← New Books Network
New Books Network
Anand, "The Notbook of Kabir: Thinner than Water, Fiercer than Fire" (India Viking, 2025)
01:33:49
Loading summary
Transcript41 lines
- [00:00]
A
Go beyond the verses and achieve a deeper understanding of Scripture with the Rebind Study Bible App. An audio experience of the Bible interwoven with expert commentary. The Rebind Study Bible App reads Scripture to you, enriching your comprehension with insights from the world renowned New International commentary on the Old and the New Testament in an accessible podcast episode format.
- [00:22]
B
Be not therefore anxious for the morrow. Matthew chapter 6. Each day will have its troubles, but by God's grace they can be survived.
- [00:31]
A
Use the Rebind Study Bible App's chat function to ask questions and get answers in real time. That's thought provoking discussion and analysis rooted in decades of research and wisdom from more than 40 scholars at your fingertips. The Rebind Study Bible App is a new way to experience the Bible with enhanced depth, at your own pace in the moments you have. Search the Apple App Store for Rebind Study Bible or go to rebind app.com newbooks network for a free 7 day trial. Hello everybody, this is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network and if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Production. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [02:08]
C
Welcome everyone. This is Jessica Zhu. I am an Assistant professor of Religion at University of Southern California at Dornsife and the New Books Network host in Buddhist Studies. Today we are very lucky to have Ethan Nand to talk with us about his new amazing and mind bending book. Oh, not a book. Oh, Anti book. So that's the not book of Kabir. Thinner than water, Fiercer than fire. Published by penguin Random House 2024. So my dear listeners, to give you a taste of what's to come, let me just read out the brief bio printed at the back of this book. Anand writes poems in English and Cabiri. He translates poetry from many Indian languages and sets them to ragas. So ragas for those who don't know is just kind of a melodic framework. Kind of. Now he's a student of the Durpat, that's northern Indian classic music. Known for its devotional and meditative qualities. And as publisher at Navayana and Navayana, the name of Ambedekarai Buddhist. So he has worked with a range of writers, translators and artists and poets. He has annotated and edited some of Ambedekar's key writings and this has informed his poetry and music. Anand Livesy Kabirsten okay, so Kabir is not just a poet or singer, much more than that. For Kabiri is a language and Kabiristan is a country. So Kabir is fully award of its own. So welcome Anand. Thank you for writing this eye opening and mind bending book. I know as a publisher who runs Navayana you frequently publish academic books such as Death on the Throne by Douglas A Part the Life and Thought of Beor Ambedekar by Ashok Gopal. Interested listeners check out my previous interviews on these two books. And Anand, she also published unconventional books such as Ganja Muhua Chronicles. I hope I'm not butchering the names but it's like so full of breathtaking art and prosecution. However, nothing has prepared me for this book, the Notebook of Kabir. As an academic who doesn't read Hindi, I feel so inadequate to do justice for this rich and thought provoking project. But I'm happy that you are brave enough to let me try. So Anant, I'd like to start our interview with the traditional New Books Network question. Could you please tell us a bit more about yourself? Maybe also the publishing house Namayana that you run and how you come to write this notebook about Kabir and how you get involved in the Kabir project.
- [04:59]
B
Thank you so much Jessica. This is wonderful. I have heard you interview my authors and it was I who decided that probably I would like to be interviewed by you because you bring a special kind of a gaze to these books. As somebody who doesn't necessarily belong to this tradition from which these books are emerged. Emerging and yet have a deep engagement, there is a certain universality to your quest towards these things. So I felt somehow we would connect. Also the fact that we met in Chicago. As for myself and talking about myself in the context of doing a work with somebody like Kabir and with Buddha, who talks about the self being a fiction, and yet we live in a world of names and associations. You're called Jessica. Recently I told a friend of mine, I'm going to call you Jesse Kabir. You know Kabir to your name. I am as much an outsider to Kabir, so to say, as you are. I grew up in the south, where Kabir is a kind of a textbook figure. When I was young, in school, like I say in the introduction to this book, I encountered him in the form of very moralistic, aphoristic verses which tell you to do things on time, because who knows if the world ends tomorrow, do your work right now so that you don't postpone and be lazy. And as children we used to make fun of that idea and say, oh, if the world is going to end tomorrow, why do something now? So that kind of irreverence is what I felt Kabir encouraged. But the teacher who teaches you doesn't encourage you to think like that, nor do your parents. So I grew up in southern India, in Hyderabad, which is in modern day Telangana in the southern part of India. And there I was. I grew up as a Tamil person. And in. In the house. I was raised to think of myself when you're talking about the self as a Brahmin, as somebody who belongs to a particular caste. But once you step outside the house, there's so much else that the world has to offer that you cease to think of yourself, yourself as somebody belonging to a particular caste. And most of your readers, I hope, know what caste is. It is a kind of structure into which society is hierarchically divided and the Brahmin is supposed to be at the top. Supposed to be. It was a family which did not. I grew up in a family which did not own books at all or keep books in their house. Not even the sacred books, Nothing. Nothing. So my only curiosity was about going to libraries and finding these things called books. And frankly, I was not much of a reader because there was no reading culture. It's only when I stepped out of the limitations of the house and found myself in what is called a university, first, a college, a graduation college, where I found myself in a hostel, that one kind of moves away from this whole parental colonialism, as I call it in retrospect, and then find a whole world out there. So it's through these many journeys that I encountered cast as something deeply bad, negative and something that limits your own social interactions with others. Kabir came in school and then left me. I didn't really think about him. He was just another poet. Like many poets are taught in Telugu and in Hindi and in English of course. One reads Wordsworth and such stuff because it's part of your syllab. I never stepped out of the syllabus mold of thinking. And it was only the political encounters that happen around the university space that started making me think critically of caste. And the fact that I also ended up falling in love with a person who was not Abraham. And then she was far more well read in poetry than I was. And she was a far well read person in general. And I clung to her. And then I realized that caused a rupture with my family eventually when I decided to move in with her. So these are the kind of formations and that primarily for me after the age of 2021, my whole trajectory became to think and think against caste. So which is what explains why I ended up being a journalist who was working in and around caste. It was first a personal thing to get out of this whole structure anglehold of caste at a personal, emotional level of love. And then you come out of it and then you decide it's just not your personal journey. The self that says I'm out of it doesn't work. Because the rest of the society continues to perceive me as somebody who was born into something. And then the rest of the society which down to the untouchables, the whole hierarchical system is grappling with this issue. So I decided to throw my weight behind this idea. And then the fact that I discovered the writings of Babasar Bambedkar. During my years as a journalist and the Hindu in Chennai. My partner and I moved to Chennai which is where I lived for about nine years. After a lot of time in Telugu speaking country, I moved to Tamil country. I'm supposed to be a Tamil but I didn't know the language. So I had to pick up spoken Tamil proper spoken Tamil when I was 24, 23, 25. Around that time. For the next nine years we lived in Chennai where I practiced as a journalist. That's where Navyana was born. As what I would call a side project. Something that I did in addition to earning a day job doing a day job as a journalist with Outlook magazine. The Hindu various places. Then Navyana started in 2003. And then the idea was yoked from the beginning to Babasai Bambedka I did learn music during my teenage years from about 17 I started and persisted with it till about 24. But it was a very Tamil Brahmin culture is what I felt. Carnatic music as it's called in the south. And it was very, very closeted with the Brahmin community or that's how it was perceived and received though its history is very different. So I gave up music after I moved to Chennai. Strangely, I gave up on poetry. I used to try to write poetry. I gave up on all these things so that I fight the political battle against caste which is how Navyana was born. From 2003 to 2014 I was doing books after books. And then one of the bigger books that you did not list there was the annotated edition of Dr. Ambedkar's Annihilation of Caste. One of the most important books written in India. I would say more important than even the Dhammapada for me because that is the way of saying nothing. There is nothing called caste. We have to get rid of it. There is no compromise I'm going to make. So it was for Ambedkar that I started Navyana along with my friend Ravi Kumar who made me kind of get involved in this project. So. And 2014 was also important. The reason I'm mentioning this and the kind of criticism I received and the book received also for featuring Arundhati Roy's rather extensive introduction was that I am a Brahmin and I shouldn't be doing these things. And there was quite a bit of validity to that criticism. And then I quit social media. I was a bit on Facebook those days, early days of Facebook. Then I stopped doing all that. And Ganja Muhua Chronicles, that the book you mentioned, I was working on it. And my friend, the person with whom I work, Venkatraman Singh Shyam, who's an artist, Venkat, to me, he's the one who said you are an ass for not singing. Because I used to listen to a lot of Kabir. Though I stopped singing, I used to listen to a whole range of music. Especially Hindustani raga music and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Bob Mali, anything, anything Dylan, whom you mentioned, Males, Bob Dylan, anything jazz, blues. The whole world opened up to me. And then Venkat told me I should get back to singing. And I found my way back into second poetry because of Kabir. And the not book of Kabir happened 10 years after that initial spark for which I hold Venkat, my friend of Ganja Mahua Chronicles Responsible. I'll stop there for now. If that's a long answer.
