For a long time, the stories and accounts of the great saints of India have allowed a public discourse full of pretension and a holier-than-thou attitude. Kabir has fallen victim to this rather entrenched tendency.
An assortment of radicals and avant-gardists have in their great praise and love for Kabir, in fact, kept him trapped in an intolerably prudish and self-indulgent moralistic discourse of love, brotherhood and universal humanity.
How is this achieved?
The existing discourse proceeds by setting up Kabir as opposed to orthodoxy, which is often associated with the Sagun perspective.
As we know, Sagun and Nirgun are normally taken to be the two philosophical concepts in Hinduism and Sikhism, where Sagun usually refers to the divine with form, attributes, and qualities, while Nirgun represents the divine as formless, attributeless, and unmanifest.
Sagun is placed on the side of orthodoxy, while Nirgun is on the side of the heterodox. Sagun is bondage, Nirgun is freedom. Nirgun is often presented as breaking with the Brahminical social order and as challenging the writ of entrenched power. Nirgun is presented as on the side of liberation and freedom for all. Songs like ‘Nirbhay Nirgun’, and so many others that uphold Nirgun approach, are attributed to Kabir.
Kabir is so often quoted as having taught us that liberation must be sought within oneself: the formless Nirgun is within us. Thus in his One Hundred Songs of Kabir (1915), Rabindranath Tagore gives great importance to the following verse. It goes:
मोको कहां ढूँढे रे बन्दे, मैं तो तेरे पास में
(Moko kahân dhûnro bande, mein to tere paas mein.)
Tagore translates it as “O servant, where dost thou seek Me? Lo! I am beside thee”. Further in the poem, we read: “I am neither in temple nor in mosque; I am neither in Kaaba nor in Kailash.” Hence: “I am within you.”
We can look at another verse from Kabir which says,
कस्तूरी कुंडलि बसै मृग ढूंढ़े बन माहि।
(Kasturi kundali basai mrig dhunde ban maahi.)
This can be explained as saying: Do not be lost and wander around meaninglessly in the “outer world” like the proverbial deer in the forest chasing the fragrance of kasturi (musk) when in fact the kasturi is within you.
The proverbial and precious kasturi is within you, if only you were to realise it – this is taken as the central insight and teaching. Liberation or moksha is then presented as an act or process of self-liberation, a realisation of your “true self”, autonomous of existing societal norms or karmakand.
II
Self-liberation suggested by the Nirgun approach is supposed to empower the individual and marginalised social groups who are now freed from their dependence on the oppressive social order. This is where we place the Nirgun challenge to certain precepts of varnashradharma (caste order), questioning the exclusion of the lower castes from the social order.
The Nirgun seeker is supposed to realise and feel the vibration in the inner mind which is nothing but the cosmic Unstruck Sound, Anhad Naad. The seeker is made to feel that there is a “truth” which you have not felt or experienced – hence the entire emphasis on anubhav (experience) or bodh (self-realisation of experience). And if only you did the right things, you could have had that anubhav.
This is where you have the very popular doha: “Likha-likhi ki hai nahi, dekha-dekhi baat” (It is not about the written word, but the seen and the felt). Any individual, regardless of social status and the identity they claim, can then achieve moksha, now understood as self-liberation. One can break away from the dominant social ethos and sanskars and yet achieve liberation.
Also read: What Makes Indian Philosophy Different From Its Western Counterpart?
So far so good.
However, only a little examination will reveal that this Nirgun approach actually very much works within the framework of the philosophy of withdrawal and renunciation. If that was not enough, we also find that it fundamentally subscribes to the doctrine of Maya, which holds that the “outer” world is false and illusory.
Not perhaps the doctrine of the Maya in its full force and full Brahminical implications, but at the very least, in the form of an emphasis on withdrawal and renunciation from the “external world”. Brahminical Brahmalok (the subtle world of Brahma) and parlok (other-world) are rejected but the lok (this world), the world in its, shall we say, ordinariness, the world of productive labour and intercourse with nature, is undermined and regarded as illusory – Maya Mahathagini (deceptive Maya), as the Nirgunis proclaim in unison with the Sagun followers. We hear these songs on Maya from Kumar Gandharva but also Prahlad Tipaniya, renowned Kabir folk singer from Malwa in Madhya Pradesh.
