Translating Kabir and his ‘life’

“A translator is an artist on oath.”
-A.K. Ramanujan.

The translator’s challenge is to maintain duel fidelity, on one hand, to the world of the target language, and on the other to the specific characteristics of the source language and its culture. As a reader of a translation, I must be able to comprehend the work and appreciate its universal appeal, but again as a reader, I must be made conscious of the uniqueness of the translated work and its own world – that, precisely, is the task of the translator. A translator is indeed an artist on oath.

Going through many studies and most of the English translations of Kabir, the reference to ‘oath’ works in a rather strange way. It brings to mind, the typical practices of a law court. A lawyer is briefed to prove a certain case and is expected to produce the ‘useful’ evidences and, at the same time, to suppress or negate the evidences contrary to his/her brief. The success of the lawyer is not judged on the basis of the conclusion flowing from the facts of the case, but by his/her ability to prove a pre-decided conclusion by deft handling of witnesses and evidences.

To most of his modern interpreters, Kabir is a witness who is called to the ‘court’ not because the ‘court’ is interested in listening to his own voice, but because his testimony is to be used for proving a pre-determined conclusion about his world – the world of early modern (or medieval) Indian society. Naturally enough, this pre-determined conclusion is only part of a larger design of past, present and future. Kabir has to perforce play the assigned role in one or the other teleological narrative. In one such narrative, Kabir is expected to play the role of the spokesperson of a Christianity without Christ. But in another he is a defender of the Hindu identity (even if somewhat ineffectively) against the Muslim onslaught. He is also assigned the roles of the ‘apostle of Hindu-Muslim unity’, or the champion of Marxist or Dalit world-view.

In his case, the early English translations have proved to be much more than mere translations. The translations might or might not have impressed and influenced the supposed ‘target’ audiences of speakers of the English language, but they certainly have left deep marks on the indigenous Kabir scholarship. The translations of the text have been intertwined with the interpretations of the poet’s historical context and have significantly impacted Kabir’s reception and appreciation in the modern Hindi public sphere and academic world. Given the special attention Kabir received from various shades of colonial scholarship, and the power/ knowledge dynamics of the colonial situation, it was bound to happen.

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Amongst the early modern Hindi Bhakta poets, Kabir is probably the most translated one in the European languages. The first European to “discover” Kabir was Marco Della Tomba, an Italian Capuchin Missionary, who belonged to the Tibet Mission financed by Propaganda Fide of the Catholic Church. He lived in Bettiah (north Bihar) from 1761 to 1773, went back to Italy and came back in 1783, and this time lived mostly in Bhagalpur till his death in 1803. He “discovered” Kabir, not because he considered him a great poet or philosopher, but because of his missionary activities which brought him in direct contact with the local people, many of whom were Kabirpanthis.

Della Tomba translated, amongst others, a text which he described as “Kabiristi” Ramayan. Tracing the history of Kabir’s “discovery”, Charlotte Vaudeville described the Ramayan translated by Tomba as “a Cabirist (i.e. Kabirpanthi) version of the Ramayan legend, in which Ram appears as a great penitent and ascetic resembling the Buddha.”[1]

The fact, however, is that the text translated by Tomba is none other than the Ramcharitmanas of Tulsidas, and he translated most of the sixth canto – the Lanka-Kand. Quite interestingly, he never made any claim of Ram ‘resembling the Buddha’ in this Ramayan.[2] What Tomba most probably meant by the adjective ‘Kabiristi’ was a text, which he found being revered by the Kabirpanthi community as well. But “for the indologists reared on the basic structural oppositions of the caste hierarchy” (as William Pinch aptly puts it),[3] a “Kabiristi” Ramayan was bound to be not only different from but also oppositional to the “Brahminical” text composed by Tulsidas. The “structural” interpretation must be upheld, even if it flies in the face of relevant facts. Della Tomba also translated ‘Mul-Panji’ and ‘Gyan-Sagar’ in order to make his readers understand the belief system of the Kabirpanthis. None of these two was ever attributed to Kabir himself. But, Tomba’s choice is quite understandable; after all, he was not interested in Kabir as a poet but as the ‘founder’ of a ‘sect’ with a large following. The ‘Kabir’ scholarship has faithfully followed Tomba in this regard till date. To most of the scholars, Kabir is an interesting figure either because he can be called as witness in the case launched against Hindu and/or Islamic traditions and practices, or because he has such a large following even today.

