Title: Songs of Kabir Author: Kabir Creation Date: c. 15th century CE Location: India (Varanasi)
Summary
Kabir's songs are fierce, paradoxical, and luminous poems that attack religious hypocrisy, caste hierarchy, and empty ritual with equal ferocity, while pointing toward a direct, unmediated experience of the divine. Kabir — a low-caste Muslim weaver from Varanasi — rejected both Hindu and Islamic orthodoxy, mocking Brahmins who worship stone idols and mullahs who shout their prayers without understanding. His poetry insists that God is not found in temples or mosques but within the human heart, in the act of honest labour, in the breath itself. The poems are often structured as provocations: "If God is inside the mosque, then to whom does this world belong?" His language is colloquial, blunt, and startlingly vivid — he speaks of the body as a clay pot, of the soul as a bird, of death as a weaver cutting the thread.
Why This Book Matters
Kabir is the most radical voice in the Indian literary tradition — a low-caste, barely literate weaver who challenged the entire edifice of Brahmanical hierarchy, Islamic legalism, and yogic asceticism with nothing but the force of his poetry and the authenticity of his spiritual experience. His influence is enormous: he is claimed as a founding figure by the Sikh tradition (his verses are included in the Guru Granth Sahib), by Hindu Vaishnava devotionalism, by Sufi mysticism, and by modern secular Indian thought. His poems represent a revolutionary moment in Indian history when the Bhakti movement — a grassroots devotional uprising — challenged the monopoly of priestly elites on spiritual authority and insisted that enlightenment was available to everyone regardless of caste, gender, or learning.
Historical Context
Kabir lived in 15th-century Varanasi (Benares), the holiest city of Hinduism, during a period of intense cultural encounter between Hindu and Islamic traditions in northern India. The Delhi Sultanate had established Muslim political power, but the majority Hindu population maintained its religious and social structures. The Bhakti movement, which had originated centuries earlier in Tamil Nadu, was sweeping through northern India, producing poet-saints who composed in vernacular languages rather than Sanskrit and who challenged caste orthodoxy through radical egalitarianism. Kabir occupied a unique position at the intersection of Hindu and Muslim traditions — born to a Muslim family, likely influenced by the Nath yogic tradition and by Sufi mysticism, he refused to be claimed by any single tradition.
Literary Significance
Kabir's poetry operates through shock and paradox. His characteristic device is the ulat-bamsi (upside-down language) — deliberate inversions and contradictions that are meant to shatter conventional thinking: "The river is on fire, the fish are buying umbrellas." This technique, shared with Zen koans and Sufi paradoxes, uses the destruction of logical sense to point toward a reality beyond language. His poems are oral in origin — composed to be sung by illiterate weavers and labourers — and they retain the rhythmic energy and directness of speech. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra's translations capture this oral energy brilliantly, rendering Kabir's Hindi into a punchy, colloquial English that preserves the poems' power to provoke and illuminate.
Research Notes
Kabir's textual tradition is complex — his poems were transmitted orally and exist in multiple, sometimes contradictory versions across the Bijak, the Guru Granth Sahib, and the Kabir Granthavali. There is no single authoritative "collected works." Mehrotra's NYRB translations are recommended for their literary power. The 1915 Tagore translations, made with the help of Evelyn Underhill, are historically important but take significant liberties. Kabir is included here as the representative voice of the Bhakti revolution, one of the most consequential social and literary movements in Indian history.
The Reading
Saints, I see the world is mad.
If I tell the truth they rush to beat me. If I lie they trust me.
I have lived in Kashi, the city of Shiva, where the Ganges bends and the dying are carried down to the burning-ghats so that their ashes may float free of the wheel of rebirth. In this city of ten thousand temples I have sat at my loom. The shuttle goes from my right hand to my left, and from my left hand to my right, and a cloth comes into being from nothing but two threads crossing.
I am a julaha. A weaver. A Muslim by birth, low-caste even among Muslims, beneath the notice of any pandit and beneath the notice of any mullah. My father wove cotton; his father wove cotton; my hands smell of cotton and of the oil with which I keep the loom from binding.
Hear what the weaver has to say.
Kabir says: pundit, how can you be so dumb? You will drown, you and all your family, unless you start speaking of Ram.
You slaughter living beings and call it religion. Hey, brother — what would irreligion be?
If God is inside the mosque, then to whom does this world belong? If Ram is inside the image they carry on pilgrimage, then who is there to know what happens outside?
The Hindus say Ram is the beloved. The Turks say Rahim. They kill each other, and no one knows the truth.
A word about the city before I go further. Kashi — what the foreigners call Benares, what the maps will one day call Varanasi — is the holiest place a Hindu can stand. The river curves here in a slow bow. The dying are carried down to the ghats on cane stretchers, wrapped in white or in red, and the eldest son lights the fire beneath the head, and the smoke rises all day and all night, every day of every year. To die here is to be released from coming back. To die here is to step off the wheel.