- [13:32]
C
No. But thank you Anand for sharing such inspiring personal journey. And then we've together Kabir and the Buddha and Ambedkar in one fabric. So anyways, this book, like your answer is unconventional in many ways. Let me just start with the COVID art. The book's dusk jacket is mostly red. But on the COVID image which itself has a book in it, I mean book cover in it. But on top we see the sealed edge of the meditating Buddha in orange half veiled by a peacock feather. Otis is the COVID of a book with no title. Very thick book. And then in the foreground of this cover Image we have Dr. Baba Shaheb Ambedkar with his back facing us. But his right hand is holding this book of this veiled meditating Buddha in orange. So this is not mind bending enough. At the back of this book the credit of the art is attributed to someone named Vikram Bise and its cover designed by some agency named no design. So Anand, please help me and our listeners to make sense of this enigma. This is a riddle. How you came to decide to name this book a notebook and why you choose this cover art with such explicit yet very enigmatic self referential gestures. Thank you.
- [15:00]
B
Thank you Jessica again. So this one, what you call mind bending I didn't think of. I think my mind was bending over the years for 10 years. So by the time it was came to finishing this book it had bent so much that I didn't realize that probably it was bent. All of us have our minds bent by something or the other. So when it came to the book, I was sitting on this book from 2018 onwards I had almost finished the book is what I thought then. Couple of encounters. And as a publisher I was personally pretty jaded about the process of publishing, getting a book out, putting your name on it. I wasn't sure so I just did it and circulated it among a few friends and left it. During COVID is when I got back to this idea of trying to get it out of me so that I can do other things. I didn't know what other things I was going to do. Maybe we'll come to it later. But I was having sung only Kabir for about eight years. And much of this work also came about because of singing Kabir. Not just about reading Kabir, you can't read Kabir is what you have to first listen to him because he says Suno suno in Hindi is an imperative to say listen, listen brother, listen comrade that's what he's saying. So I heard him and then I was singing him. And then I curated a major exhibition in 2020, just before COVID for a Devi Art foundation in Delhi. I've kind of been a interloper into many fields. Music, art. I've curated a major exhibition, a few of them in fact. And this one was the biggest one. And that's where I did this Buddha, Ambedka Kabir, kind of a confluence. So the exhibition was called Shunyata Samantha Shunyata, the Void. The idea of emptiness. And Samantha Saman is equality. So it was called Emptiness and Equality. So it was two figures installed by a great artist called Prabhakar Kamle which kind of opened this very big warehouse which was turned into a gallery. On one flank you'll see Buddha mounted on a pedestal. A very tiny Buddha on a very big pedestal. And a very tiny Ambedkar looking at him from across the hall, say 50, 70ft away from each other. And they are looking at each other as tiny figurines. And then when I did this book, and then Covid happens after that exhibition and when I decided to finish this book, I discovered this art of Vikrant BISE. And in 2024, early 24 I think there was a major exhibition by Vikrant Bise who's an Ambedkarite artist, comes from Bombay, grows up in the slums there and then works very hard to become an artist. A self trained, self taught artist. Today he is really much celebrated. But he has had an arduous journey. And then when I discovered his work, I fell in love with it and his superb craft and his politics. And then I decided I would commission a kambal by him for the COVID of the book. I just told Penguin, my publisher that this has to happen. In fact, they didn't quite comprehend the artwork. And they said, I don't know what is happening. Can you do another work of art? So I just told them, no, no, no, set it aside. This is the artwork. So what is happening There is all I gave. Of course Vikrant didn't read the entire book. He has heard me sing, he has been with me. I've been to his house and he produced this wonderful art. What does it do? I told him, for me, this book, book is about first discovering Ambedkar, like I said in my introduction to myself. And then through Ambedkar I discovered the Buddha. Because Ambedkar's biggest book written towards the end of his life, his biggest project was to move towards Buddhism. And he Wrote the Buddha and his Dhamma, which for readers, I should tell you the great Ashok Gopal who did a part apart is currently finished. An annotated selection of the Buddha and his Dhamma, which is a big, big book. So a selection. Commit an annotated selection. So for me, the Buddha figure was somebody who was hidden behind the kind of clouded in time and a kind of a misty figure at a distance. And there are so many representations of the Buddha we never know. There was no photograph of him. Right. We don't know how exactly he looked like. Gandhar art is different from Southern ways of depicting him, from Southeast Asian ways of depicting him. So he gets. He takes the features of the people who imagine him. Isn't that right? So here he doesn't look like he has particular eyes, nose, nothing. You immediately recognize a seated meditating figure as Buddha. But is that Kabir sitting on the COVID of the book? We don't know. Maybe that little peacock thing, which is all this was discussed over the phone and with Vikrant. So I told him, baba Sahib, Ambedkar is reading a book. We don't know what book and looks like. It's a Kabir book. But there is Buddha. So through Buddha I discovered first Kabir. Then I realized when I was reading the Buddha that a lot of Buddhist ideas, suttas were being rendered in very colloquial what we call Hindi today. Hindi didn't exist as a word even back then. What was the local Basha, the Prakritic Basha. So that was what I felt Kabir was doing. And it looked to me at one point like Buddha had stolen a lot from Kabir. Why? Because I was reading Buddha. After reading Kabir, let us remember that Ambedkar himself was raised by a father who was a Kabir Panthi, as he called himself. That is, he took on Kabir Panth, which is a part of Kabir. Panth is a kind of a sect. Ambedkar's paternal grandfather, we are on the father's side. Paternal grandfather was a Ramanandi, which is another sect. So each generation of Ambedka Ambedkar saw a transformation or a conversion, so to say, Ambedkar moves towards the Buddha. So Ambedkar grew up in a family which knew his poetry. Kabir had spread up to Maharashtra. Even in the introduction I speak about how Kabir there is a grave for him in Odisha, which is in far east of India. Kabir is supposed to have traveled to Samarkand, Iraq, everywhere. So Kabir's legend and mystique Spread as far as the Buddha git. And in several ways he was paraphrasing the Buddha. So the COVID for me had to be a little kind of a teaser what is inside the book. Initially you'll think, where is Kabir in this book? So the Kabir could be the feather, peacock feather. We don't know because always in traditional depictions which come after 20th century, in the 19th century, after modern art started coming, every saint in India was shown with a beard and looking very pious and closing his eyes in meditation. But to me, Kabir looked like a working class regular person who also did some meditation. Perhaps, we don't know, he meditated on the word, he meditated on certain ideas. So we wanted to bring that. And the not book was of course not be trapped in a book. So it had to be not a book. So that idea also had to be conveyed by the art. So if you notice another thing, the pattern that we made, design is a company that I invented along with my friend Anurag Jadav, who helps me do some design for Navyana books and for other so called clients, we can say so no Design is something like a little invention that happened because of this book. It didn't exist before that. So notebook needed no design. You can also read it as note sign if you want.