Describing the Kabiristi Ramayan translated by Tomba as the “Buddhist version of the Ramayan legend” might have been an inadvertent “mistake” on the part of Vaudeville, but the scholar’s self-confidence in this regard is just one example of Kabir being used as an instrument to “prove” a predetermined conclusion about the nature of Indian cultural and religious history. A similar example can be cited from a very scholarly introduction to a very recent Kabir Translation in English. According to scholar-translator Vinay Dharwadkar, “Kabir’s audiences since the sixteenth century have persistently tried to claim that, he was a Brahmin by birth”, the scholar details such attempts for the benefit of his audiences of the 21^st century.

One series of biographical accounts constructed after about 1600, for example, has suggested that he [Kabir] was the illegitimate child of a Brahmin widow in Banaras, who abandoned him at birth, leaving him to be discovered by a childless Julaha couple named Niru and Nima… It has also asserted that Kabir was a precocious adolescent, and acquired a diksha-guru by tricking a high Brahmin – the philosopher and theologian Ramananda – into accepting him as a disciple and initiating him into bhakti. The stories in this series acquired their influential forms in the Kabir Parchai, composed by Anantdas around 1625, and the Bhaktirasabodhini, composed by Priyadas about 1712, both of whom were commentators of the Ramananda Sampradaya, and tried to absorb Kabir, however implausibly, into a particularly conservative variety of saguna Vaishnava devotion.[4]

This politically correct sounding description is factually quite incorrect; it is also reflective of insensitivity to the dynamics of a whole culture and tradition. I have, elsewhere, dealt with the whole issue of the relationship of Ramananda and Kabir, and also with the so-called “conservative” nature of the Ramananda Sampradaya.[5] Here, let me just point out that Anantdas, the author of Kabir-Parchai was of course a Ramanandi (Priyadas was not.), but nowhere in his Parchai does Anantdas call Kabir an “illegitimate child of a Brahmin widow”. Throughout the text, he persistently maintains that Kabir was born into a Julaha family. It was only in the 19^th century that Kabir was given a Brahmin widow as the biological mother. The Hindus in the early modern India did not have any problem with one of their most revered figures being a Muslim Julaha by birth.

It is quite a popular and respectable exercise (and, of course, necessary) to deconstruct the attempted brahaminisation of Kabir. But not many scholars seem to be interested in exploring the connection between the 19^th century colonization of India and the Brahmin widow mother of Kabir.

In the case of Vaudeville, maybe the Tomba text was not easily available, which in fact should have led to more caution and circumspection, but the Parchai of Anantdas has been available (along with two independent English translations by David Lorenzen and Winand Callewaert) for quite some time. It is indeed amusing to note that the 1991, New York edition of the translation of Parchai of Anantdas by Lorenzen has been listed in the impressive bibliography of Dharwadkar’s work.

Dharwadkar rightly follows the lead of Wilson in recognizing the name Kabir as containing not just an individual author but a whole tradition of poets, but is he right in saying that, “the Kabir poets consistently refer to the individual Bhakta in masculine gender and therefore are unapologetically masculist and even misogynist”? [6]

Here are the first and last stanzas of the poem ‘Dulhan Gavahu Mangalchar’ (दुल्हन गावहु मंगलचार), translated by Dharwadkar himself, under the title “Wedding”:

O bridesmaids,
Sing wedding songs:
King Rama, my bridegroom
Has come to my house.

Kabir says,
I’m off to my wedding:
I’m marrying the imperishable.[7]

The ‘Kabir poet’ in this poem is actually adopting the persona of a woman. It is Kabir the bride who is singing this song. Is the translator ‘an artist on oath’ here? Or is he a lawyer with a brief, too eager to somehow prove his case? As a matter of fact, in most of the Kabir poems, the longing for Rama or God is expressed in woman-speak. The Kabir poets are ‘misogynists’ no doubt, but only in the didactic poems. In moments of emotional intensity, they invariably adopt the feminine voice. We should carefully reflect on such issues instead of rushing to pronounce ‘unapologetically’ final judgments.[8]

Also, in the same poem the translator has rendered the line “tan rati kari man rati karihaun” (तन रति कर मन रति करिहौं) as ‘I have painted my body red, I’ll paint my mind all red.’ The word ‘rat’ or ‘rati’ in the original has nothing to do with red paint. It is rati, the erotic desire, plain and simple, which is reiterated by bringing in the expression “main joban madmati” (मैं जोबन मदमाती) – which has strong erotic connotations in popular imagination. And the ‘misogynist’ poet (a woman as far as this and other such poems are concerned) is not embarrassed in expressing his/her desire.

