Anand, poet and publisher at Navayana, starts looking for Kabir after he moves to Delhi in 2007. He finds Kabir here, there, everywhere. In 2014, he begins to capture the wandering spirit of Kabir in English. The Notbook of Kabir: Thinner than Water, Fiercer than Fire, is the result of a decade-long pursuit of the way Kabir is sung today – not the Kabir found in books. In this excerpt, Anand recalls his 2016 experience of listening to Kaluram Bamaniya at a basement of a wealthy family’s home in Delhi. Bamaniya, a Kabir singer from Tonk Khurd village in Dewas district, Madhya Pradesh, was awarded the Padma Shri in 2024. Many of his renditions of Kabir are featured in The Notbook.
Come into the palace, my brother, my sister, my beloved
For the king of formlessness, spread the form of a bedGod is in between yes–no and haan-na, says Sultan Bahu
The emperor of words who has been the distance
Who has been to that place in between, says so
My dear na-no and brother haan-yes
When we do not know what limit we occupy
When we do not know how to harness the limit
Why look for that which is limitless?man mast huaa phir kyaa boley?
The heart is joyous, there’s nothing I can say
The heart is buoyant, what’s there to say?
When joy has run my heart over, what’s to say?
I’m drowning in myself, what am I to say?You steal with the thief and you aid the police
You are in what is stolen and you are in what is found
You become charitable among those who fleece
Among the poor, you’re a vagabondThe heart has now turned mendicant:
A lute in my hands, a song on my lips
I wander ticketless everywhere
I rule in every direction I turn
I live in the city of love
The police is you, the thief too
Find me if you can and you’ll find nothingStrut in pride all you want
The body will turn to dust
You’ll find god only in love
Sorry if I sound like a crazy cuckoo
Trilling the same thing, saying nothing newYou’re in the elephant and in the ant too
Wherever we turn it’s you, it’s youIt’s you, only you, you, you, only you
Allah hu, Allah hu, Allah huBless the mullah who cries Allah hu
Coming in love’s arms, he goes Allah huAllah hu, Allah hu, Allah hu
Hu hu hu, Allah hu hu huWhen you find a diamond, just wear it
Why stop to admire every chance you get?The swan bathes only in the mind’s lake
It does not wash itself in the lake of every sense
I felt light when placed on the scale
When found immeasurable, what do I say?Ride slowly, sister, ride slowly
Let people stop and see who drives by
Our cart is decked colourfully
Our wheels wear the reddest dye
We turn again into the same song, “Man mast huaa phir kyaa boley”, which shines differently each time it is sung and heard. It appears now to us as “Saahib mil gayaa til oley”/ “I’ve found the master in the pupil of the eye”. Behind these song fragments, behind these words whose wisdom shines more when embellished with music, is a story that folds many.
In October 2016, I heard Kaluram Bamaniya perform in the basement of a wealthy business family’s home in South Delhi. A friend’s friend’s friend had forwarded an invitation on WhatsApp, and I made my way there. At this private mehfil, meant for the host family and their intimates, if someone sought my bona fides, I was prepared to say I had come for Kaluram Bamaniya’s Kabir. No one asked. If a mendicant singer of Kabir, or Kabir himself arrived here after a day’s labour on his loom or after a twelve-hour shift as a metal polish worker in the Okhla Industrial Estate, he’d have been turned away at the gate.
The chandelier was intricately cut and the floor cushions were so spotlessly white I wondered if I could sit without leaving a trace behind. I sat up close to the troupe. There were not more than forty in the audience. Commodious chairs were lined along the walls for the hosts and the corpulent men and women to rest. Some wore the finest silks and exuded expensive perfumes. There was a velvet-cushioned throne placed on a higher ground at the far end of the hall. It was the gaddi. It was adorned by a presumably dead rich man’s ornately framed photograph. The finest of flowers were decked around it. Many walked up to bow before the gaddi that seemed unaware of its own importance. In the life-size picture, he wore the beatitude that comes easy to a man well-fed all his life. I slyly clicked pictures of the obsequiousness and the incongruities (Kabir, here?), unaware of the incongruity and irony of considering myself above what I was surveying.
