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190 pages

English

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Knowledge ahead, knowledge behind, knowledge to the left and right. The knowledge that knows what knowledge is: that s the knowledge that s mine. Bijak, sakhi 188 One of India s greatest mystics, Kabir (1398-1448) was also a satirist and philosopher, a poet of timeless wit and wisdom. Equally immersed in theology and social thought, music and politics, his songs have won devoted followers from every walk of life through the past five centuries. He was a Muslim by name, but his ideas stand at the intersection of Hinduism and Islam, Bhakti and Yoga, religion and secularism. And his words were always marked by rhetorical boldness and conceptual subtlety. This book offers Vinay Dharwadker s sparkling new translations of one hundred poems, drawing for the first time on major sources in half a dozen literary languages. They closely mimic the structure, voice and style of the originals, revealing Kabir s multiple facets in historical and cultural contexts. Finely balancing simplicity and complexity, this selection opens up new forms of imagination and experience for discerning readers around the world.

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Poetry

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Publié par	Penguin Books Ltd
Date de parution	21 octobre 2003
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9788184753332
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	4 Mo

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Extrait

Kabir
The Weaver s Songs
Translated and with an Introduction and Notes by VINAY DHARWADKER
PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
About the Author
Introduction Kabir, His Poetry and His World
1. The Life of a Weaver
2. The Fabric of the Text
3. The Thread of Authorship
4. The Design of the Poetry
The Poems
I. ‘Sixty Threads in the Warp’ Poems from the Northern Texts
The Final State
Body and Self
Slander
Birth and Light
The Senses
The Master Weaver
Trap
Poverty
Fable
Departure
Ant
Mosque with Ten Doors
The Way
Purity
Greed
The Jewel
All h-R ma
II. ‘I’ve Painted My Body Red’ Poems from the Western Texts
Wedding
Fever
The Provider
Debate
Mother and Son
Banaras and Magahar
Let Me See You
Storm
The Love of King R ma
Doer and Deed
M y
Meditation
Sapling and Seed
Moth
Deadly Business
III. ‘The Ganga Drains the Ocean’ Poems from the Eastern Texts
Warrior
R ma’s Essence
The Simple State
The Ten Avatars
Parting
A City Ablaze
Holiness and Hell
IV. ‘Neither Line Nor Form’ A Selection of Aphorisms
Shaloks from the di Granth
S kh s from the Kab r Granth val
S kh s from the B jak
V. ‘This Sheet, So Fine, So Fine’ A Selection of Songs
Sheet
The Flawless One
Breath
The Bhakta’s Caste
Garden
The Mystery of M y
Swan
Fish
The Ineffable
Apostasy
All h-and-R ma
Neither This Nor That
Rain
Creation
Don’t Stay
Translator’s Note
Notes to the Poems
Note on Transliteration
Glossary
Bibliography
Copyright Page
PENGUIN CLASSICS
THE WEAVER S SONGS
Vinay Dharwadker was born in Pune in 1954, and was educated at St. Stephen s College, Delhi University, and the University of Chicago. He is the author of a book of poems, Sunday at the Lodi Gardens (1994), and an editor of The Oxford Anthology of Modern Indian Poetry (1994), a co-editor of The Collected Poems of A. K. Ramanujan (1995), and the general editor of The Collected Essays of A. K. Ramanujan (1999). His other edited books include Cosmopolitan Geographies: New Locations in Literature and Culture (2001). He has published translations of modern Hindi, Marathi, Urdu and Punjabi poetry, as well as essays on literary theory, translation studies and Indian English literature. He teaches Indian languages and literatures at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he also serves as the Director of the Centre for South Asia.
Introduction
Kabir, His Poetry and His World
1. The Life of a Weaver
And now it s the same bank of the Ami where I stand upright again with Infinity wrapped in a small, poor man s bundle slung over my shoulder .
Who has survived who hasn t? And even the one who has survived- how much of him is left at his own proper location in his own proper time?
Kedarnath Singh, Uttar Kab r (1995), pp. 133, 137
The historical figure we know as Kabir probably lived in the eastern half of north India in the fifteenth century. For the past 200 years or so, the Kabir Panth, one of the religious organizations associated with his name, has assigned him an extraordinary lifespan from 1398 to 1518. Ever since the British orientalist H. H. Wilson published his pioneering essays on the subject in English in 1828 and 1832, modern scholars have sought to find more plausible dates for Kabir.
In 1950, and then again in 1964, the distinguished Hindi literary historian Parashuram Chaturvedi sifted through several decades of debate and several bodies of evidence to conclude that the poet most probably lived between the late fourteenth and mid-fifteenth centuries (845-70). The American historian of religions David N. Lorenzen reopened the discussion in 1991, when he used Anantadas s Kab r Parach , a text composed around 1625 and affiliated with the Ramananda Sampradaya, together with historical accounts of Raja Vir Singh, an early sixteenth-century ruler of Baghelkhand, to argue that Kabir may actually have flourished around the year 1500 (9-18). However, two detailed studies by Gurinder Singh Mann and one by Pashaura Singh, all dealing with the textual history of the di Granth and published between 1996 and 2001, have demonstrated once more that the poet was a predecessor and not a contemporary of Guru Nanak (1469-1539), the founder of Sikhism. The information we now have about the formation of Sikh scripture and Kabir s place in it strongly supports the claim that he was born in or about 1398 and died around 1448, just before the mid-point of the fifteenth century.
