Can There Be a Vaishnava Kabir?

Abstract

When Kabir is invoked today, he is apt to come across as an individualistic and defiant social critic, someone who inveterately set himself apart from the religion he saw being practiced all around him. Yet when we look at the language of the earliest collections, where his poetry is archived, we find that Kabir often speaks in clearly Vaishnava terms—and not entirely because sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Vaishnavas reformulated his poetry to make him fit their mould. What kind of Vaishnavism, then, did Kabir imbibe and espouse? In this essay, I propose we think of it as “vulgate Vaishnavism”—something a good bit more all-embracing than the Vaishnavism propounded by some others in the world he inhabited. This does not make it less forceful, however, and there is little reason to believe he learnt it from Ramanand.