Kaluram Bamaniya and his friends were likely going to be paid well. How does an artist make a living other than by trading their art? What is a good place to perform? Can art exist only in and for itself? Then how will it reach me? Clouds gathered around me. Questions I reckon Kabir would have asked. Would Kabir have ever sung for a well-clad gentry at a private mehfil, or performed at the Jaipur lit-fest or in Edinburgh, were his to-and-fro to be covered and a good fee paid? Or would he have been a struggling artist in Benares whose childhood was spent stealing shrouds off just-lit pyres, now uploading his jams on Instagram and YouTube hoping someone would discover him and regard him the new Marley? Would he have been lynched for presumably possessing beef or marijuana? Or would he be doing the rounds with his tanpura for a living, turning up as impeccably dressed as the teetotaller vegetarian Bamaniya, and if he did, would it also be an all-male troupe, or would Kabir be trans? Would Kabir have applied for a writer’s residency, thinking, Oh, I’ll write well if I’m fed and paid well and if I’m in a place with no connectivity? Or would he still just weave for a living and sing to the rhythm of the loom, not thinking of who heard him and who didn’t? Which one story or all of these will serve my purpose?
The most secular art must and does negotiate the sacred. But how does it negotiate the might of the market and the state? How does it greedily receive and on the rare occasion righteously return awards, expecting applause for both? How does it even begin to resist the lure of what’s respectably called patronage? Say sponsorship by Reliance Foundation or the CSR arm of the Adani group? Or a wealthy family in South Delhi that pays the artist in hard, unaccounted-for cash.
As Bamaniya and his all-male troupe, dressed impeccably in white kurtas, black vests and colouful turbans, set their instruments up, the clouds drifted away. I would not be denied an evening like this by my awareness of history, politics and my complicity in a network of privileges and entitlements. As a man of small pleasures, I shall look between yes and no. I shall seek beyond my limitations, if not my limits. Enlightenment has to be here and now, within limits, through a raga on the lips. When we do not know how to harness the limit, why look for that which is limitless?
The casual opulence of the house and the people was offset not just by Kaluram but by the bareness and austerity of the Kabir he sang for a little over an hour. Other poets and artists were remembered, their phrases and verses woven into the words of Kabir, who was already speaking in a translation, in Kaluram’s Rajasthani, a Kabir who teaches us how to say nothing, a Kabir who proffers us words that help us pretend we’re erudite. I came under the spell of words charged with music, and quickly overcame my estrangement. I scribbled notes on the back of papers that bore the report of the annual general meeting (importantly called ‘AGM’) of the Seabrooke Apartments Owners’ Association, Chennai, a report I had never read of a meeting I had never attended. As Kaluram and his ensemble made things up about Kabir who made things up about the words that make us what we are, I part translated, part made up lines in English. Kaluram did not bring in Allah hu. Nusrat came between us. I jazzed it up.
I left wordlessly after the performance.
I booked an Uber and explained to the driver where exactly I was standing in the C Block of New Friends Colony. It would take five minutes. Did “Mann mast huaa phir kyaa boley?” indeed stick mostly to the scale of what has come to be raga Bhoop or Bhoopali, found in the Carnatic system as Mohanam, the universal pentatonic found in Paleolithic bone flutes in Europe to the tune of the ominous “Star Spangled Banner” (the Rockets’ red glare, the Bombs bursting in air), ubiquitous in Asia in all forms, labelled folk and classical? How much has what’s come to be “classical Bhoop”, from Kabul to Lascaux, Okinawa to Dharwad, stolen from the tradition Bamaniya comes from, and how much of Bamaniya has found its way into the raga I know? Where does one begin, where does the other end? Is it possible to inhabit a raga between what is stolen and what is found?
As I quietly contemplated the prospect of listening again to the recording I had made of the songs that were still buzzing inside me, two helmeted men on a bike snatched my phone from my hands and sped away. I panicked. I shrieked and ran after the bikers. Some two hundred yards later, pacified by concerned onlookers, I took an auto-rickshaw and rushed to the nearest police station, some minutes away, to lodge a complaint about the faceless thieves. There I found similar petitioners, saying they’d also been relieved of their cellphones. Mine was expensive; the origin of sins. Our descriptions of the thieves matched. We commiserated with each other. For the police, it was all routine. We were told registering a case would be a waste of everyone’s time. And time must not be wasted. The phone did not come back. Another replaced it.
I had tried to capture Kabir on my phone, and he stole my phone.
The loss almost completely erased the experience of that evening of Kaluram and Kabir, the rich man’s framed photo, the fancy chandelier over which rose words threaded with music – all embers of a forgotten fire now. The police is you, the thief too.
A year later, in 2017, rummaging my laptop bag while at a writing residency in Ranikhet to work on a manuscript on raga music, where my phone luckily doesn’t work so that I may, in relative peace and quiet, write about what was stolen and what was found and of that space in between, I discovered these notes folded and crumpled at the bottom of the bag, and it all came back. Some of the handwriting was unclear, but I tried to make sense of how poorly I had understood Kabir despite all the fuss.
Excerpted with permission from The Notbook of Kabir: Thinner than Water, Fiercer than Fire, Anand, Penguin India.