That the world consists of a gap between perception and reality, that the world is layered and full of deceptive leads cannot be denied. Even the Charvakas will deny this at their own peril. Same can be said about the “new atheists” like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. Karl Marx famously highlighted the gap between reality and appearance as the rationale for the work of science. The real issue with the Maya doctrine lies elsewhere. And that has to do with the bad faith and bad conscience produced by the ritualistic norm of renunciation and the ascetic ideal following from the doctrine of Maya.
The Nirguni approach unravels itself as it is now at pains to distinguish its own version of the doctrine of the world as Maya from that propounded by the upholders of the Sagun approach. Nirgun turns out to be far closer to the Sagun approach than it initially appeared.
So, again, one wonders if the Nirguni approach is at all really what Kabir stands for. We must then ask: is it possible that Kabir opened up a vision and horizon beyond Nirgun?
Indeed, we know that the Bhagavad Gita already presents the Nirgun as existing in an internal opposition to the Sagun. To Arjun’s question about which path is better, Lord Krishna answers that the Sagun is superior to the Nirgun. Just because Orthodoxy holds Sagun superior should not however lead us to immediately assume that Nirgun is such a radical alternative, or radical at all. The Gita makes it clear that Nirgun and Sagun exist in an inner unity.
Hence one should not read too much into the orthodox conservatives like Acharya Ramchandra Shukla opposing Nirgun Kabir. Shukla’s work hides the deeper inner unity between Sagun and Nirgun, which has misled many radical Kabir scholars who fail to problematise and unpack the Nirgun approach. They often end up indirectly subscribing to fundamental presuppositions of Nirgun that are actually highly orthodox, like the doctrine of Maya. Orthodoxy is opposed at the level of a thin political posturing without confronting the deeper Brahminical presuppositions.
In fact, the Nirgun inner self comes far closer to the Advait Vedantic approach with its emphasis on the state of susupti(deep sleep). Susupti is regarded as generative of the Infinite Self, the highest stage of the self, called turiya, as we find in the Upanishads.
Philosophically, the emphasis on susupti stands out not just for the mode of life privileging renunciation and the ascetic ideal, but as generative of the world itself. All these precepts are often treated as Nirgun, where the Infinite Self is regarded as Formless. Yet these are also fundamental to the Sagun worldview, often expressed as the notion of the Brahman as the Formless One. One would expect that this convergence between Sagun and Nirgun surely unsettles those who regard Kabir as Nirgun. Sadly, that does not seem to be the case.
III
By classifying the world as “outer” or “external”, the doctrine of Maya, even in its altered Nirguni version, undercuts the seeker’s foothold in this world. Thus dislodged, the Nirguni seeker is in despair, forced to turn inwards, within oneself, in order to do away with the purportedly false “outer self”. In the name of doing away with the ritualistic, mechanistic karmakand of institutionalised Brahminical religion, all of the “outer world” (now designated as “sthula”, “lower domain”) is spirited away. Anhad Naad and Brahman share common cause here.
A prior weakening of the individual, despairing and despondent, seems to create the dependence and attachment to the Nirgun. Nirgun seeks to retroactively suture the gap and hollowness that the doctrine of Maya creates in the individual. The dominant narrative however tries to suggest that the individual or the seeker’s misery and suffering arises out of avidya, ignorance, or being immersed in Maya and not knowing the true path.
Nirgun keeps the individual, the sadhak or sadho (the seeker) in fear and awe – not of the ritualistic sectarian Gods, or the myriad intermediaries of priests and purohitas, but of not being in tune and harmony with the formless Anhad Naad. It instils a sense of guilt, that you are not in touch with the power of silence, that you are out of sync with the Unstruck Sound which is the Anhad Naad. You are not in tune with the Kayanat, out of touch with the Jhini jhini bini chadaria and with the Ram Ras. Or you have not polished yourself enough like a Shaligram. So, no Moksha for you!