- [22:41]
C
Okay. I just like appreciate so much of this insight. I'm so happy I asked you this question. I never thought that meditating figure could be also caveat. But now that after you pointed it out, I was like, of course it could be. But I also greatly appreciate the insight that about mind bending is us, the deluded beings whose mind are bended. So your book is trying to bend it back or maybe straighten it, but you know, I'm just still continue to speak from this deluded perspective as a deluded scholar. Okay, so if the COVID art of this notebook is not mind bending enough, let's go to the content here you have listeners, you have to bear with me. I'm gonna read several long quotes from the introduction part about Kabir. It's all Anand's work. Okay, so start with page 18 here. Anand, you wrote, Kabir is more of a mystery than a mistake, more a Persona than a person. Kabir is a sign. A sign that the signature can be a shared conscious, a collective way of being, unquote. And then to further make sense this shared consciousness on page 19 you wrote, Kabir is an invitation to the joy in the delicious and free pleasures of language, threaded to the abstract thought of music. Kabir is an invitation to witness the formless take form. Kabir is an invitation to think the unsought. Further down page 21 you wrote, Kabir is a fabric without stitches, no centers, no edges, no beginnings, no endings. Then you gave us two beautiful verses of Kabir. The first one, let me just read it out loud. The cloth Kabir bears knows no wear and tear. He holds the warp of love with the weft of care. And the second one you weave yourself into says, it's not just Kabir who can see all this. There's love in every heart, a poem in every one. Maheshah Ram sings it, Anand dances to this. Love is in every heart, a poem in everyone. So this Kabir Stan is a what you termed boundless. No place of awareness in poetry. Even the accursed Brahmin may cease to be a Brahmin in this blessed no place. That's on page 22. And then finally page 23. Kabir today writes in English. Kabir is the sign that the signature is a shared form of existence, the realization of fraternity amongst strangers. So please tell us a bit more about this unique yet shared consciousness with its own language, Kabiri and its own sovereignty, Kabir Stan, which is a boundless no place where all strangers become friends. Thank you.
- [25:46]
B
Thanks again, Jessica. So Kabir Stan was a word I came up with and very end of the book, when you have to write your own again, you have to write about yourself. They say, speak about yourself. We all do that. Sometimes they say say something about yourself in 60 words. Sometimes they say 150 words. You have more space here. And sometimes when people write their, what you call autobiography or memoir, they get to write so much about themselves. So when I did this, it just occurred to me that I should in India, since you say you don't know the word, the language of Hindi, there is one big term here called Kabristan. If you just turn Kabir into Kabri, Kabristan means the graveyard and it refers particularly to the Muslims and their graveyard. And the current regime in India, the right wing Hindutva regime of Rashtriya, Swam Sevak, Sangh, bjp, all of them, their biggest thing in their speeches, in their public rhetoric, in their hate speech, which is the opposite of the love speak of Kabir is to talk about Kabristan. How these Muslims have land to bury their dead and we are being robbed of land. Sounds a bit like Trump. I know. In terms of what we lose to people who are not originally from India, that is the logic. So for me, when I did this Kabir Stan, a lot of people misread it as Kabiristan. So in fact somebody asked me, oh why? Very dear friends of mine, people belive it to me asked me oh, why have you said you live in a graveyard? So I said just read a bit more carefully. Then they realized it was Kabir Stan. So it's also Pakistan. You know the idea of go to Pakistan, they'll tell you if you. They don't like you in India, if they think you are anti India. So it was then I. That doesn't, that word doesn't probably exist in a kind of a established way so far. So this boundless place that I'm talking about, whether you let Nibba now or that place where it could be death, it could be the big. Like this place with no beginnings, no endings, what is that place we all go to? Because there's a. Whatever Marx said about surplus today there is one thing so yet where do we all go? And we spend so much of our time thinking that we know how to think. And Kabir puts all these things into question. What is it that we are thinking about? In very simple language he tries to take ordinary people to that space of thinking about thinking and also about not thinking about this larger place where we are going, which is for me the no place. So constantly you will find that he's saying I have been to a place which is so beautiful that I cannot tell you about it. And then he'll tell you in five verses what that great place is. So this whole thing of double negativity I can't tell you. And then you will tell me there's several verses in this book, several poems in this book, several things which people sing in this book which is the not book. Which is why the not book idea also comes. Why do I Yet of course it's a physical palpable book with an ISBN number, with a cover, everything. And yet the point of this book is to take you to that place which is beyond this book, which is to go find the Kabir in you. You earlier said you want to be part of Kabir Stan to me, in your email exchanges to me I think well, you are well. Often the book makes this claim that Kabir is writing in English. Like I said, what is it? Write a Kabir like poem in English. We can write a Kabir like. And I've tried saying raga poems in English. It doesn't work as well as works with a more vowel friendly language like Hindi or Telugu or most of the Indian languages have heavy are heavy on bubbles. It works better there. But to me, Kabir, if you were around today, and it is also not one historical Kabir we are talking about. Kabir is a certain kind of an emptiness into which we all pour ourselves. So Kabir himself becomes for me a sign of that which is not.
- [30:02]
C
Well, absolutely fascinating. And I definitely didn't get the Kabir tan graveyard kind of resonances at all. But Anand, in the rest of the interview, may I trouble you to recital sing some of the points for us. I want to focus on three things that I think is major things you touch upon with this notebook is the warp and weft metaphor about love and no place. And the first one is on page 79 titled Affect Fabric so fine. Please share with us this appointment and tell us how you kind of wove this song and how you wove yourself into it and how your listeners, our listeners weave themselves into this warp of love and breath of care.
- [30:53]
B
Okay. This was one of the earliest poems I translated. It was a poem which I one of the first poems I learned to sing as well. And a dear friend of mine, very dear to me is called Akila Akhila Sesh Asahi. But to me just Akila. She's designed a good lot of Navyana's books till at least up to 2019, 2020. And then she has taken a break from this. She's probably 10 years older than I am and on her 50th birthday she celebrated it. And she's involved with fabrics and she was doing something around fabrics other than just type design. She's one of the best type designers, typographic designers in this part of the world. And she has done most of Navyana's covers including Ashok Gopal, Dust on the Throne that you saw that whole Dhammap lipi that she put there 2023, she designed that book. So she keeps doing on and off projects. But this book had unfortunately no connection with her other than the fact that she is in this book as a fabric. So fine. So for her 50th birthday I decided to present Kabir song to her as a gift. I remember taking this print out to her and giving it to her. This was the first draft. So I have lived with this poem for a. With this song. And it is a tune set by a legendary singer who kind of took to Kabir in his own fashion and introduced it to concert platforms of the mainstream elite audience. You know, they were. Kabir was very much alive among other people. But the elite concert going city, urban public was not so Much into Kabir rather than just as a idea, not in terms of performing it in a classical music space. So this band is called Kumar Gandharv, one of the finest singers of 20th century raga music.
