ABSTRACT
Let us recall the image at the close of the previous chapter of Kabir’s arrival on the scene of a triangulated religious contest in medieval India between Hinduism and the religions of the Book. What made this representation possible was the late colonial idea of an ecumenical caste-based Hindu society, broad enough to embrace the nation as a whole, but narrow enough to resist social change. Paradoxically, it was when the actual conditions of caste ( jati) were written out of history and experience and raised to the level of the imagined ideal of a seamless Indian/Hindu community-which is to say, it was only after caste had been dehistoricized-that the historical stage was set for the arrival of Kabir in medieval times. The idea of history implicit in Dwivedi was that of the possibility of change at the level of the individual (Kabir) and the necessity of a continuum at the level of the collective (Hindu society, or India as a nation). Kabir’s individual spiritual quest, so Dwivedi seems to argue, provided the ground for the longevity of the Hindu idea of social. But the effects of such a dramaturgy were debilitating for the modern legacy of Kabir, given that dalit critics today such as Dr. Dharmvir consider this fifteenth century low-caste weaver ( julaha) and poet of Banares, a convert to Islam, to be the dalits’ own god. Debilitating, because when Kabir arrived in Dwivedi’s Kabir as its eponymous hero, he seemed neither dalit nor Muslim, and appeared unmarked by caste or religion; it was instead his uniquely Hindu and Indian way of being that was proclaimed by Dwivedi as the great event in Indian history, one that marked the birth of the modern Hindu subject.
