Kabir’s Notbook
By Anand
Penguin, 332 pages, Rs 499.00

Mystics, sages and seers, there have been many in India’s rich history; but Kabir is unique among them in many respects. “Kabir is the most alive of all dead poets,” writes Anand in a sort of preface, entitled ‘An interjection’.

The Notbook of Kabir (note the not) also matches its subject matter in uniqueness. Finding no other way to capture – actually, celebrate, wrestle with, chat endlessly about – the myriad facets of the poet, it flows over in many directions. Formally speaking, it is a collection of fifty well-known hymns of Kabir, rendered helpfully in both Roman and Devanagari scripts, along with fluid translations into English. Informally speaking, it packs in a lot more than that.

Kabir’s words are spliced with “annotations, reflections, dilations, digressions, mediations and illuminations”. The tangent points that launch them range from Dr B.R. Ambedkar to Roland Barthes and Jose Saramago. It’s that kind of book. The Tittha sutta of the Buddha, then, sits rather comfortably among the Kabir compositions.

The author warns that the songs in The Notbook “will not correspond with the lyrics printed in the posthumously published editions – “the Kabir Granthavali, Adi Granth, Bijak, Mahabijak, Kabir, Parachai, Sakhi and so forth, overseen by ‘pundit’ scholars”.  Instead, what is presented here is inspired by the renderings of the artists who are far away from “the Akademi/ academy-driven industry around Kabir” and closer to people at large. They are Kumar Gandharva, Prahlad Tipaniya, Mukhtiyar Ali, Kaluram Bamaniya, Fariduddin Ayaz, Abu Mohammed and party, among others. The well-known Kabir Project anchored by filmmaker-turned-singer Shabnam Virmani was the starting point of it all for the author.

How this motley crew does not constitute a Kabir cottage industry, one may ask in the irreverent, chutzpah tone that pervades the book, inspired by its subject. But the need for such cynicism is not needed here – that might be the answer in the pun-ridden, wordplay-infested language of the book that is Not. There are passages when one may say in exasperation what Woody Allen said after reading some existential philosophy. (“True, the passage was totally incomprehensible to me, but what of it as long as Kierkegaard was having fun?”) But, usually, the reader here will be having fun encountering Kabr via Anand.

The reader may end the last page only to turn to the first and keep reading it in a circular fashion – once in a while – coming out of it with her mind boggled, more frequently in the good sense of the term.
 
The author has also curated the Kabir compositions on YouTube, including his own renditions. Which enriches the reading experience.

[For more on the image at the top: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/456967]