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European/modern studies and translations of Kabir seem to be using him for making some point of larger significance for Indian traditions. H. H. Wilson, just like Tomba, introduces Kabir while describing the community of Kabirpanthis and their belief system. He was the second European after Tomba to attempt a translation of some Kabirpanthi works, and in his ‘sketch’ of religious sects of Hindus – first published in 1828 and in 1832 – he rendered 100 sakhis of Kabir in simple and flat prose for the benefit of his readers. He praises the Kabirpanthis for their “Quaker like sprit” and, at the same time, is quite candid about the more interesting reasons for this praise. He likes Kabirpanthis for the fact that “their mendicants also never solicit alms, and in this capacity, even they are less obnoxious than the many religious vagrants, whom the rank soil of Hindu superstition and the enervating operation of an Indian climate so plentifully engender.”[9] The connection between obnoxious vagrants seeking alms, the Hindu superstition and the Indian climate is indeed a revealing one.

G. H. Westcott was the first European to write a whole (albeit small) book (1907) on Kabir. Again, the missionary scholar was not interested in the poet, but in the founder of the Panth. He was also quite candid about the motivation of his study of ‘Kabir and Kabir-Panth’. He writes in the preface, “We have probably in the Kabir Panth, a religious system that owes something to Hindu, Muhammadan and Christian influences.

If Christ had been an Indian, would not his Gospel have been welcomed by many who now refuse to listen?”[10] Westcott concludes his study saying, “It is not improbable that this doctrine [Shabda], as set forth in the literature of Kabir Panth has been influenced by the writings of St. John, as is confessedly the case with the teachings of Radhi (sic) Swami Sect of modern origin.”[11]

Influenced by St. John or not, Kabir was useful for reaching out to those who would have listened to Christ – had he been an Indian. Was he not bluntly critical of the superstitions of both Hinduism and Islam? Was he not so utterly resentful of the hideous practice of idolatry? For many, Kabir came handy in imagining some kind of Christianity without Christ in early modern India. Similarly, “Bhakti” was seen as the only true religion of India – as it was taken to be so similar to Christian like devotion to a personal God, and of course the early proponents of the Bhakti doctrine in south India were indebted to the Nestorian Christians.[12]

Seen in this context of Kabir’s “discovery” and his use by the indologists and the missionaries, Tagore’s translation of Kabir (‘One Hundred Poems of Kabir’, 1915) was indeed a significant departure. He was “assisted” by Evelyn Underhill, who also wrote the introduction. Both the translation and introduction have been critiqued by many, most notably by Vijay C. Mishra, who focused on just one poem and its translation. Incidentally, in this poem also we find Kabir speaking in a woman’s voice, instead of referring “to the individual Bhakta in masculine gender”.

The poem in question is: “balam aao hamare geh re” (बालम आओ हमारे गेह रे – poem 35 in Tagore’s translation), and Mishra quite convincingly argues that “the sense of alaukik (the other-worldly) manifested here is not Kabir’s but Tagore’s own. Tagore not only interprets, he also inter-penetrates: he posits an alternative text for Kabir. As a result, the conventions of Kabir – his undercutting, his verse as an evocation of ‘absences’, a sense in fact of incompletion – are lost.” [13]

The fact however remains that it was here, in this translation, that Kabir was read and presented primarily as a poet, as a member of “that small group of supreme mystics.” And this mysticism bit was stretched so far that in the entire introduction, the term ‘caste’ does not make an appearance. Kabir is compared here with many Christian mystics; obviously the idea was to make him sound familiar to the target audiences. But, more importantly, this translation, rejecting Kabir’s reduction into only a ‘reformer’ or sect founder, underlined his poetic self. While introducing or translating the ‘social criticism’ aspect of his poetry, it also hinted that Kabir was not critiquing only the orthodox Hinduism and Islam but the very idea of religious orthodoxy – which could have had Christian provenance as well.