- [32:50]
A
So I'll.
- [32:51]
B
Before I say more about this, I'll read the translation. But since you've asked me for a little bit of singing, I'll do that. I'll use an electronic tanpura because on zoom, that records fairly. Okay, so this. Ah. So when Kabir talks about the warp and weft, it is also sometimes the in breath and out breath that he's talking about. And he comes to that point also in this particular song. So I'll sing a bit of this song. This aa was to just establish my voice, which is that J.
- [33:57]
C
SA.
- [34:25]
B
Ram.
- [34:57]
C
Sam.
- [35:25]
B
Kamala.
- [35:48]
C
J.
- [35:51]
B
J N so here Jessica, I change the word das usually to boss. For me, Kabir Das means a slave. So he was turned, I feel, into these lyrics, into a kind of a das, Das of God. For me, he is boss.
- [37:17]
C
D.
- [37:49]
A
The holidays are coming up and that means friends and family are going to be in your house. Is your house ready? I know mine wasn't. So I went to Wayfair to make sure that I had everything I needed to entertain and put these people up. During the holiday season, Wayfair is the place to shop for all things you need for your home, from sofas to spatulas. And listen to this. Starting October 30th, you can shop Wayfair's can't miss Black Friday deals all month long. You can get up to 70% off. Wayfair will ship your items fast and free. Now, in my case, I need to do betting. My betting was shot. So what did I do? Well, I went to Wayfair and I bought some new sheets and pillowcases. I also bought a comforter simply because I thought it was beautiful. It was very easy to order them. The price was right, shipping was free and they came well before I needed them. So don't miss out on early Black Friday deals. Head to Wayfair.com now to shop Wayfair's Black Friday deals for up to 70% off. That's W A Y-F-A-I-R.com sale ends December 7th.
- [38:54]
B
So I sang the Kumar Gandhar part. There's another singer called Muktiya Rally who treats it very differently, sings it in a different style. So there are many ways of doing the same thing. Taking the same verse and introducing new metaphors into it, changing the words of it sometimes all These things happen. And yet there is a core of Kabir. Whether a person from Rajasthan who happens to be a Muslim by birth, Muktiyara Ali, is doing it, or whether Kumarji is doing it, whether Anand is doing it here. And somebody reading it at a distance like you can see the connection between Daoism and this. So that is the beauty of these kind of verses. The word which is repeated here. Genie. Genie, Genie. It means so many things and it is repeated so many times. And the meaning starts expanding and exploding. It at one level means something that is subtle, something that is beautiful, something that is special. It is so subtle that it will become subtle peak and become silent. If you want. I sometimes call it. If it's something is too subtle, it becomes subtle. So Kabir invites you to play with these words whether it is in English or not. Which is when, as I was working with Kabir, I realized I can change his name from. From Das Kabir or Kabir Das. There's a whole section on why Das is a problem, why Brahmin is a problem, all these categories you have to transcend. Kabir by himself means somebody who is great, humongous, and it's a singular name, Kabir. Which is why when you introduce me as Ehsanan, by the time I did this book, I became just Anand. I didn't want the burden of one surname or one initial that frames your name, which is your father's name or some such thing. So Kabir demands that we embrace this fabric, which is boundless. Which is what I was trying to tell. Okay, here you are celebrating your 50th birthday. Akhila. But there is something bigger. Bigger, Bigger. Where birthdays. Time. Time in the sense of today being the 1st of November, 2025, just doesn't make sense. I'll take a break there and wait for you to step in.
- [41:03]
C
Thank you. This is so mesmerizing. I'm especially touched but that, you know, you can. Everyone can sing these songs in their own style. Just because Kabir is so big. Such a fabric. We can all find ways into this stitchless fabric. And I'm also like surprised to learn that warp and weft is actually metaphors for inbreeds and outbreath. Wow. They just like weaves with the sun itself. So much better. But next up, I Want page 1999, where my love lives. And I noticed that in this poem and many other places, you consistently translate the word nirvana or nirvana for buddhologist as no place and interpret it in my reading as Kabir. Stan, we Are strangers. All strangers become friends. Please share with your listeners this sun and explain a bit more about this no place where our love names.
- [42:07]
B
Okay, so I'll read a bit of it instead of saying so in this in Hindi again. Why do different people sing it differently? Because we do not have Kabir. Historical Kabir perhaps lived in 15th, 16th century. That's the larger consensus. No two scholars agree upon. Dates, there is no clarity even with Buddha's dates, there is no clarity sometimes, as you can see. When did he exactly do this? When did he exactly do that? And with all these sainted lives, the problem is also of, you know, whether it is Buddha or kabigir, they all get enlightenment. This Nibbana thing, on a full moon day. Can you believe it, Jessica? When was Buddha born? On a full moon day? When did he get enlightenment on a full moon day? When did he get mahapari Nibbana? All pompous names for just ordinary death is called Mahaparinibbana. And that also happens on a full moon day. All these are coincidences or do they happen only to great people? So what people like Kabir? And Kabir is just one again signifier for all those people who carried some of these ideas of the Buddha and turned them into songs. What is the Dhammapada but a song? The teachings of Buddha cannot be found in Tipitaka, nikayas, canonized editions, annotated editions. No, it's not possible. I think what happened with Buddha's ideas where they were so fascinating and there is no purity to those thoughts. They get imbibed and translated by people. Why did the Buddhas often in those long discourses, they end with a short, cryptic, two or four line pada, which is a metrical verse. The Dhamma pada or Dhamma pada, whichever way you want to call it, is meant to be learned by, wrote and sung. We do not know the tunes in which people composed it or sang, just like with kadung. So I feel whether it is with Kabir or the Tantric Buddhist tradition of Eastern India, where the bowels of Bengal and Odisha. There's a text called chariopada of the 12th century, written mostly by Dalits. Louis Pada is there many of them? Many of these poets have names. There are about, I think 15 poets who did Chaurya Pada, which is claimed both by Odisha people and by Bengali people as one of their, their early texts. And it is Buddhist Tantric verses all about abstraction about Nirbana. So and they're all sung Ragas are given complicated old ragas which have been lost with time because 800 years have passed. Nobody sings those ragas anymore. So how did these working class people, whether in the south, whether in Karnataka, Because Buddhism, let's remember, we don't need to read Dust on the Throne. You just need to meet people and you don't need to to read books to find this out. Buddhism spread throughout the subcontinent first. Most of what is where I grew up in Andhra country, Telugu country, Telangana. All these places are full of Buddhist monuments and sites. From here they come to New York and they mount a big exhibition there of Kabir statuary. So in terms of statuary also Kabir becomes big. So the idea of why all this happened with state patronage is a longer story I don't want to get into. But. But right now what is of interest to us is this idea that Nibbana is something as an idea that moves among people, appeals to people. The idea of love and a certain transcendence which love and a certain bonding can give. And a certain idea of non attachment. This whole idea of not being attached to your. It is not about escape but it is about saying that you can only do so much in this world. You are going to die and what are you going to do with it? Not just sit under a tree and meditate, but live actively. So I felt that these poems survived through troubadours, through people who took these words and moved among other people and spread