ABSTRACT
Despite the weighty rubric, the idea of “allegory” I associate with Kabir and examine in this chapter is easily characterized. I refer to the constant shuttle involved here between worldly and ethereal, fleshly and spiritual. For allegory, these are all sites of involuted and repetitive thinking. Yoga and tantra were rich sources for such imaginings. Allegory necessarily poaches on systems; it is from the point of view of the popular a mode of intellectual brigandage. Above all, it is a form of surreptitious speech. It flits effortlessly between the real and the imagined. In what follows I make the argument that the installation of deities as loci of emotional yearning in the age of bhakti is based on this idea of allegory. The deity in bhakti is set up in the interior region of the soul, but it can as well exist as an object. The “subject” of bhakti, I want to suggest, is the emotive individual who can practice a perpetual transience between the deity lodged inside as an imago and the deity out there who can be the object of devotion. I do not make distinctions between bhakti and the Sufi Way while making this point. It seems to me that the tendency to establish an object as at once the inner source and the outer aim of an emotional attachment is widespread in the Indo-Islamic era, traversing both high and low forms of culture. I conclude this particular thread of my argument by discussing the possible effects this allegorical tendency has had in the realm of politics today. The embrace of deities is not however the only aspect of allegory. In the next chapter I show how the work of allegory is two-fold. If it embraces mainstream religiosity, it also turns away from it to affirm involuted modes of interiorization. This refers us to the inner crypt of allegory.
