ABSTRACT
This book tries to imagine what it means to intercept a mode of thinking at the cusp.1 Its subject is the poetry of three medieval saint-poets from northern and western India. The work of at least two of these poets, Tukaram (1608-50) and Dnyaneswara (d. 1296) is little known outside India, and is certainly altogether unfamiliar to South Asians who know very little about western India. The key figure in this book, the fifteenth century weaverpoet Kabir (d. 1518) who was a convert to Islam, is known both in the English-speaking and Perso-Arabic world as a mystic poet whose poems are often placed alongside those of great Sufi poets such as Rumi. In India, Kabir was for long seen as a poet who defied caste and religious distinctions in his impassioned verses; he was taken to be the very embodiment of Indian secularism before and after the time of Nehru. Yet the recent history of Kabir, and by the same token Dnyaneswara and Tukaram, requires me to do more in this book than introduce the reader to the writings of these extraordinary poets. For, in the last decade or so a resurgent dalit (untouchable) movement has sought to claim for Kabir the status of a dalit god, or a dalit thinker. “Dalit” or downtrodden, is how empowered untouchables prefer to address themselves. Kabir’s dalitness stems from his “loss of caste” as a weaver, a julaha, but also from his explicit references to caste distinction in his poems.