the message even if it was watered down differently. So in this particular song which comes to us through Kumar Gandharva G which you have chosen for, for me to elaborate on, this is again something in 1920s, one person collects from the people in the Malwa region which is somewhere between Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh. And he collects it from the mendicants who are walking on the road and singing Kabir. Okay, so there is this person who puts it together at an ashram. It's named in the book right now the name is not coming to me. And Kumar Gander picks that book up which has over 500 songs. And then from that book he selects probably 30 or 40 or 50 and then sets them to music by improvising on what he has already heard. So the original is always lost sight of Kumar. Gandhi is not aware of the Buddhist connection and maybe I'm making it up. Somebody who listens to this will say, oh, this is very Upanishad, like not exactly or Brahminic, not exactly for me. So it depends on the lens that you're bringing to Bear. And for me it is a Buddhist lens and through Ambedkar that I'm doing this. So this verse is called Sakiya vagara sabase nyara. That's how it begins. Sakiya means, oh, my friend Vagar, that place Ghar is actually that house. Sab say nyara. Nyara is another word like genie. Something so special, something so unique, something so beautiful, where my true love lives. My idea of translating it as love is also questionable. Puranu, purushik Ghats back to the Rigvedic idea of the purusha. But I tend to translate it as something else. So I think several of these ideas from the Vedic period, from the Upanishadic period, from the Buddhist ideas, all these are getting mixed and turned into something else. But the core here of thinking about what the duality of, say, even in breath and out breath and the cessation of breath that is at the heart of this poem as much as it was in the geni chatteriya poem. And this directly corresponds to a Bahia sutta which is attributed to the Buddha. I say attributed because we are not sure if Buddha was a good poet and he wrote all these wonderful metrical verses, or people who heard him were good poets who framed his sayings. Because with Buddha, let's remember, each thing is said like this. Thus have I heard, Thus have I heard. And then they tell you a parable which ends in a verse with Kabir, kahe, kabira suno bhai, sadho, last line there. We begin by saying, thus have I heard here by saying, listen to me. Suno means to listen. Kaher, Kabira. Kabir is singing. Kabir is saying this. Listen, listen up. Sadho means sadhu. Or also to means to do sadhana, which is practice, to work on something, to hone something that is also sadhana. So I'll sing a bit of this first in Kabiri, as we call it, and in Buddha, logical terms as a sutta. So give me some time. Are we good to go?
- [49:29]
C
Yes, please.
- [49:53]
B
Sakiya sab Jahana. Where there is neither sorrow, Sukh nor duk nor grief, no, no grief nor happiness. The other binary is truth and lies. Both are not there. Sam is day, Raina is night. Nahi is not, not, not. Why is this book called not book? Because Nahi, Nahi, there's so much of. No, no, not this, not this, not that, not this, not this. Throughout Kabees, there is no night, there is no day, there is no sun, there is no moon. Where we are going and where are we going? What does the Buddha say? Same thing. This is Pali. Patavi becomes prithvi in Sanskrit. Patavi is earth, Aap is water. There is no water there. There is no earth there. No, no, no, no. What is Buddha doing? He's copying Kabir. If time is such a loop, then probably Buddha came after Kabir. To me, at least, at least in my journey. Sam up. Now here I've changed the word to manuso. What does the Buddha's original script say? That person is called a Brahmin, says Buddha. The one who manages to transcend these binaries and attain the no place. The one who goes there. And then he necessarily is a he. Maybe Jessica is not allowed and that person is a Brahmanu. I reject it. Look at the alliteration when Manuso the idea Manus is man, human, rather human. That comes from Babasai Bambedkar. For me, he emphasizes in his book Manuski, as he calls it, sukha dukha, pamuchati. So you transcend rupa arupa, meaning form and formless. What you talked about as nirgun, nibbana, where there is no breath, bana is also wind. However you pronounce it with va or b. It is wind and there is no wind within. Your breath is gone and there is. It's a void. It's the shunya. So when you're going to the shoonya, why should you go as a Brahmin? Is the question that we need to naturally ask if we are enlightened enough to talk to the Buddha on his terms. Which is to say, meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha, like you said, which is a cliche these days, but it is also a truth. So I'll stop there, having given you two versions of the same song, both by Buddha and Kabir.
- [56:15]
C
Thank you so much. It's not just beautiful music, it's also very incisive understanding of some structure, issues of academic study in general, which will talk about the next question that you have a verse really on topic. But about this, this song, the Buddha logical part of me just cannot help but make these comments. So Kabir and many other poets belong to these Nirgun movements. And that's in the sense that these poets sing about the formless attributeless God and nir gong. Nir means negation. Gong is like guna, attribute of features. But on page three you quoted the scholar translator David Lorenzen about this nirguni cosme or formless. And then I'm quoting you, quoting Laurenson, the Nirgun Poet praise the formless God. A God who is everywhere and nowhere, within all things and part or from all things. The Supreme God without arms, legs, beard, eyes, sex. So even recognizable personality. So definitely not a Brahmin. I'm so sorry but when I read this I was like wait a minute. This is precisely what the formless, nameless, indeterminate Unhung Dao or path in Lao Tzu Yinzhuang's mystical atheism. It's not about God per se. Definitely not a big cop, big king, big daddy God up somewhere. So readers interested in this topic please really check out the links in my blog post on mystical racism is Chinese Huang Zouchen and Tiantai Buddhism. I honestly feel at a certain point the so called labels, Buddhism, Daoism, whatever it is just like should fall apart. But next is my favorite poem in this whole collection at the moment. Next time I read this I don't know how I feel, but right now it's on page 16 in the scene and unseen. It's a play on the well known Tita sutta about the blinds and elephants. A very well known Indic story where the able bodied Brahmins and the Buddhists make fun of the blind who could only grasp so called impartial truth and then fight with each other about, you know, whose truth is a better truth. Losing sight that we all are finite beings and the formless God signifies an ontological ambiguity that defies any attempts to cope complete knowledge as the positions of Brahmans and Buddhists have taken right? So but my favorite part is however, how you turn the table on end that's on page 70 you wrote here I just quote they think only they are true the Buddhas holding what they grasp the elephant us. So this remind me the Chen spirit. Now when you see the Buddha on the road you kill it, but you also give us your reasons for doing this right? That's the kind of the critique of the whole discipline academic study so unlike the Chinese Chan masters you wrote in the Tita Sutta the Buddha stumbles from the Nikayas well funded institutional compilations of unauthorized authorized editions of his ideas, speech and discourses. Toda suttas put together a few hundred years after the author's passing, it is clear that Buddha was often given to holding forth. A few pages later you explained on page 124 that each person experience of a part of the elephant, blind, mute or deaf, fully abled or disabled will be different as well as the elephant's experience of each touch. This the Buddha does Not seem to see, at least in this version of his studying that comes to us in the Nikaya. Yes, but the kabir of the 15th century does. So in the ensuing pages, you gave a few amazing verses. Could you please just share some with your listeners, some of Kabir's wisdom and love that we don't really get to see in the Buddha of the Nikayas?