Pilgrims come from a thousand miles. They walk barefoot. They sleep on the steps. They pay the Brahmins to chant for their dead. They buy ghee, they buy flowers, they buy little earthen lamps to float on the river. The Brahmins grow rich in Kashi. The shopkeepers grow rich. The boatmen grow rich. The dying are useful to a great many people.
Into the middle of this trade I have set my loom.
I do not whisper these things in corners. I sit at the loom in the open lane and I sing them. I sing them at the bathing-steps where the Brahmins bring their pots of water. I sing them at the gate of the mosque when the muezzin has finished and the men are walking away from prayer. I sing them in the bazaar.
The Brahmin pulls his cotton thread tight across his shoulder — the sacred thread that says, I am born from the mouth of God; you are born from the foot — and he looks at me as if I were a stain on the lane. I look back.
You are a Brahmin, I am a weaver of Kashi. How am I lower than you? I sit and I say the name of Ram. You sit and you turn the pages of the Vedas and the Puranas. Tell me whose work is closer to him.
You wear the sacred thread and call yourself a Brahmin. Were you born of a Brahmin woman by some other passage than the one all men come through? Did you enter the world by a different road? Then why is your blood different from mine?
Kabir says: a stone you call God. You bow before a stone. If that is how you find him, I will worship a mountain — at least the mountain is bigger.
Going on endless pilgrimages, the whole world died, exhausted by so much bathing. Not one of them ever found Ram. If he had been at Jagannath, wouldn't everyone have found him by now?
The mullah climbs the minaret and shouts five times a day. Is God deaf? Why are you shouting?
You read the Quran. You read it and read it and you do not understand a single word of it. If you had understood even one word you would not be killing goats and calling it worship.
I am not a Hindu. I am not a Muslim. I am a body made of five elements, and the spirit plays inside it.
I have spent my life refusing both sides of the lane. The Brahmin in his temple, the mullah in his mosque — they are two priests with two account-books, charging the people at two different doors for entry to a house in which God has never lived. The forms are different. The emptiness is the same.
Where, then, is he?
Do not go to the garden of flowers, O friend. Do not go there. In your own body is the garden of flowers. Sit on the thousand-petalled lotus inside you, and gaze upon the infinite beauty.
Kabir says: where are you searching for me, brother? I am beside you. I am not in the temple. I am not in the mosque. I am not in any ceremony, in any ritual, in any pilgrimage. If you really look for me you will find me in an instant — in the next breath, in this very moment.
This is the teaching, and the teaching is older than I am. The Bhakti — the path of love — was already moving up out of the south, out of Tamil country, when I was a boy. Poet-saints in the vernacular of the people, singing in the tongues their mothers spoke, refusing the Sanskrit of the priests, refusing the Arabic of the lawyers, going straight to the formless Ram with nothing in their hands.
I am of that movement. But I have a harder mouth than most.
I do not invite. I shock. I insult. I turn your settled little world upside down and let you see what falls out of its pockets. This is the ulat-bamsi — the upside-down speech — and it is meant to break the mind of the listener the way I break a knot of cotton with my teeth.
The river is on fire. The fish are buying umbrellas.
I saw a lion being devoured by a goat.
The ant carries an elephant on its back, brother. The blind man strings a needle.
You ask me what these mean. They do not mean. They are not riddles to be solved. They are small explosions set under the floorboards of your sense, and when they go off, the floor opens, and through the opening you see — for one instant — that the floor was not real. That is where Ram lives. In the place the floor was hiding.
Brother, you have slept for millions of years. Why not wake up this morning?
This body is a clay pot. Today it is here. Tomorrow it is smashed on the ground and the potter has gone home.
The body is a pot. The body is a rented room. The body is a coat I have put on for the length of one fair-day at the market, and the fair ends at sunset, and the coat goes back to whoever lent it.
While I wear it I sit at my loom. The shuttle moves. Each breath in is the shuttle going out. Each breath out is the shuttle coming back. A thread crosses another thread. A day of life is woven. A night of life is woven. The cloth gets longer; the thread on the spool gets shorter; the weaver leans closer to the work.
Kabir says: the swan has flown from the lake. The net is empty.
The swan is your soul. The lake is your body. When the swan goes, what stays? The cloth you wove. Not the rupees you piled up. Not the caste-mark on your forehead. Not the prayer-beads. Not the sacred thread. Not the certificate of pilgrimage to Jagannath that you bought with your wife's silver. None of these go with the swan. Only the cloth — the quality of attention you brought to each thread.
Listen to how I see it.
The whole world is a loom on which the Lord weaves. The earth is the shuttle, the sky is the warp, day and night are the woof. He sits at the great loom and he throws the shuttle and the universe comes into being, thread by thread, breath by breath, day by day.