As though to compensate for this reactionary move, and in a rather populist strain, Kabir is then presented as pontificating “good values” of love, humanity and compassion without engaging with the questions and contradictions of social relations and human existence. Kabir is nicely curated for liberal appropriation.
IV
One can even go to the extent of suggesting that, in some sense, the Sagun Karmakand is “superior” than the Nirgun. For in being a collective mass bhakti, it offers the seeker the lifeline of a scapegoat. You have the option to, as it were, blame it on others, or on the big Other. Alienation itself is mobilised towards a perverted collective power of the masses. This signifies how the process of nation-state formation in India is related to the Sagun Bhakti movement’s ability to bring together huge masses of people under one cultural-emotive umbrella.
Indeed, the visionary poet Gajanand Madhav Muktibodh (1917-64) seemed to be pointing in the right direction when he focuses on the “limitations of Nirgun thought”. He asks why is it that the opposing Sagun approach of Goswami Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas gripped the imagination of the masses and why Nirgun failed to do so. He suggests that there is something impoverished and limiting about “Nirgun rahasyavaad (mysticism)”, in contrast to Sagun “which seems to enlarge and enrich our hearts and minds”. Muktibodh highlights how Tulsidas’s Lord Ram could simultaneously uphold the entrenched Brahminical social order even while appearing very inclusive of people on the margins.
Sagun spawned varnashramadharma, an entire social and political order, mobilising great masses of people without undermining the legitimacy of the Brahminical elites and the existing power structures. Muktibodh goes on to examine the reasons for the victory of Puranic Brahminism over anti-caste Nirgun. Nirgun is bereft of social determinations and can only remain an internal opposition to the social form produced by Sagun. Nirgun is Sagun’s democratic embellishment, akin to the process of democracy humanizing capitalism.
Muktibodh prepares the ground, the soil for us, to explore the field beyond Nirgun. But he does not achieve a breakthrough. He does not inaugurate a new terrain of thought. Yet he refuses to indulge in the radical’s lazy virtue-signalling about Sagun’s oppressive and Brahminical character. Muktibodh goes beyond petty-bourgeois radicalism.
Kabir cannot then be a placeholder for this kind of radicalism and must instead be our path to get out of the Sagun vs. Nirgun debate and open up a new horizon.
V
We have good news.
A closer look does indeed reveal that Kabir escapes the Nirguni framework.
I think Kabir is looking for a direct relationship with the world, ending the Nirguni seeker’s bad faith and guilt-ridden striving for the inner experience of truth. Kabir breaks with the Nirguni’s unholy nexus with the doctrine of Maya. He attempts to find a sahaj (simple) and lucid life outside of the Nirguni injunction, outside of the supposed communion of the seeker’s inner self or inner vibration and the Anhad Naad.
Particularly in the many Ulatbanshi poems and songs, we find Kabir greatly immersed in his engagement with the external world – which in fact does not remain “external” as such. Kabir places humans in their active relations with the world of things and objects, nature, other human beings and animals, without the affliction of a pathologised inner self or inner lack. Neither the collective mobilisation of alienation of the Sagun, nor the experientially authentic individualised relation of harmony with the World Mind of the Nirgun. A new vista is opened up, something closer to the lives of people – something closer to a lucid life.
In Kabir’s Ulatbansi, there’s no given truth or experience to which we must attain. Ordinary life is not Maya. The illusory and the true are no longer in dichotomy. We do not look for life outside of life. We are in the midst of a constant and direct engagement with ourselves and the world. Kabir’s this-worldly approach achieves an intensity and levitation that now allows for a massive rejig of the order of things. The inner mind is not necessarily dismissed or rejected but placed in its intimacy with life. The inner mind is now produced in the great and everyday cataclysm between humans, objects and things as they reproduce themselves in the register of the Unknown.
The Ulatbansi transforms what looks like the order of nature as also the world imagined by both the Sagun and the Nirgun. Divinity is now no longer separated from life.
In one Ulatbansi, Kabir says: “What an astonishing sight: A Lion lovingly grazing a Cow!”.