- [60:36]
B
Okay, we will first see what the Buddha says in this Pali verse, if you don't mind. This is known as the tit sutta. So tita is like a ford, you know, so. So you cross, get across to the other side of the river or a stream or anything using a fort. So that's why the tankara is. Can also be said the ra sound gets removed in colloquial, ordinary people's tongues. So tita, sutta, sajanti, AKA samana, brahma. These are all in perfect meter. And this is in the Udana vagga. I've given chapter and verse of where you heard. And then it disturbed me because it comes at the end of a long parable which is being taken as a Hindu fable, as a Buddhist fable, as a Jain fable. And Buddha himself says, I heard it from somewhere else. Like he always has this caveat, thus have I heard so. And in this story, which most people around the world know, it's also Rumi who. Who really packages the story in a different way. There is a blind. There is an elephant put inside a room. Luckily not a blind elephant. Nobody cares for whether the elephant is blind or mute. It's just there. And remember back then, Jessica, people used to export these elephants, whether from Africa or anything, as an exotic thing. The rich kings and others who could afford to keep exotic animals, they were the efforts to imprison not just humans as slaves, but also animals, you know, so for display, oh, look, I have wealth, meaning I have an elephant with me. In a country where elephants are not there, imagine it being forced to be there. And then people are gathering around this elephant. Luckily, in Buddha's country, there are elephants, which is India. So they're gathering around this. And five people perceive this. It's a story clearly touching the elephant and not everybody thinking, this is about a broom. One person thinks the ear is a winnow, the head is like a jar. Another person thinks the tusk is like a plough, you know, plowshare. And the body is a granary. Imagine making fun of blind people. I'm not talking about political correctness here, but a lack of insight when you're actually saying the truth can be perceived differently. Buddha seems to stumble and there is a certain problem in perceiving. And again, all these are men several times a point view of out that there is a certain male centeredness in these stories. You will find this in a lot of soaps fables to everything. Why do the why? Why would the hair and tortoise Jessica compete with each other? Their worlds don't meet weak these false metaphors and then project ourselves onto them. Be like the tortoise, not like the hare. But the hare has no problem with the tortoise. If you think of about it similarly here these kind of parables convey a certain kind of a normative truth which needs to be questioned. And I was thinking, where is the relief? And strangely enough, Kabir seems to think often says this verse. There are two versions I give you. They think only they are true Brahmanas. Let's attack the Brahmins. First they think only they are true Brahmanas holding what they grasp the elephant's ars. Then I turn it around to say they think panas buddhas, Rs. All of it rhymes, so I'm happy. They think only they are true, the Buddhas, holding what they GRASP the elephant's Rs. We talked about so many parts of the palatable parts of the elephant. So I brought in the Rs. This is just not humor, but this is about an inversion make. And for me, Kabir offers great relief. And I go on about how Buddha was well kept and well taken care of. It is not this and not that. What is the elephant? What is the elephant in the room? It is our own blindness. So that's why when Kabir says the mute bursts into song, the deaf can decry the notes. We think somebody is deaf, but there is a certain sense, a sensation that they also experience when whether they touch the elephant or whether they listen to a song, the mute bursts into song. The deaf can decry the notes. The cripple springs into dance, the blind paints in unseen tones again the restatement of the Nibbana Sutta or the Bahia Sutta. No sun, no moon, but light. So constantly in many of Kabir's songs, more so in the kind of Kabir that is gathered in this book, you find that Kabir constantly talks about how nature's ways are very strange. And his vision is far more in as was. In other words, he says, I'll just read the English part, which will be more easy for your readers. The lame scales, the Everest, the world's Everest at her feet. I bring in the her. We can bring to Kabir what we are. Just like Kabir can bring to the Buddha the idea of Kabir what the idea of Kabir is. So these are transformations also of ourselves. We transform ourselves in the process of reading and thinking with Kabir, with Buddha, and yet against Kabir and against Buddha, reading against the grain, trying to make Buddha more Buddhist, if you please. Trying to make Ambedkar more Ambedkar, right? Trying to make Kabir more Kabir than he possibly could be. So that is our insight. We look back at these people, right? And you also look ahead. So the lame scales, the average, the world's at your feet. The mute sing silenced truths, Boundless music, His beat vagabond Avaduta Time defeats every distance. The sky is bound and flung underground. The serpent rules the heaven. For Kabir love is supreme for it all is forgiven. True love can be utterly flagrant. So such verses have been called, and they've been written not just by Kabir, by Abhang poets from Maharashtra, Mahara Imharati Vachana poets from Kannada, where the whole world turns upside down, down the ant flies away and goes to the sky and swallows the sun. In Muktabai's abam from the 13th century, which predates Kabir. So Kabir also was collecting all these, listening, because back then there were no books for people to read. And let's remember Kabir was from a working class, he was a weaver, he was ostracized. He was somebody who was neither Muslim nor Hindu nor anything. He could have been anything. He was everything. So for me, these are the takeaways that we need to constantly be alert in our reading, whether as scholars, whether as. As lay people, whether as listeners. Because we are not just readers, we're also listeners. We need to listen to that inherent music better than we what we originally are.
- [67:46]
C
Thank you. I'm just trying to take in this such wisdom and insight. And I just want to point out for listeners, this kind of singing is I probably butchering this the term the downside. That's kind of the downside up sounds and definitely check out Dao de Jing Zhuangzi, you will see very, very similar, kind of paradoxical, but, you know, also turning the table kind of a language. But what I want to point out is that in Kabir, especially the way you read Kabir Anand, the social revolutionary spirit that Professor Chivalin in his very old book, 1973 book, I think it's just called the Buddha, that spirit actually get expressed instead of tamed in the Nikayas. And I also have to admit that your sharp words, especially about grasping the elephant ass part, really shed a light on the structural blindness in Buddhist studies and actually in academic studies in general. So think back, really back in history. Which part of human populations would have enough control over society, materials to leave enough stuff material choices like tombs, buildings, monuments, texts for academics to study. Today, it's typically the top 1%. The ruling elite, the greedy ones, the possessive ones, the megalomaniacs. You get the idea. But if you want to know more about data, archaeological findings, I highly recommend Luke Camp's Goliath Curse, the History and Future of Societal Collapse. But in Buddhist studies, if we just focus on texts and archaeological excavations of beautiful statues, cave paintings as our main evidence, then more often than not we are just reproducing the stories of the 1%. And you know, it just so happened that if you're telling the stories of that 1%, you're pretty much repeating the stories of subjugation, the status quo, like the Buddha in the Nikayas. And unlike the Kabir, who lived on through the fluid fabric of care and love, of all those who wove their love, their care and their social revolutionary spirit into this living fabric with no stitches. For this reason, near my friend Susan Kirkesh at Trinity College and Minchong no at Lehigh University were laboring for an ongoing project that hasn't taken shape yet. It's still formless, but we can't Buddhism of the 99%. Hopefully one day we can move together. We can move the needle a little bit. But many thanks, Ahmed, for introducing me to this kabir stand and kabiri. I hope I can just leave there at some point. So my next question is kind of along a similar line Based on page 234 in a long chapter that you explained the bhakti movement that you mentioned, some scholars and historians who viewed the bhaktas or the devotees of bhakti as someone who, let me just quote it, who have a radical edge that gets blinded by history. And then you mentioned Chok Khamela is an example because Gandhi saw him as a perfect Harijan, the child of God. But Ambedkar dismissed him, saying that most bhakti saints, because most second bhakti saints for not forcefully questioning the order of Chaturvarna, the caste system. But then you show us in, you know, this points in a different light. Do you mind to recite for us the subversive song of chocamela on page 236 and how everything is Tainted and explain what you think it means for us today.