So, in light of the above, do we have a Kabir translation in English where we are in the presence of this early modern poet along with the consciousness of our own time and concerns? Can we find a translation where the translator is not a lawyer with a brief but indeed an artist on oath?

The answer fortunately is in the affirmative, as we have with us the translations by Linda Hess. Her translations (in collaboration with Shukdev Singh) of many poems of the ‘Bijak’ were first published in 1983. She, while introducing the poet to her readers, notes “the intimacy created by Kabir’s style” and reminds us:

As readers or listeners, we are more inclined to identify with Kabir. When he conjures up a comic pandit, we laugh. When he exposes the greedy and hypocritical, we scorn. When he reveals the incredible blindness of people who won’t face death, we applaud. The use of stock characters allows us to maintain a sense of detachment… They are not descriptions of us.

But gradually something begins to gnaw at our consciousness. It occurs to us that pandits can wear other costumes besides the white dhoti and rosary of tulsi or rudraksha beads, can sit under other umbrellas than those that front the Ganga at Varanasi. It is relatively easy to notice panditry in the universities, violence in government, greed in the market place, phoniness in religion. Then we can spot signals closer at hand, in the gestures and voices of our neighbors. But Kabir’s power is most tellingly revealed when his words reverberate in our own skulls, and we see the succession of disguises under which we live our daily lives.[14]

This longish quote brings out Linda’s concern as a reader and a translator. Kabir’s scathing social criticism is only too well known, it is important, however to remember that I am organically linked with society and community. A ‘social’ criticism is effective and valid only when, instead of being delivered form the pulpit, it springs from the intellectual and emotional participation in the life and fate of society. Linda’s approach is an extremely important rebuff to those strategies of appropriation which reduce Kabir (or any poet, for that matter) to the status of a subservient fellow-traveler of a given religious or secular theology and teleology. Not only her ‘introduction’, but her translations as well, seek to ‘read’ Kabir for her modern audience, but without in any way sacrificing Kabir’s own specific historical and intellectual location.

The translator – the artist on oath in this case – is able to strike the necessary balance, as she knows the link between the poet and the audience of translation. She says of Kabir, “he is the most translatable of the non-modern Indian poets.” This despite the “problems raised by archaic, unsystematic language forms and obscure expressions which trouble Indians as well as foreigners…” Kabir is most translatable “because of the simplicity and bluntness of his style; and further because of a way of looking at and speaking of things that is more modern than classical, more individual than idealized.” [15]

Linda’s translations are neither literal nor arbitrary. She displays a remarkable ‘feel for the language’ of the poet. In poem 28 she renders ‘Vajra Kenwar’ (वज्र केंवार) as “adamant doors”. Now, ‘Vajra’ in Sanskrit and Hindi means strong, alluding to the favorite weapon of Indra. But, in everyday speech ‘Vajra’ carries precisely the connotation Linda has rendered it with – ‘adamant’. An incorrigible fool is called ‘vajra moorkh’, or just vajra or bajjar – which means adamant fool, not a strong one. In the context of the poem also, it is the adamancy, not the strength of the doors that matter – “they locked up seventy-two apartments with adamant doors.” (कोठ बहत्तर औ जो लावै, वज्र केंवार लगाई).

This feel for language is quite natural in a translator who instead of using Kabir to prove a case or a thesis lets the poet speak – both in the translations as well as in the introduction. She rightly notes at the outset, “There are volumes of legendary biography about Kabir, but the widely accepted “facts” about his life can be summarized in a few sentences.”[16] Now, this situation presents two choices. Either, you carefully and sympathetically ‘read’ the legends or just focus on the poetry as such. Linda opts for the second, which is decidedly better than reading legends literally or dismissing them in a cavalier manner. Unlike many others Linda is more interested in Kabir the poet and goes to the Panth from his poetry instead of the other way around. As a matter of fact, she has been actively interacting with the Kabirpanthis (particularly in the Malwa region of Madhya Pradesh) for quite some time. This interaction has brought her in touch with the rich, ongoing tradition of retaining the Kabir poetry through oral performances, and she has rendered some such poems in beautiful translations.