We read further:
एक अचम्भा देखा रे भाई, ठाड़ा सिंह चरावै गाई। पहले पूत पीछे भई माई, चेला के गुरु लगै पाई॥
जल की मछली तरूवर व्याई, पकड़ि बिलाई मुर्गा खाई॥
(Ek acambha dekha re bhai, thada simha charava gai. Pahale puta piche bhai mai, cela ke guru lagai pai.
Jal ki machali taruvar vyai, pakadai bilai murga khai.)
It is translated as:
Such an astonishing sight, a lion is grazing a cow.
First son, then mother; the master touches the disciple’s feet.
Fish from water climbs the tree, catches the cat and eats the chicken.
How can the son come first and then the mother ? How can the fish catch the cat and eat the hens?
There is no dearth of such Ulatbansi verses. Another one says that the river is drowning in the midst of thousands of boats. Or that the tree has its roots in the sky. Even more interesting is where the hunter is supposed to have killed the deer without shooting an arrow, eating its meat without killing it! It is far from just an aesthetic play with the absurd.
The order of things, the arrangement of things, the things and objects and their sequence: all these are now malleable, combined and re-combined in myriad ways and patterns. Kabir scatters the order of nature, the order of humans, the order of society, not just at the level of power, privilege, and the caste order, questioning the social or cultural, but at the level of the fundamentals of existence and the laws of nature. His Ulatbanshi opens up an ontological, metaphysical plane.
If the above examples do not convey the full sense, then consider what Kabir says about prayer or meditation, what is called sumiran. It is absolutely fantastic and a way to the otherworldly through a this-worldly path. I discovered this in the course of a personal conversation with Prahlad Tipaniya who pointed out the following verse:
सुमिरन की सुधि यों करो, ज्यों गागर पनिहारी ;
बोलत डोलत सुरति में, कहे कबीर विचारि।
(Sumiran ki sudhi yon karo, jyon gaagar panihari;
Bolata Dolata surti mein, kahe Kabir vichari.)
Tipaniya explained: Understand sumiran or prayer/meditation as the concentration of women carrying pots of water on their heads who might be absorbed in chatting and gesticulating away, and yet perfectly balance those pots. As deeply spiritual a process as sumiran is seen in terms of an “outer” world and “ordinary” human activity. There is no attitude of distancing from the world of Maya to then seek the “true vibration” through the inner mind. Nor do we have a sadho called upon to maintain a distance from the world, or from desire and attachment.
It is not about reaching the higher plane of the spirit or vibration (the subtle Unstruck Sound) through ordinary activity, the way Gandhi thought of spinning on the charkha as the path to the Almighty. Rather, the activity is itself the sumiran and not a means. The spirit is borne of the activity. Kabir is not just adopting the aesthetic mode of the absurd in order to uncover a deeper truth.
Nor is Kabir only celebrating the malleability of the world and the given social and natural order. Rumi, Amir Khusrau, Tukaram, Chaitanya and Meera’s infinite bliss of dissolving one’s own self in love might be the spirit which has moved innumerable hearts and souls. Kabir invites us to do something more beautiful and daring: dissolving one’s own self in the midst of other fellow humans and not just in relation to an Idealised Divine. He is not, we might say paraphrasing Hegel, putting the bone in the spirit, nor the spirit in the bone. It is just that the bone and spirit are inseparable for him.
Immediately, one sees that the theory of the world as Maya is no longer operational. A poem like Maya Mayathagini loses its power of meaning even if it continues to thrill us, elevate us, transport us. Kabir’s Ulatbansi then is not just an example of Sandhya-bhasa (twilight language). It in fact stands for a deadlock within the Nirgun corpus, pointing to a space beyond the Sagun-Nirgun framework.
More importantly, then, the Ulatbansi inaugurates a new psychic space in Kabir’s sadho. The sadho is transformed. The psychic space he opens for us is one where there’s no given truth and we are not trying to adapt or adjust or attain to some kind of self-realisation through the Anhad Naad.The seeker no longer seeks freedom within alienation. Kabir is ecstatic that we can directly, actively relate to the world the way a child does. The child doesn’t want to give up his toys, there’s no split rationality there, it’s a direct relationship, suffused with ram ras and sumiran.
