, and as you tumble into each one of them, he only grows in complexity. Linda Hess, writer and Kabir scholar, speaking of her tryst with the musician Kumar Gandharva and Kabir as a multi-part, endless journey, recalled a 1991 incident. “Have you listened to Kumar Gandharva?” writer U.R. Ananthamurthy had asked her on the campus of the University of California, where she taught. Linda hadn't. “How can you translate Kabir without listening to Kumar Gandharva? In India, text is only a pretext. Please listen to him,” he had urged her.
As Linda Hess and Ananthamurthy settled down for a reading and conversation recently in Bangalore, they remembered this first exchange between them. Almost 18 years later, “Singing Emptiness” a collection of translations of Kabir's poems that were sung by Kumar Gandharv hit the bookshelves. The conversation was charged with the excitement of perceiving Kabir's spiritual awakening, and it also slipped into contemplative moments, close to Kumar Gandharv's experience of emptiness.
“My first encounter with Kumar Gandharv was in Mysore in 1989. His music and our meeting later was so intense that I had to write a poem,” explained Ananthamurthy, recalling his own tussle between Kumar Gandharv the extraordinary musician and the everyday person. “His music was transmitting the power of Kabir's nirgun into his listeners. I was mesmerised. But later, as we all sat down for dinner, the manner in which he recovered himself into an ordinariness was astonishing.” Kumar Gandharv spoke continuously, devoured his food hungrily as if he just couldn't bear the wild Kabir riding on him; he had to get rid of him. “I was disappointed as he stripped himself of his mystic attainment, but I realised that anyone who leads such an ecstatic life, in his case music, had to transform himself into the ordinary. The intensity can be unbearable,” Ananthamurthy said.
The connection between Kabir and Kumar Gandharva, says Linda, is about that boundless space that exists beyond singer and listener. It is less common to realise that they also share an aliveness to the world, a presence in the body, without which their ‘otherness' would perhaps fall down, powerless.
“How could he sing emptiness? I would be puzzled…,” recalled Linda. “You can find it in the voice of the minstrels and saints. Their voice matches their state of mind. I learnt to capture the element of shoonyata as one hears it in their voices,” Kumar Gandharva had said. However, Kumar Gandharv would sing in such a way that it was possible for others to seek an entry into his emptiness. “It is mine, yet not mine,” he seemed to say. “To achieve the quality of nirgun in music is very hard. Meaning is not crucial in music, but to bring in meaning and yet emphasise on no-meaning is very hard. Silences and pauses are part of his music,” felt Ananthamurthy.
He added that Allama, the 12th century Kannada mystic poet, is the greatest example of Nirguna . “He creates a language for himself. But it is a perpetual negation – you arrive at a meaning, but you are also giving up the meaning.”
At this point Linda was reminded of the last Nirgunbhajan that Kumar Gandharv composed, “Shoonya ghar shahar”. “The text raises questions, the song dissolves them,” she said. Kumar Gandharv's nirgun also means nirbhay , of joy and freedom, and of losing one's identity.
The short interaction was intense, each trying to grapple with their own experience of Kabir and Kumar Gandharva, through word, through music. Tara Kini's rendition of Nirgun Bhajans established for the audience, a contact with the ‘real'. Prithvi and Pooja, nine year olds, sang “Ud Jaayega”, and put everyone on a mystical flight.
