Songs of Kabir - An Aesthetic Delight..:

I just finished reading SONGS OF KABIR, and to put it briefly, every song was a gateway to self-realisation. If revelations came to Lalla 'like a moon flowering in dark water,' For Kabir, revelations are like a fish taking to water- so spontaneous, so candid and so evocative... One can instantly feel the appeal and the zeal of the songs reverberating in our hearts, and enamouring the senses alike.

Wendy Doniger's Preface is profoundly panoptic in its presentation and Arvind Krishna's Introduction is earnestly effulgent in its ebullience. 

Prompts me to go ahead and quote a few lines from the Preface and from the Introduction.

In his Preface, Wendy discusses the conflicting thoughts from Hinduism and Islam on Kabir's birth, and their claim over him [akin to the 14 the century Kashmiri poetess-saint Lal Ded] after his death. 

I quote: The story that Arvind Krishna Mehrotra tells, of the Muslims wanting to bury him and the Hindus to cremate him, may have been inspired by the poem in which he says:

Cremation turns you to ashes, 
Burial into a feast
For an army of worms.
Your athlete's body's only clay, 
A leaky pot, 
A jug with nine holes.

Many of Kabir's poems mock the various false dichotomies beyond cremation versus burial, that people impose upon that jug.... The line between high and low castes also fell away as he sang:

Were the Creator
Concerned about caste, 
We'd arrive in the world
With a caste mark on the forehead.

The strongest testimony to Kabir's attitude to caste comes from his own poetry, for he regarded caste as irrelevant to liberation. But Kabir was not a revolutionary in any political or even social sense. Iconoclastic, yes; anti-institutional, to be sure; poor and low in status, you bet - but not concerned about putting an end to poverty. His goal was spiritual rather than economic or political liberation.... These details often resonate with traditional Indian literary and religious tropes. The husband and wife who are in the same bed but don't meet, provide a natural metaphor for our inability to recognize the god who is always with us, but it also draws upon a classical trope of Indian erotic and religious poetry: the unloved wife, the abandoned lover.

The equine metaphor - 

Put the bit in its mouth, 

The saddle on its back, 

Your foot in the stirrup, 

And ride your wild runaway mind

All the way to heaven.

reworks an idea expressed in the Katha Upanishad, several centuries BCE, that the senses must be harnessed, yoked, like horses.

Think of the self as a rider in a chariot that is the body; the intellect is the charioteer, and the mind the reins. The senses are the horses and the paths around them are the objects of the senses. The senses do not obey a man who cannot control his mind, as bad horses disdain the charioteer...

In his beautiful Introduction to SONGS OF KABIR, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra traces Kabir's spiritual roots to the Bhakti movement, which began in South India, in the country of the Tamils, in the sixth century CE but over time acquired a pan-Indian character... but it was in North India, between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, that it found perhaps its fullest expression. Bhakti favoured the informal over the formal, the spontaneous over the prescribed... 

Parallels can again be drawn here with Lalla, who is again considered a forerunner of Bhakti. Ranjit Hoskote, in his introduction to his translations of Lalla, entitled "I, Lalla", says that, it's an error in ahistorical thinking.' According to him, bhakti-marga is the way of self-dissolving devotion, which is only one among the three major approaches to the Divine recognised in Hindu practice. The others are karma-marga, or adherence to the prescribed ritual forms, and jnana marga, or the path of evolved awareness and world-transcending insight.

Arvind, describes the quintessence of Kabir's Songs in one catchphrase: "A Kabir poem has no time to waste; it hits the ground running."

One of my favourites, here:

Let's go!

Everyone keeps saying, 

As if they knew where paradise is, 

But ask them what lies beyond

The street they live on, 

They'll give you a blank look.

The translations have retained the original essence in all its flavour and is a connoisseur's delight by all means. There are metaphysical questions, unconventional upside down visual images, as in 'water catches fire' or 'the sea's ablaze', neologisms such as 'headed for Deathville', etc are an intellectual feast to the inquisitive eye. They bring to life the vivaciousness and the joie de vivre latent within. 

The first 'upside-down poem' goes thus:

Brother, I've seen some

Astonishing sights:

A lion keeping watch

Over pasturing cows;

A mother delivered

After her son was;

A guru prostrated

Before his disciple;

Fish spawning

On treetops;

A cat carrying away

A dog;

A gunnysack

Driving a bullock cart;

A buffalo going out to graze,

Sitting on a horse;

A tree with its branches in the earth, 

Its roots in the sky;

A tree with flowering roots.

this verse, says Kabir, 

Is your key to the universe.

If you can figure it out.

My favourite in the Runaway Mind section is:

When greed hits you like a wave

You don't need water to drown....

...

Who survives?

The ones whose minds, Kabir says, 

Are tied to rocks.

"Who looks outside dreams; who looks inside awakens", said Carl Gustav Jung. Indeed, SONGS OF KABIR lead you to the road within! and, they are akin to the poems of Lal Ded, 'demonstrates close acquaintance with the raw side of life.'

[thanks, i owe to a dynamic member of our family, KA, for the lovli book! You made my day :-)]