One Hundred Poems of Kabir

Kabir is a well-known saint in India. Born in or near Benares around 1440 of Muslim parents, he was accepted in early life as a disciple by Swami Ramananda. Ramananda had brought to Northern India the religious revival which Ramanuja, the great 12th century expositor of Vishishtadvaita Vedanta based on bhakti, had initiated in the South.

Kabir was the founder of a sampradaya (Kabir panthis) to which many northern Hindus belong. Still, his influence has been much wider: it is as a mystical poet that Kabir lives for us.

He hated religious exclusivism (I am “at once the child of Allah and of Ram”, God is “neither in Kaaba nor in Kailash”) and decried religious hypocrisy and ritualism. He was not a religious ascetic but a weaver, a simple and unlettered family man, who earned his living at the loom. He preached “the religion of love”, through which one discovers the omnipresent Reality, the “All-pervading”, “the breath of all breath”, within Whom “the worlds are being told like beads”.

His poems, written in a popular dialect of Hindi and addressed to the common people–which he probably sang to his disciples while working at his loom–are still very present in the India of the 21st century. The present edition, translated by Rabindranath Tagore and published for the first time in London in 1915, has become a small spiritual classic.