The poetry preserved in Kabir s name in the older surviving manuscripts indicates that he spent the greater portion of his life in Banaras. Known by the ancient name of Kashi as well as the modern Sanskritised name of Varanasi, Banaras has long been identified as Shiva s city , one of the principal sacred sites on the Hindu map of the subcontinent. While most sources agree that the poet grew up, underwent an apprenticeship, and eventually practised an occupation in Banaras, some suggest that his birth and death may have occurred elsewhere. In all likelihood, Kabir spent a part of his life or passed his final days in the town of Magahar, which now lies in Basti district, approximately 15 miles west of Gorakhpur and 100 miles north of Banaras. A poem with his signature-line that appears as shabad 15 in R ga Gau in the di Granth (as compiled in 1604) seems to confirm the story that Banaras and Magahar constituted the two ends of his life:
Now tell me, R ma, what s my future trajectory? I ve renounced Banaras: a huge mistake.
Like a fish out of water, stranded on a bank, I m left without the austerities of my previous births.
I ve squandered my whole life in Shiva s city: now that it s time to die, I ve risen and come to Magahar .
Kashi, Magahar: for a thoughtful man, they re one and the same. My devotion s depleted: how will it land me on the other shore?
The connection between Kabir and Magahar, however, is more than poetic. Since at least the late seventeenth century, residents of the town have claimed that the poet was either buried on its outskirts, or entered his sam dh there. One colonial account indicates that a local nawab named Bijli Khan built a mausoleum at that location on the banks of the river Ami in 1450, and that Fidai Khan, a nawab from outside the region, repaired it around 1567 (Keay 1931, 95-97). Whether these two men invested their resources in the monument specifically to commemorate the poet remains uncertain, but as recently as 1985 the Sunni Vaqf Board of Lucknow possessed a deed dated 1698-99, which registers the gift of the village Kabirpura Karmua for the upkeep of the Muslim tomb of Shah Kabir in Magahar (Lorenzen 1991, 17). The honorific title Shah mentioned in the document suggests that the building may already have come to be regarded during Aurangzeb s reign as the darg h of a sufi p r . This is broadly consistent with the fact documented in Abdul Haq Dehlavi s A kh b r al-A kh y r (composed between 1590 and 1619) and Mohsin Fani s Dabist n-i Maz hib (mid-seventeenth century), that Indian sufis in the Agra, Delhi and Kashmir regions were reading Kabir s poetry during the reigns of Jahangir and Shah Jahan. The tradition has continued throughout the colonial and post-independence periods, with a family of hereditary Muslim caretakers maintaining the mausoleum as a place of sufi worship and pilgrimage down to the present.
The position of Magahar in the poet s biography, however, is complicated by two disparate factors. On the one hand, descriptions and photographs published by the missionaries G. H. Wescott (1907) and F. E. Keay (1931) and the contemporary Hindi scholar Shukdev Singh (1981), among others, show that the old Muslim tomb in Magahar stands next to a Hindu-style temple, which supposedly memorializes the spot where he entered his sam dh , and is maintained by s dhus belonging to the Kabir Chaur Ma h of Banaras. On the other hand, as early as 1598, Ab l Fazl, the author of the n-i Akbar , the official chronicle of Akbar s reign, recorded the existence of two other sam dh s for Kabir: one at Ratanpur, now a dozen miles from Bilaspur, in Chattisgarh, and another at Puri-Jagannath, in Orissa, both maintained by the Dharamdasi branch of the Kabir Panth from the seventeenth or eighteenth century onwards (Vaudeville 1974, 33-35).
Whether Kabir was born and died in Banaras, or in Magahar or elsewhere, the poetry attributed to him and the discourse that has accumulated around it consistently claim that he belonged to the community of weavers in the Banaras-Magahar region. Nita Kumar s ethnographic and historical work on Banaras in the 1980s has confirmed afresh that weavers have lived and worked in the city for the greater part of the past 1,000 years. Banaras has been famous for its silk and cotton weaving since early modern times, if not earlier, and remains a centre of international distinction for this craft, alongside such cities as Dhaka and Kanchipuram. Until the early twentieth century, Banarasi weavers produced their high-quality silk and cotton fabrics on handlooms that seem to have undergone little technological change over the previous seven or eight centuries. Even after the introduction of the jacquard machine and the Hattersley domestic loom around 1928, they have continued to practise their craft in ways that may go back to the beginning of the last millennium. Silk weaving, especially for saris, is still done on looms installed in k ra kh n s or workshops in weaver s homes, and work-patterns in modern family businesses remain centred around the personalities of their master weavers, whose individual styles combine labour and leisure, technical skill and commercial acumen, and moodiness and imagination in different measures (Kumar 1989, 147-52).
One of the Kabir poems in the di Granth -shabad 54 in R ga Gau , preserved since the first decade of the seventeenth century-captures the general atmosphere of a Banarasi weaver s workshop with great