Kabir says, win over Ram
Woo him with words of nectar
The fractured jewel of your mind
Piece by piece, put it together

Kabir’s poems abound with signals to the poora (whole), the ek (one), the saabut (unfragmented), the akhandit (undivided), the sakal (complete). Listening to him, we begin to recognise the crisis of our being as that of fragmentation, of dis-aggregation, of being splintered into multiple dualities. Nature vs man, man vs woman, Hindu vs Muslim, high vs low, public vs private, head vs heart, spiritual vs worldly, sacred vs profane…the list goes on. Held in the thrall of these delusional and violent binaries, we function through identification and exclusion; through alignment and rejection. Is it any surprise then that much of the time we feel broken?

Kabir gives us another architecture to imagine the shape of ourselves. In this design, our self is not constructed by claiming one side of a duality. Rather we are fashioned as drops of water, of the same abundant substance as the ocean. We have within our small selves all the properties, all the constitutive molecules that make up the limitless whole. We are the many, held in the one. We are fractal images of the ultimate reality.

A drop falls in the ocean
Everyone agrees
The ocean held in a drop?
A rare one sees

The wave in the ocean
Is the ocean itself
Rising, water, falling, water
Tell me how it could be
Any other?

Instead of ‘ocean’
You call it a ‘wave’
By doing so
Does it lose its water?

The world’s a mirage
That obscures the eternal
Kabir has seen through it
And blown its cover

If we embraced this wholeness within ourselves, perhaps we would be less anxious as men about the feminine within, less anxious as heterosexuals about our (perhaps unexplored) capacity to love someone of the same sex, less anxious as Hindus about the evidence of Muslim culture in our lives, less anxious as ‘upper castes’ about the breaching of our spaces by the “lower”, and generally speaking less anxious as “us” about the lurking presence of “them” in us. We could relax into our porosity. We would no longer need to feel small, threatened and in constant need of securing our borders, rallying our defences against being overwhelmed by the “Other”.

This truth, that truth is one!
One breath, two lives
Look in your heart, and you will know
What is stirring in mine

What existed before self and the Other came about? Kabir speaks of a pooran purusha (literally the “complete man”) in many a poem. Purusha refers in Indian philosophy, briefly speaking, to the non-material, formless consciousness which takes material shape in the form of prakriti. So when Kabir discovers the pooran purusha, he is connecting with a primal wholeness that is also our own hidden, unrevealed Self. Unless we do that, from our brokenness arises fear. We fret about securing our fragments, protecting our territories, our small selves, small lives. Kabir’s poems expand us…to hold within us the ocean, the sky, the entire cosmos. That is when love becomes possible, a fearless kind of love, for if we are the All, then what can we lose? “Mann saabut phir darna bhi kya?” (When the mind is made whole, what’s there to fear?)

Nothing in me, is mine to claim
All that is, is yours
I surrender what’s yours
To you again
What can I say I’ve lost?

Our times reverberate with corrosive calls to homogeneity – one nation, one religion, one family, one language, one colour – a series of normative, intolerant and prescriptive “ones”. Kabir too calls for One – but a plural, heterogenous one.

The former desire for oneness looks outside, and finds diversity and difference disconcerting, and seeks self-definition through rejection and exclusion, carving out territories of purity to feel secure. Kabir’s desire for oneness looks within, and finds a manifold diversity and wholeness there. He seeks self-definition through embracing and inclusion.

I got yoked to that One
Now One suffuses all I see
All are mine, I belong to all
No one is other to me

But does Kabir allow us to float away and find comfort in the “One” by being absorbed into some undifferentiated, transcendent soup where all differences are erased? No. He continually returns us to the reality of our ghat – this palpably material and fragile body, akin to an earthen vessel. He returns us continually to this particular body, which is located, here and now, in the politics of this present moment and space, enmeshed in the transactions and relationships of this tangible world.

What makes you a precious Brahmin
And me a low-caste cur?
Blood runs in my veins
Does milk run through yours?

One bone, skin, piss, shit
One blood, one gore
One drop created us all
Who’s high, who’s low?

But just as we start to settle into this identification with the socially marginalised Dalit body, he surprises us again. He forbids clinging to this or any identity. From the vantage point of this “particular”, he insistently and continually returns us to the “universal”, to the gagan – an utterly immaterial emptiness, akin to the sky.

Excerpted with permission from Burn Down Your House: Provocations From Kabir, Shabnam Virmani, Speaking Tiger Books.