- [71:54]
B
This gives me, I mean I just fortunately spoke about Marathi Abangs. Abhang is that which is not broken. And in the 12th century the Abang movement was something that picked up from the kind of took the baton from the bachana tradition of 12th century Karnataka. What we today call modern Karnataka, rather the Kannada universe. All these languages, let's remember, were just being formed. They were coming into being, so to speak, say through poetry. Poetry is the first instance. Let's remember that without poetry there is no God. All the ideas that we have of God in every religion, tribal or established, Abrahamic religion or non Abrahamic religion, organized or ethnic or whatever you want to call it thrives on the kind of a mystical poetry that is attributed. So Plato was right, you need to ban these poets. They created God. So again the way the very poet who makes these gods can berate and deride God and put them down from the pedestal. So Chokhamela, who happens to belong to the same caste as Ambedkar Mahar from Maharashtra was a second, third generation Marathi Abang writer. Before him Nandev and Namdev and other poets. Some of them, like I said, even accursed Brahmin can get enlightenment by writing poetry and singing. So there were Brahmins also were involved in. But more importantly a lot of working class men and women, sex workers to potters to sweepers to everybody was writing. Shokamela happened to be an untouchable. He was not allowed into the temple of Vital. A God standing on a brick, whom he worshiped, whom he was devoted to, but he was not allowed to even see him. So the idea of Nirguna or praising the formless comes out of the very fact that you can't even see see what you're praising, right? So the real conundrum, untouchability, stopping you from seeing God creates this wound in you which produces this very powerful poetry. So this one somehow for me when I discovered it, opened a whole world of chokamela to me. And I particularly like this verse because nobody sings it and at least as far as I know in the so called performance set. So I, I'll sing it very quickly for you. It says Veda. The key word here is vital. Vital means taint or pollution. The Vedas, the Puranas, the Shastras, Shiva Brahma, Vishnu, everybody is tainted in this. This is an Iraq called Bairagi. And the Bairagi literally means the one who is a mendicant and a wanderer moving from one place to Another. So it kind of suits. Oddly enough, this is the Veridaga in which the core structure of Vedic chanting is also supposed to happen. Shastrasi vitala kayaramangala Vishnu. If Choka is tainted, if choka is untouchable, if choka is polluted, interestingly, the word for menstrual pollution and for the ritual untouchability that is inflicted on a so called untouchable is the word vital. So here Chaukhamela is rejecting his own rejection by saying, if I am tainted, everything is tainted. Birth is a taint. Death is tainted. Shankara is a taint. Among the tainted. Brahma is a tainted. Vishnu, tainted. The body is a taint, soul tainted. The self is everything. The spirit tainted. Puranas are tainted. So tainted. Vedas are tainted. Shastras are tainted. What did I do? I read the whole verse upside down. Says Choka, taint to taint, tainted. Now what does Ambedkar do as a break from this? He says, nothing is tainted. You are not tainted. I'm not tainted. The world is not tainted. Things are what they are. So Ambedkar marks a radical break. Chokamela wants to go into the temple and he's beaten for it. Ambedkar says, let's abandon this temple. Let's build a consciousness which is beyond these temples. So he revisits Buddha with all these. Of course he knows his Chokamela. Maybe he didn't celebrate this. What does Ambedka say in annihilation of caste? Let us set the dynamite to the Vedas and shastras that give no room for love and for reason and for rational things thinking. What is Shokamela doing in 14th century here, 800 years, 700 years before Baba Sai Bambedkar, he was literally setting vedas and shastras on fire by denouncing them. So that for me is a very, very important break in terms of thinking. And I think these are the kind of thoughts that would have traveled to Kabir. Let's also try to think of what Kabir may have heard, whom Kabir may have heard, what kind of things Kabir heard. Instead of just parroting what Kabir has said. Look at the context. Chokamela would have been somebody who traveled to Banaras in the form of people carrying these words, not in physical person. Similarly, Kabir travels by remaining in one place. Like I traveled to you by remaining here thanks to technology. But those were different kind of journeys back then. I'll stop here again.
- [78:27]
C
Thank you, Anand. That is like so insightful. And I think either upon or bound, right. They're broke, unbroken or broken. I just feel like the. The courage to subvert whatever is the domination, hierarchy, the hierarchical dualism or binary. That spirit is unbroken, it's continuing. And then we just keep singing and keep reviving it. Even if the top 1% trying to kill it and you cannot. They're 99% of us. And that also reminds me of this song. Just while listening to your singing it. The song by Billie Holiday during the civil rights era. She sings a strange food. She's the first one started talking about the ning because of her son, right? That started and helps, you know, started feud and movement. So you know, those songs, they matter. I'm very sad. This is our. Our last substance. Qu. Substantive question about this not big. On page 253, you. This is the song My Guru Got me High. There's an intriguing backstory about a so called guru of Kabir named Ramanand. For me, it reads just like another myth of subjugation. But you choose to read story, you know, so very subversively, right? Very radically in that you let me quote you is your kick to my head that got me singing. That's page 255. And then you continued. The rejection by Ramanand creates the consciousness of a more universal emancipatory subject. And it is the unfortunate experience of untouchability that elicits the most, most profound, unpedagrated concept of Dalit subjectivity. The norm of equality, quite like capitalism evokes the revolutionary subject of the proletariat. And Lenin says, the capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hunt them. But Kabir and Bedegar would not wish to hunt their caste class enemies, though they would rather transform the enemy and burn the rope. So a graceless Brahmin guru is saved from the disgrace he visits upon himself. He's at once destroyed, renewed and rescued. Such is the grace of the fabric of equality. It wraps everyone in its fold. That is so beautiful. It said, full of rain and love all at the same time. Please share with your listeners this backstory in this verse that you read so radically but so like spot on.
