Purshottam Agrawal’s ‘Kabir, Kabir’ is a critique of our times

Lallan S Baghel

In the last few decades, there has been an intense and curious critical engagement to explore the nature of India’s vernacular or desaj modernity, and to decolonise it from the remnants of the western colonial modernity. Social scientists, literary critics and political philosophers have attempted to explore the nature of indigenous knowledge towards re-inventing India’s vernacular modernity from the perspective of lived social reality.

One may ask a few banal questions: why it is so important for scholars to locate the contours of ‘Indian modernity’ in the vernacular literature? Do these critical engagements offer us pathways of transforming the hyper-masculine, ‘Hinduvised’ post-colonial India into a more democratic and egalitarian India? Keeping these questions and concerns in mind, ‘Kabir, Kabir’ by Prof Purshottam Agrawal offers a fascinating and layered perspective and analysis about vernacular Indian modernity and a critical public sphere of Bhakti via the life, work and poetic expressions of Kabir.

The author has engaged for more than three decades to understand the critical philosophy of Kabir and how he as a poet and a radical reformer not only critiques the existing social order though his poetic sensibilities, but also offers a methodology to create a better and humane world beyond the binaries of religious and secular worlds. To illustrate this point, the author says; “Kabir is essentially a poet of atam-khabar (self-news: self-awareness).”

In this well-researched book, the reader is taken for critical pedagogical excursions via Kabir’s poetry to understand the debates on tradition and modernity and its academic tensions: how Kabir critiques the dharmashastras in a form of Purusharthas such as Artha, Kama, Dharma and Moksha, and offers an alternative normative order of Purusharthas as Prem (love), Vivek (wisdom), Sahaj (a kind of natural serenity) and Ram (Kabir’s favourite name for the innermost spiritual experience). These four key words provide new values and tools to understand the discourse of Kabir’s Bhakti beyond organised religion and the traditional Hindu worldview.

Thus, the book has catalogued six comprehensive chapters spread over different themes: ‘Approaching Kabir’, ‘There Lived Weaver in Kashi’, ‘East and West in Kabir’s Time’, ‘Life is Transitory and Kabir Composes Poetry’, ‘Bhakti: Morality and Moksha in Everyday Life’ and ‘Erotic to Divine’.

The title of the book suggests that it might be about Kabir’s life-poetry and its literary aesthetics and philosophical outlook. However, the author deconstructs this impression and provides a much deeper philosophical understanding about caste, gender, sexuality and debates on colonial and post-colonial modernity through the lens of vernacular modernity. This has been one of the central questions and challenges while writing this book. Consequently, the author engages with Kabir’s philosophical poetry as an Archimedean point to critique the discourses on colonialism and Eurocentric modernity via canonical and narratives available in vernacular literature. He writes: “Poets like Kabir and Tukaram are described as ‘surprisingly’ modern for having such a mindset, the implication being that their society was medieval and stagnant till it came in contact with Europe through colonisation. But what if Kabir and others like him, far from being ahead, were in fact natural products of their time?”

How far can this approach towards excavation of desaj or vernacular or alternative modernity be free from the discourse of nativism in the times of hyper-masculine ‘Hindu’ nationalism, especially when most of the syncretic poets and thinkers, including Kabir, have been appropriated by cultural nationalists?

Needless to say, the author offers many critical insights to deal with these questions and anxieties in this enriching book.