You are also a weaver. Whatever caste they have written you into, whatever scripture they have made you bow before, whatever mullah is barking at you from the minaret or whatever pandit is squeezing tax out of you at the temple gate — under all of that you are sitting at your own little loom, and you are weaving your own little cloth, and the cloth will be cut.
Kabir says: your loom is set up, your thread is wound, you have only a few yards left to weave. Who will finish the cloth when the thread runs out?
The highest Brahmin and the lowest untouchable are at the same loom. The thread is the same thread. The end is the same end. The only difference between one cloth and another is the love that went into the weaving. That is all.
There is also the parrot. Have you watched a parrot eat a fruit? It sits on the branch with the fruit clamped in its claw, and it eats from the inside out — the seed is gone, the sweet flesh is gone, the skin is still there hanging from its foot like a little empty house. The world holds you like that. You think you have the world in your grip. The world is eating you from inside.
Wake up before the skin is empty.
Wake up before the cotton on the spool is finished. Wake up before the lamp-oil burns dry and the wick gutters and the room goes dark. I am not asking for ten years of meditation in a cave. I am not asking for the renunciation of food. I am not asking for the abandonment of family. I am asking for one moment of honest attention — one moment in which you stop pretending that the answer is somewhere else, in some other building, in some other book, in some other priest's pocket. One moment.
When I was, He was not. Now He is, I am not.
The lane is dark, the lane of love is so narrow that two cannot pass. When I went looking, He was not there. When He came, I was no longer in the way.
I sit at the loom. The shuttle goes back and forth. Outside in the lane the pandit is going to the temple with his pot of Ganges water. Outside in the lane the mullah is going to the mosque with his prayer-cap on. Each of them has the answer; each of them knows. Neither of them looks at the weaver as he passes.
I let them go. I throw the shuttle.
Kabir says: I went looking for the bad and found none. When I looked inside myself, I found there was no one worse.
The moon shines inside my body. My blind eyes cannot see it. The moon is in me, and so is the sun. Inside this same body of five elements — this same lent coat, this same clay pot — burns every light there is. The pandit and the mullah are looking outside for what is sitting inside the rib-cage of every man who passes them. This is the joke. This is also the tragedy.
I will die in the year they call the year of the snake — somewhere around the time the foreign reckoning calls fifteen hundred and eighteen. Tradition will say I went to a small town called Maghar to die, far from holy Kashi, because there is a saying that whoever dies in Kashi goes straight to heaven and whoever dies in Maghar comes back as a donkey. I will die in Maghar to prove that the place does not matter. The body is a pot. The pot breaks. Whether it breaks in the holy city or in the cursed one is no concern of the pot.
When I am dead, my Hindu and my Muslim disciples will come and quarrel over my body. The Hindus will want to burn me on a pyre as Hindus burn their dead. The Muslims will want to bury me in the ground as Muslims bury theirs. They will pull at the shroud, each side claiming me.
They will lift the shroud. There will be no body. There will only be a heap of flowers.
The Hindus will take half. They will burn them with fire and incense and the chanting of mantras.
The Muslims will take half. They will bury them with the prayers of the dead and a stone above the grave.
In death I will do what I did in life. I will refuse to be claimed by either side, and let each side have what it most wants — a ritual to perform.
My songs they will not bury. My songs they will not burn. The Sikhs will take some of them and put them inside their Guru Granth Sahib. My own followers, the Kabirpanthis, will gather some of them into a book they will call the Bijak. The Hindus will gather others into a collection they will call the Kabir Granthavali. Three books. Three different selections. Three sets of disciples each insisting their version is the true one.
This too is correct. I never wrote anything down. My words were carried in the throats of singers and weavers and wanderers across the length and breadth of this country, and singers do not preserve a song the way scribes preserve a text. Each singer sings what he remembers, what he understood, what his teacher passed to him. The song changes. The song must change. A song that does not change is already dead.
Six hundred years after the heap of flowers, my songs will still be sung. Truck-drivers in the north will sing them at roadside tea-stalls. Day-labourers in Bihar will sing them at the end of a long shift. Folk-singers will sing them at village festivals; classical singers will sing them on concert stages; old women at the village well will sing them while they draw the water. The mouth of the people will not let me go.
Kabir says: the weaver sits at his loom. The shuttle moves. The thread runs out.
And the song, brother, the song goes on, and on, and on.
This post is part of Civilisations, a 149-book chronological journey through world literature. See the full collection →
Two translations are recommended. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra's NYRB Classics edition (2011) is the best literary rendering in English — punchy, colloquial, and alive to the poems' oral energy. Rabindranath Tagore's 1915 translations, made with Evelyn Underhill, are historically important and beautifully lyrical, though they take significant interpretive liberties.
Trans. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra. The finest current English translation — direct, colloquial, and true to Kabir's voice.
Trans. Rabindranath Tagore. The classic 1915 translation — lyrical and historically significant.
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