The Ulatbanshi then inaugurates a new form of life, a new social form and way of life.
VI
We must pause and ask if perhaps we already have forms of life in India that cohere with Kabir’s Ulatbansi. Tipaniya’s explanation of the Kabir verse presents us life lived in a moment, a slice of life – so also with the verses about the son supposed to be born before the mother, or about sumiran. Rid of dogma, life appears in its malleability, upside-down-ability. But we might as well turn to particular forms of life that we still find among certain Adivasi communities in India. They often retain memories of the ways of life of the ancient Asuras as we find in the earliest Vedic hymns and chants.
Consider this.
In Central India, there are popular practices, where the adivasis would put the Gods on trial and beat them up. One widely reported such practice is at the Bhangaram Devi Temple in Bastar where “the courts hold Gods accountable for their actions and imposes punishments”. The Gods must conform to human needs and aspirations, failing which they can be punished. Gods must keep up with humans.
If you can beat up the gods, if you can punish gods, this means your basic attitude towards the world is not split. God who must save you from fear is itself not so Godlike. You might still seek the grace of God or seek the Anhad Naad, but not by withdrawing into your inner self, since you have an open and direct relationship with God. The grace could be mutually agreed upon all the time – and here too it is a shifting terrain. The balance of forces is not permanently loaded on only one side. So if the gods misbehave, then you punish them and similarly if you misbehave, you are also punished.
The individual is not internally split as with the Nirguni seeker attaining to the Anhad Naad. The inner is not higher than the outer. What is suksma (subtle), and what is sthula (lower), must now be drastically revised. Hence, humans no longer act out of lack. Actions are not symptomatic of some underlying displacement of psychic energy, but is directly a result of his or her drives. Seeking and living are indistinguishable.
The Anhad Naad as such need not be dismissed or rejected, but the centre of gravity is no longer the inner self or inner mind borne out of renunciation or withdrawal from the outer world considered as Maya Mahathagini. It is rather spontaneously generated through our relationship with the “outer world” where the seeker is just living ,but lives in the bliss of life itself. Maya can and must still deceive but cannot and should not create despair.
There is life – and bliss – outside both the Sagun and Nirgun frameworks. Kabir invites us into it.
VII
In historical terms, Kabir’s Ulatbansi can surely be understood in the context of the material culture in the Indian subcontinent at the time, which is around the 15th century. The term “material culture” is indeed appropriate, not least because the saints have placed a cultural idiom (Ram ras) with regard to a material practice (weaving), as we find in the song ‘Jhini jhini bini chadariya’.
We are told in that famous verse: “Right in the middle of the market, the bazaar, Kabir stands with a flaming torch” (Kabira khada bazar mein, liye lukaathi haath). Often, we find references of love being sold in the market. It is in the context of the overall material culture, then, that we must place “Kabir the weaver” who most likely engages in buying and selling his goods. This is the early modern period flanked by a buoyant Indian ocean trade, a time of globalization and a kind of modernity. For a slightly later period (17-18th century) but focusing on Varanasi, the historian Christopher Bayly, in an evocatively titled work, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars (1998), mentions that the Nath Yogis received donations from the merchant classes.
What is unmistakeable is an urban culture associated with trade, the rise of commercial classes, changes in political dynasties and regimes, and cosmopolitan influences. This is evoked in the image of Kabir in the open space of the ghats on the Ganga in Varanasi.
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Among the detractors and social contrarians then, the radical Saints and the Sufis would naturally specialise in highlighting the hypocrisy of the pandits, commercial classes and their spiritual pretensions. Nostalgia for the lost values and a happier life now takes the form of critique, as a kind of reprieve from the present. The songs and dohas loved by the popular masses would be full of the signs about an earlier world, or a better world, which is now in ruins. Elements and idioms (like Ram Ras) from the popular and often dominant narrative are now weaved allegorically into a blistering critique.
Both Sagun and Nirgun occupy this allegorical mode. What we know about allegory as a form of symbolic narrative is I think best expressed in the words of Walter Benjamin. “Allegory”, he wrote, “is in the realm of thought what ruins are in the realm of things”. Form rules over content. The search for the Eternal Form displaces the real world which is now absorbed in the doctrine of the world as Maya.