Working either on the ‘Bijak’ or on the oral tradition, Linda constantly emphasizes the poet Kabir. His mysticism and his social concerns are, after all, facets of his poetic genius. Linda analyses the ‘rough rhetoric’ of Kabir in a very thought-provoking manner, but more importantly she ‘knows’ that like any other great poet, Kabir is the poet of the primary facts of life – love and death. This ‘knowing’ clearly makes its presence felt in her choice of the poems; she has chosen poems reflecting various moods and devices of the poet instead of focusing on either ‘social’ or ‘spiritual’, ‘collective’ or ‘lonely’.

It is because of the ‘feel for the language’ coupled with a feel for the integrity of the poet’s personality that Linda works as ‘an artist on oath’ rather than as a lawyer eager to win his case. And she does it with a spontaneity of her own. In poem 23, the first line is: अवधू कुदरत की गति न्यारी and the last is: कहै कबीर राम है राजा, जो कछु करै सो छाजै. The poem is about the ‘incomprehensible’ ways of nature in the existential sense. Apart form the ‘normal’ aspects of this incomprehensibility, the poet also brings in the fish that are hunting in the forest, the lions swiveling in the ocean, and of course a ‘dumb man’ pronouncing ‘an endless word’.

In the translation, the first line is rendered: ‘hermit, nature has unnatural ways.’ And having spoken about the whole gamut of these unnatural ways, the poet in translation concludes: “Kabir says – Ram is king, whatever he does is natural”. Obviously, the expression ‘unnatural’ also indicates the limitations of our knowledge of nature and its ways. The transition within the poem from ‘unnatural’ to ‘natural’ underlines the poet’s dialogue not only with the ‘hermit’ but more importantly, with himself and with us.

Linda underlines both in translation (as we just saw) as well as in analysis – “he is primarily talking to us.” It is not for nothing that most of the Kabir poems, be those of ‘assault’ or of ‘contemplation’, are directly addressed to his audience – that is us.

The poet’s address to us becomes more interesting and challenging in the so-called ‘Ulatbansi’ (upside down language) poems. There have been many attempts to open up these ‘esoteric’ poems. The fixed meaning of technical words employed in this upside down language has been detailed and debated amongst the scholars. But Linda gets to the heart of matter, so far as its significance as a poetic device is concerned: “Upside-down language should make you feel like a fool: that is part of its function.”[17] She does not dismiss the attempts to read the Ulatbansi with the help of some kind of thesaurus of the esoteric terms and, on the contrary, details the tradition of such attempts quite sympathetically. But, she got into another way of reading the same while working on the Ulatbansi with Dada Sitaram – an elderly Kabirpanthi – who could not help exclaiming “Maja aa gaya!” (‘it is so funny’). And the translator could see the characters from the Ulatbansis walking around in her own twentieth century world like the characters from a ‘comic strip.’

This incident is important as it reflects sensitivity to the ways in which Kabir is still read by his own audiences, more importantly the humble openness of the translator-scholar, which is sadly so missing amongst many of us.

Linda’s journey with Kabirpanthis is far from over. After all, in certain journeys the path is more rewarding than the destination. And the indication of the course of the search, the journey was already there in 1983. Linda ends the introduction to her translation of the ‘Bijak’, recalling her meeting with Gayabanandji who, true to his name, just enjoyed going missing suddenly and reappearing again suddenly. And as Linda recalls:

Sometimes, he would talk very loud. Sometimes he would be so quiet you could hardly hear him. Sometimes he would sit still and not say anything. Sometimes he would make a sudden noise, clap his hands sharply, sharply. “Kuch bajega!” he would shout, clapping his hands – Something will ring! As if urgently trying to impress on me the difference between my book-learning and some real experience, he would talk about a process leading to Samadhi, and suddenly, clapping his hands loud and fast, he would repeat, “Kuch bajega! Kuch bajega!”[18]

I have no idea about Samadhi, but yes, many a time I see people distorting the real life personal and social experiences to fall in line with the book knowledge of their choice instead of interrogating such knowledge and the chosen books. In the context of Kabir and in other contexts as well, if knowledge were to come in a dialogue with experience, hopefully ‘kuch bajega’ – something will ring.

Notes

18. Ibid. p. 37.