Sant Kabir

Kabir grew up in a family of weavers in Kashi, and his poems are full of the loom: warp and weft, the fine sheet, the shuttle. The Kabir Panth tells that he was found as an infant on a lotus in Lahartara pond and raised by the weaver couple Niru and Nima. A famous account says he wished to be the disciple of Swami Ramananda and, being refused, lay on the steps of Panchganga Ghat before dawn; the acharya’s foot touched him in the dark and he cried “Ram, Ram”, and Kabir took that as his diksha. His God is Ram, but a Ram beyond form, found inside the heart and not in any outer show. He mocked hypocrisy wherever he saw it, in the pandit who reads without understanding and the mulla who calls from the minaret, and he was hard on pride of caste. His sakhis, couplets of witness, and his padas and ramainis were sung long before they were written; they survive in the Bijak of the Kabir Panth, in the Guru Granth Sahib, and in Rajasthani collections. Tradition says he went to Maghar at the end, to show that the place one dies does not decide one’s fate, and that his body turned to flowers which Hindus and Muslims shared.