- [81:25]
B
So this verse again carries on. You know, I think it should be evident to anybody who reads the not book that by the time they get through with it, even if they start in the middle and go, you know, don't need to read it in a sequence even, what you realize is a lot of these verses have been written by people who have been carrying on this tradition of singing Kabir not through books, by oral transmission of it over and over a few centuries. So I feel that this verse is that Prahlad Tipaniya Sahib, again from Rajasthan, contemporary living singer, one of the finest singers of Kabir, considered very spiritual and all that. He also happens to be a Dalit now when he sings this. And he probably took it from his guru, who either made it up or. Or added his own verse and Tipaniya himself adds it. It used to disturb me a bit, the last verse where he says, guru Ramanand Tumadi Balihari Sirupar Tokar ay dini sahib Kabir baksis Karlo ye agama bani gai. But the whole poem begins by singing sahib ne bhang pillai. The sahib got me high on cannabis, right? The Guru has got me high on cannabis. He has shown me the path to bliss. My eyes have turned rose red. This the true love of my beloved. He got me high on his brew. He is my love, my true guru. So the poem goes on about how he gives you wine, how he gives you. So this whole. See, we also need to remember that this whole Sufi influence was also there in Kabir's time and much later about. About a kind of a bond between the guru and Chela the disciple, which is about love and not necessarily about extracting a price. Because the earlier tradition in India is to say, if you only Brahmins can teach Brahmins and others are not, indeed, not even Brahmin women are allowed. So when you go to a Brahmin and curiously ask, hey, why don't you tell me about what this stuff is all about? They're likely to shoo you away. So does this Guru Ramanand say, how can I teach you, you low caste fellow, to Kabir? So the whole legend is recounted in the book, of course. But yet this rejection can produce a certain. Because when Amit in his time wants to learn Sanskrit, he's told, your caste cannot learn Sanskrit. He does happen to have one or two Brahmin teachers who take a liking to him. But they're not even good teachers. They become known in history, Kabee's. I meantka's teachers to be known in history, like even in Ashok Gopal's book, as somebody who taught Ambedkar even if badly, even if he didn't do a good class and spend time selling shop and trying to sell stuff, why does he become famous? Because you taught Ambedkar. Otherwise he's nobody. What is Guru Ramanand? Nobody really sings Guru Ramanand's Verses people sing Kabir so which we need to again. If we start hating that figure then that is not going to get us any everywhere. So I feel through this intense listening again. It's just not a song. You listen one time for five minutes, six minutes and move on. It's a song that you stay with. So in the musical tradition we sing this same song over and over and again. My guru Ustad Vasipudi says that a song or a raga each day is born again even if you sing the same thing. I sang a very short version of say the first song that Genie, Genie, Genie. I can sing it for half an hour. Then the meaning starts imploding in a different way. So each time each iteration of the song becomes different. So when I listen over and over to something and try to make sense of it, these translations happen and new meanings explode. So when I read it again now or listen. So the problem with the book, the not book even then is a book, is that it binds meaning into a certain frame. Yet when I read it again, when you say this is my favorite poem and say maybe if I read it tomorrow, it's another every that is the beauty of this kind of. That is the invitation to the reader to think for yourself and to think beyond these categories of even a Brahmin guru and a Dalit learner. So how do they both attain nibbana, so to say by transcending their identities. Nibbana or shunya, the space where we all go does not allow for identity. It's a nothingness. Over to you Jason.
- [85:44]
C
I just feel it's so full of wisdom that we all need to hear.
- [85:49]
B
So that is why I say in the book at one point in India the more popular word is buddhu not Buddha. A buddhu is somebody who is like an idiot who doesn't know who can ask stupid questions. And it is by asking silly questions and stupid questions that you get close to Kabir or you get close to becoming Kabir or even the Buddha. Buddha. The Buddha would have been berated in his own time. Let us remember for asking silly questions we need to start asking these questions of ourselves.
- [86:18]
C
Well, if our diluty beings mind abandoned to such extent, we do need some like wise divine fools to ask those silly questions for us. Like would you show us in this caviar book? But thank you Anand for performing for us and for writing such an inspiring and insightful not big. Since we have only about an hour, we cannot cover everything. And so is there anything else in the book? I mean storage, but you know that we didn't have time to discuss here. But you like to highlight for listeners and readers.
- [86:53]
B
Well, I would say if you listen to this and happen to stumble on the book, if you manage to, whichever part of the world you are in, I don't know if it is easily viable, in other words other parts of the world, but do listen to the song list that I've given. But just listening to the songs and enjoying them is not enough. So I would say if you do it with this, with the help of this book, then it'll help you come to terms with a lot of things that are important in our times and connect you to a certain philosophical way of thinking. And philosophy is not for the rich and the famous and those who study in the universities. This is is living proof of the fact that the love of knowledge is not confined to books and to people who manage to go to universities. Kabir is the best example of that. So it'll help you not just see yourself but to see others. This is not about discovering yourself or any such a self help kind of a project. It'll help you, I think the listeners and readers of this book to go find that kind of empathy and that kind of compassion and the love that Manuski and Maitri, that Baba Sam Betkar talks about and that will help you look at the world differently. There is nobody who is not capable of enlightenment is one takeaway from this book that I hope you will get. And that itself is a kind of enlightenment, I would think.
- [88:14]
C
Yes, definitely help you get out of this kind of a structural ignorance. Scholars like me. And I'll also link in the blog post the list of the songs that you created on YouTube that readers can kind of listen, sing along if they want to. But last question before we part our race, I'd like to ask this last traditional New Books Network question, what are you working on? What keeps you busy?
- [88:43]
B
A lot of things keep me busy. As you know, I'm a publisher at Navyana, so there are authors and books I'm responsible for. But after I started singing and doing Kabir, it has led to a lot of discovery of other wonderful. India has a very rich canon of poetry in many languages which is rarely sung. They are meant to be sung. So in the last 200 years or so, what has become so called classical music? India leans on a very brahminical corpus of lyrics and very boring lyrics often which lack in poetry and grace. Most often, often they are cliches that are repeated over and over about A husband who is having a good time with another woman and the wife is waiting. That's a lot of North Indian lyrics or love for Krishna divine lyrics and all that. So there's a lot of secular poetry here, which I have discovered. And since I started singing in public, I've been trying to come to terms with poetry. And I sing in about at least 10 languages now. Once you have music, language doesn't become a barrier. So in my late age, now I'm 52, in the last six, seven years, I have discovered this corpus in Tamil called tirukkural, which is 13, 30 verses each. Each verse is very haiku, like seven words. I'm going to send them to you even before I publish some of them. So I take those seven words and then transform it into what I call a raga sonnet. And then which is both a commentary in verse on the thing and then I set it to music. Of course I sing. So singing and coming upon new ragas, creating new ragas. This is one part of my work with the Kural and with Chokamela, whom I sang Vedasi Vital just now. I've had a fortuitous rediscovery of sorts of reading his verses again and setting a lot of his poems, about 38, 40 of them. So currently, along with my friend Comrade and also somebody who learns music from me, Dhamma. Dhamma Rakshet Ranadive is his full name. Dhamma is how he's known of Bombay. He runs. He's part of a troupe called Yalgar in Bombay. He learns this raga music from me. And together with him I'm thinking of a project on Chokamela. So if you want to call it a project, we want to do a musical production around him and probably eventually a book. So at the same time I work on many things. Two days ago I was trying to do a Kannada vachana and set it to music and I taught it to Dhamma. So all kinds of poems which inspire me every now and then. Small discoveries here and there, but a sustained. Two sustained projects which might see the shape of a book eventually. One is the translations and commentary and the fun I have with Tirukkural attributed to one bearded poet. Again, all poets are bearded in and wise looking. So that's Thiruvaluvar and the other one is Chocamela, among many other things that I'm juggling right now. So that would be it.
- [91:37]
C
Wow, you are so full of energy. And I'm really looking forward to interviewing about your other forthcoming books on poetry that we don't really get to hear about. And thank you again for these amazing experience. And my dear listeners, please get a copy of this notebook. It will take you away from the stereo land of the 1% of the academic philosophy but into the fabric, the fecund fabric of equality. The warp of love and weft of care. And that's the, you know, Kabir stand we are talking about. But it could be a of Buddha land. Because Buddha is just a sign, a symbol. Even though we have canonized his teachings. But you know, you don't have to take the canon to be too serious any. Anyway, hopefully it will inspire you to not only visit this land but also become its residents. Thank you.
- [92:37]
B
Thank you. Thank you so much. Jessica. We are all. We are all in our minds capable of traveling anywhere. That is the beauty of it. So I think we can all be part of this. This Kabir Stan. Because we are all going to end up in some Kabristan, in some graveyard or the other. Whether we are buried or burned.
- [92:54]
C
Yes, why not Kabir?