Weaving His Words

lassical singer Neela wraps her shawl a little tighter before breaking out into an alap at an open-air concert. It is the beginning of an enchanting evening with Kabir, the 15th century poet-seer whose words find expression in her voice. Only, she isn’t singing at Horniman Circle, in south Mumbai, or even Carter Road, in genteel suburbia. She is in Mankhurd, in an open-air ground usually reserved for marriages. The audience trickling in is from the surrounding slum, one which has seen six suicides in the last month and often witnesses communal flare-ups. It is a place that needs the soothing balm of Kabir’s words, and his focus on seeing the Divine in everyone. “They’ve never attended a classical concert or had a famous singer perform for them,” says Bhagwat, project coordinator with Yuva, one of the partners of the Kabir Festival in Mumbai.

The festival, with an inclusive format and for which entry was free, was held earlier this month. There were film screenings, live concerts, workshops and lectures held across the city, featuring an array of Kabir scholars and artistes. It was a stellar effort to bring Kabir alive for an audience in which many only knew him as the figure associated with the preachy ‘kaal karey so aaj kar’, or maybe through some bawdy or facetious versions of his dohas.

Bit by bit, as audiences danced in the aisles of air-conditioned auditoriums and at open-air satsangs, as “rural rockstars” like Prahlad Tipanya of Malwa, Madhya Pradesh, Mukhtiar Ali of Rajasthan and Moora Lala Marwada of Kutch, Gujarat, were mobbed on the last day of the concert, as fevered discussions in colleges and slums broke out after film screenings, Kabir was reclaimed. His message of finding the evil within before finding the evil in others hit home, finding relevance in the here-and-now world of one-upmanship.

He spoke most directly to children and the youth. In Mankhurd, teenagers who watched the film Kabira Khada Bazaar Mein have demanded screenings for smaller groups, so they can have “better discussions”, while children from the Salam Balak Trust danced vigorously when dancer Sanjukta Wagh asked them to interpret the complex doha ‘Jal mein Kumbh hai, Kumbh mein jal hai, bheetar bhar pani, Ram kabira ek bhaya hain, koi na sakey pehchaani’!

“Kabir has to be experienced, not read intellectually,” says filmmaker Shabnam Virmani of the Kabir Project, which provided logistical support for the Mumbai festival. As a result of the three-day festival, which saw two weeks of run-up events, people got to experience the “integrated” Kabir. A refreshing change from how Kabir is often used to serve pre-conceived agendas: secularists use him in lectures on communal harmony, Kabirpanthis deify him, urbanites admire his ascetic, spiritual aspect, and social activists use his hard-hitting verses to rattle caste barriers.

But Priti Turakhia, a Mumbai resident who organised the festival with a band of just 50 volunteers, wanted to present a holistic alternative to the fragmented ways in which Kabir’s words are usually consumed. The same thought has guided a string of festivals in the past year, which saw Kabir popping up in Bangalore, Auroville, Chennai, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, Baroda, Musoorie, the US, Canada and Nepal.

ut these gatherings, numerous though they are, are only a small part of the story of how Kabir is finding renewed relevance, especially in urban India. Neeraj, lead singer of Makeshift, a fusion-rock band from Delhi, recounts how his band has played at clubs and bars in Delhi to enthusiastic responses and also helped slum kids deal with their aggression through workshops featuring Kabir. The band mixes guitar riffs with tunes learnt on a 10-day yatra through Kabir country, the Malwa district of Madhya Pradesh, with folk musicians.

Folk musicians like Prahlad Tipanya and Mukhtiar Ali, who are steeped in the oral traditions of Kabir and live and breathe his words everyday, are the backbone of this Kabir revival. They feature prominently, along with others like Kabir scholar Linda Hess, in the four films made by Shabnam Virmani that lie at the heart of Kabir Project, anchored at the Srishti School of Art, Design & Technology, Bangalore. Delving deep into the many facets of Kabir, they were filmed over six years. It was Shabnam’s way of dealing with Godhra and its aftermath, which exploded around her when she was living in Ahmedabad.

Since then, the films have been picked up by cultural, youth and social organisations working on diverse issues. Irfan Engineer, director, Institute for Peace Studies and Conflict Resolution, Mumbai, who screens these films as part of his modules, speaks of how powerfully audiences connect with them because they feature so many voices, crisscrossing across state and national boundaries, the secular and the sacred, the urban and rural. He says RSS workers attending his workshop were moved by them. The youth-centric Open Space, started by the Centre for Communication and Development Studies in Pune, holds interactions after film screening to motivate young people to tackle the problems in their community.

Shabnam’s Kabir satsangs in Bangalore have sparked off individual stories of change, such as that of Deepa Kamath, a teacher who quit her well-paid job at the Valley School in Bangalore to help Prahlad Tipanya open a school in Malwa, and Priti Turakhia being inspired to organise the Mumbai Kabir festival.  “Kabir represents home-grown wisdom. It is great that urban Indians can connect to Zen and other global spiritual traditions, but it is nice to come home to Kabir,” says Shabnam.

Addressing the disconnect between education and oral traditions, the Kabir Project has sought to infuse more of Kabir into the classroom through school programs. But the most exciting of all future endeavours is a “living” web archive that the Kabir Project is slated to start. It will enable anyone with an internet connection to access all the poems of Kabir and other poets in the nirgun and Sufi tradition, like Baba Bulleh Shah, Hazrat Amir Khusro and Shah Abdul Latif Bhatai through words, audio clips etc. But as visitors discovered at the Mumbai festival, nothing quite beats experiencing Kabir in real-time.