The nostalgia for some kind of a lost purity and established social order is invoked again and again in the Sagun. It is reacting against the loosening of social relations during the time, seeking to consolidate a reactionary opposition. Shukla’s work can be placed in this register. We find emphasis on maryada (entrenched values), shraddha (faith) and the emphasis on a personified God. We need to go no further than consider the construction of the figure of Lord Ram in Goswami Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas.
Nirgun dohas in challenging Sagun allegorically deploys the imageries of hansa (swan), ghata or matka (earthen pot), shaligram(polished pebbles) to speak about self-realisation through experience of the Formless. But here the dominant attitude is not just of nostalgia, as with Sagun, but of melancholy too. That is why Nirgun seems radical in the avant gardist mode. A mass collective cannot congeal around it, reminding us of Muktibodh who points to Nirgun’s “limited appeal”. Nirgun’s opposition to Sagun is “an opposition to an opposition”. It is a secondary and derivative response, naturally bereft of social determinations – or it can only representationally signify social contradictions, the way radical Nirguni saints challenged certain features of the caste system.
Disengaged from the world, the Nirguni seeker has strong parallels with the 19th century Baudelairean flaneur who responds through signs about an earlier world which is now in ruins. Both Sagun and Nirgun are, in that sense, part and parcel of the reproduction of the aesthetic modes internal to capitalism today. The world of objects, things, human relationships, love and labour – all of these are now invoked in the aesthetic mode of allegory deployed in the search for the Formless Anhad Naad.
Kabir’s Ulatbansi challenges this slide into melancholy and unpacks the allegorical capture of the world by establishing a direct and simple, sahaj, relationship with things, objects, humans and indeed the Gods. This is Kabir’s sahaj – which must be seen as having traversed many Sagun and Nirgun artifices and edifices, often aligned with entrenched power and its inner oppositional determinations. Kabir’s sahaj absorbs and subsumes what could be retrieved from both the Sagun and Nirgun and points to a world beyond. The sahaj must mean that the humans and the Gods are in a disharmonious and perpetually shifting balance of forces, as we saw with the Adivasi practices in central India.
VIII
The Ulatbansi assuages and uplifts the seeker who has been wrongly made to feel guilty about being absorbed in this world which is regarded as Maya. It promises that the Anhad Naad will no longer be dangled at you as a reward for mending your ways. In other words, the Ulatbansi does not presuppose a seeker clutching at the straws of alienation for freedom. It does not seek a seeker who is already deprived of a living relationship with the world around. It does not promise moksha on condition that one withdraws away from the world.
Indeed, the Ulatbansi lets the experience of formlessness grow out of the encounters with this world. Not an encounter with the world out there, but a continuous encounter with an unknown encounter, where being in this world is always itself a divine experience. To the Nirguni’s Anhad Naad, we can say the Ulatbansi proposes the encounter with the Unknown. The Unknown however is inseparable with our engagement with the Known. The Formless and the Form, the shukshma and the sthula are inseparable.
Nirgun and Sagun force upon us a soteriology, a path of salvation, abstracted from history and life, if not from “real events”. The focus on the inner self in search of Anhad Naad, Truth or the Brahman forces a kind of amnesia about life and history. Kabir’s Ulatbansi challenges this as it proceeds by, as we saw, placing sumiran in the midst of what Sagun and Nirgun will consider to be the world of Maya.
The rehabilitation of the world, restoration of the world to the seeker – these are the great achievements of Kabir’s Ulatbansi. The self-liberation of the seeker now appears as an openness to the world – this world which will also include the social and the historical. Kabir’s Ulatbansi can then also be seen as providing the philosophical and indeed the phenomenological basis for Sant Ravidas’s vision of social emancipation in Begumpura. The Sagun and Nirgun soteriologies are unpacked and forced to reckon with a sense of life and history.
Saroj Giri teaches Politics in University of Delhi and is part of the Forum Against Corporatisation and Militarisation (FACAM).