New Delhi. Kabir is the most alive of all dead poets. He is a fabric without stitches. No centres, no edges. Anand threads his way in. The Notbook of Kabir is the result of Anand’s pursuit with no end in sight. This is the story of how Anand loses himself trying to find Kabir.
“Like most people, I first met Kabir as a child through school textbooks. I was perhaps eleven. I was raised in Hyderabad. I instantly loved Kabir. He was fun, and I had fun with him. But with time, I forgot about him. The few dohas I learnt in school stayed with me though.
In my mid-thirties, I started listening to the many ways in which Kabir was and is sung across North, Western and Central India. Kabir sang his way back into my life—through Prahlad Tipaniya, the late Kumar Gandharva, Mukhtiyar Ali, Kaluram Bamaniya, Fariduddin Ayaz–Abu Mohammed and their party of qawwals from Karachi, and many other well-named and nameless wayfarers. I began paying attention to these songs after I moved to Delhi in 2007, the city where I have since lived and worked.
I had formally learnt Carnatic vocal music from my seventeenth to twenty-fourth year, on and off. In 1998, I moved to Chennai to work as a journalist. Unable to come to terms with the conservative Brahminism of the Carnatic social and aesthetic worlds, I stopped singing in 1999. I was focused on fighting caste in all ways possible, and set aside poetry and music from my life.
After 14 years, in 2013, something shifted inside me. I felt a calling to sing these songs. This (re)turn in my life owes to working with my friend, the great artist Venkat Raman Singh Shyam of Bhopal. Listen to Kabir, sing him, Venkat said. Listen to your heart, Venkat said. Kabir, too, said so in each song: Kahat Kabir, suno bhai. Listen, brother. I became Kabir’s bhai and dost, brother and pal. Soon, Kabir told me to be my own Kabir, to become Kabir. And here I am now, with a book to show the world: The Notbook of Kabir: Thinner than Water, Fiercer than Fire.
Why is this book a Notbook? Is it not a book? Why is it not a notebook? My work as an editor and publisher made me learn how not to write. Correcting other people’s errors made me wary of my own. To correct and refine myself, I felt I should translate the Kabir songs that I was beginning to sing. Kabir watched and corrected me at every step and turn. It has been ten years since I have been singing, thinking, translating, eating, breathing and living Kabir. My time with Kabir has happened parallel to some twenty-five years of immersion in the writings and thoughts of Babasaheb Ambedkar and several anti-caste thinkers before and after him. This also helped me see how the sung-and-heard Kabir I was drawn to uses many Buddhist ideas and concepts. Now here’s my Kabir, your Kabir, our Kabir.
This is the Kabir—the many Kabirs—you will not find in books nor on Google. You will find it only The Notbook of Kabir. Take him home. Read and listen. He will be your friend. He will help you find the Kabir in you.
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