'Where he lies, I lie': Tagore meets Kabir

Abstract

What drew Rabindranath to Kabir? Although a poet’s purpose is never entirely transparent, the enquiry here is necessary to understand the ‘myriad-minded’ reach of Rabindranath’s art. In India’s cultural history as well, it is worth asking the question because One Hundred Poems of Kabir represents the merger of two of India’s foremost cultural institutions, Kabir and Rabindranath, within the global institution of English. From his early teens, Rabindranath had displayed the spiritual power of his poetic imagination, which progressed from awe at the distant father figure of the upaniṣads to an intense relationship with the personal godhead of vaiṣṇava poetry, especially as in Jayadeva’s Gitagovinda. But it was when he came upon Kabir’s poems that he found an answering echo to his growing attraction for a philosophically more sophisticated idea of an abstract, nirguṇa deity who could nonetheless be a viably and personally realised presence. His English versions of Kabir’s poems are necessarily, then, approximations of that resonance, which explains their closeness in form to Rabindranath‘s own expression of spirituality, most notably in his Gitanjali. My aim here is to understand the Kabir–Rabindranath unity by viewing Rabindranath’s translations in the light of his own poetry of spiritual self-affirmation.