The Devotional Songs of Kabir Saheb

Kabir Saheb, Rabindranath Tagore · Higher Ethics and Devotion Series · 50 pages

The songs of Kabir in Rabindranath Tagore's translation, with the introduction by Evelyn Underhill in three parts, running to fifty pages with each song separately numbered on the contents page.

Underhill's introduction occupies the first fifteen pages and does the work of placing a figure who belongs to no single tradition — a weaver of Benares claimed by Hindus and Muslims alike, whose songs were transmitted orally long before they were written down. The songs themselves then follow, numbered in sequence, each short enough to sit on part of a page. What the arrangement offers a reader is the opposite of the compilations elsewhere in this section: there is no abstract, no train of thoughts and no editorial apparatus directing attention to a doctrine, because the songs are not making an argument that could be summarised. They are addressed to the reader and to the divine by turns, and their recurring subject is the uselessness of the outward apparatus of religion — pilgrimage, fasting, temple and mosque — against the presence sought within. Tagore's English, made in 1915, is deliberately plain and unrhymed, and the numbering makes the file usable as something to open at random rather than read through, which is much how the songs were meant to work.

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