With the zeal of an early learner, author and Kabir scholar Linda Hess animatedly sings some of her favourite Kabir compositions. As she directs her hand to my heart and sings the phrase “chhot lagna”, I realise why she is such an unusual scholar – Linda is a fervent follower of Kabir, not a dry academic for whom he is a subject of her thesis. A journey that began over four decades ago as a quest of spirituality and love of poetry, it has gone deeper and beyond. Linda’s oeuvre has travelled further than the printed word to rope in Kabir in his many forms – oral to performative traditions, Kumar Gandharva to Prahlad Tipaniya. As she chases this extraordinary liberal, free spirited Kabir with the ardour of a devotee and dedication of a researcher, Linda draws our attention to the ecstasy and mysticism of faith, as also his ironic existence — a Kabir who remains deeply politicised and iconicised in several pockets of India. Bodies of Song: Kabir Oral Traditions and Performative Worlds in North India, by Linda Hess to be released tomorrow, is an exhaustive and meticulously researched work that travels into the milieus of this Bhakti poet.
“My work in North India over several decades has turned gradually from the purely text-based toward reception, performance, and cultural embeddedness,” writes scholar Linda Hess, about the genesis of her book. “When I first engaged with Kabir, in the late 1970s, I was interested in poetry as language, form, meaning and craft. My task was to translate and interpret. I also studied the history of manuscript traditions in order to position myself on the question of authenticity, which was compulsory for a scholar. But even then, I was drawn to investigate the experience of the audience, imagining the voice of the poet actively doing things to the reader-listener,” she explains, speaking of how texts lived in people, beyond the covers of books. The book – written over a period of 12 years – addresses important questions about living traditions, music, religion and spirituality.
In her extensive travels across various parts of North India, Linda sees how singers of various kinds have indigenised Kabir into their life through their experiences. He therefore exists in the folk of Malwa and Rajasthan, as he exists in the Sufi of Sindh, Rajasthan and Pakistan. And more. The narrative fascinatingly records -- with particular examples of compositions – of how Kabir’s texts offer a fluidity and freedom for an individual singer to alter phrases/words based on the language and perceptions available to him. While for some ‘ram’-- what could be interpreted as a religiously loaded word -- is the keyword, for others it could be ‘nam’. Kabir’s nirguni bhajan can even begin with a Ganesh stuti, for instance.
Born into a Jewish family, Linda, writing poems as a six-year-old, was inclined to be religious. “At 14, I realised that I hadn’t found what I was looking for. When I was in my 11th grade, I started reading Emerson and Thoreau. Both of them were profoundly influenced by India, and both had read the first translation of the Bhagavadgita . Walt Whitman’s poem Passage to India , Emerson’s poem Brahma , and Thoreau’s writings attracted me to India. I was looking for a good spiritual path in 1958… this was much before the fads of the 60s – hippies, Beatles etc.”
As a Fulbright scholar, Linda came to India in 1964 to teach in Patna Women’s College. She learnt Hindi simultaneously, post-Independence Indian poetry fascinated her, she travelled to different parts of the country, and this also happened to be the time when she had a tryst with the Bhakti poets. “Among Surdas, Mirabai, Tulsidas and Kabir, I realised I was extremely attracted to Kabir. After a few years, I went to live in Benaras, and with the help of Shukdev Singh I translated Kabir. I realised that I was a Nirgun kind of person, and I would just do Kabir,” says Linda of finding her spiritual anchor.
But from her books, The Bijak of Kabir to Singing Emptiness to Bodies of Song , Linda’s has been a sustained, a continuous engagement with Kabir. “There are many things that keep me tied to Kabir.” This Bhakti poet, she says, was the most unusual of them all. With his “rough rhetoric”, a language that was plain and simple, he was grabbing the attention of every listener – “Suno, bhai sadho”, he said with force. This Linda says is what Zen philosophy does, using language to get beyond language. “He penetrated my heart straightaway. I felt he was speaking to me,” explains Linda. Kabir had a remarkable vision about the body too. “The body is perishable, but it is also a precious vessel. The light and anhad naad , both reside in the body. Even as a poet he was stunning, here he was telling us to look inside, and constantly investigate who and what we are,” observes Linda.
Progressively, the book moves to the realms of “social-political” and “religious-spiritual”. Mapping these divergent views, Linda writes: “The polarity became a recurring motif, once I moved from studying Kabir as poetry on a page to meeting Kabir to his living cultural contexts. Some people talked primarily of the religious Kabir who teaches devotion to the guru… the interior Kabir who evokes yogic concentration…, the boundless nirgun reality….Others were interested in Kabir as part of the social and economic order, a low-caste weaver who worked with his hands, …. Debunked religious authority…. This Kabir also speaks of Hindus and Muslims, their identities and motives, their craziness and violence, and the potential for living together in peace.” Her argument gets sharp and bold as she treads the opposites of religious/spiritual and political/spiritual. What is extraordinary about it is the manner in which she chooses to cast them in the framework of music (bliss) and the power that it wields on human sensibility. She does this with two stories – a Beethoven sonata being played to Lenin, and Hindu nationalist Golwalker commenting on the emotional impact of Bhakti. Lenin wants to reject the “superhuman beauty of music” because it “takes away his aggression”. Moving further, Linda stunningly argues, “Rejecting religion and embracing spirituality is too easy. It oversimplifies the ways in which religions actually function and perpetuates the alienation of secular intellectuals from the majority of their fellow citizens.”
Through Kabir, and his poetry, and his philosophy and his journey, Linda is actually looking at the world we live in. She questions our notions and leads us to paths that could perhaps help us find answers to the violence and aggression we are facing. She says: “Kabir and his nirgun poet friends won’t solve the political spiritual problem for us. But they will provoke and challenge us not to forget our humanity under any circumstance.”
If I say yes it isn't so,
and I can't say no.
Between yes and no a space
my true guru's place.
