What do I know?

Disclaimer: This post is part of a series of essays I wrote at the Young India Fellowship. This particular essay was written as part of the Critical Writing course on Mind, Society and Behavior.

I believe the summer of 2016 was one of the most significant phases of my life. I had slipped into a period of depression and my personal and academic life was suffering immensely as a consequence. At my lowest point, I had turned to literature. It seemed to me to be my last respite; my messiah. And it did not disappoint. In a span of three months, I had read close to 75 books. There were days where I was completing 500 pages in a single sitting. I do not know if there is an upper threshold at which reading could be considered unhealthy but if there is, I am pretty sure I had far surpassed that limit.

I can say with absolute confidence that I learned more about myself and the world around me in those three months than the time encompassing the rest of my existence. Therefore, what I reflect upon in this essay will draw heavily from my readings (of philosophy, fiction, science, and religion) from the summer of 2016;.

As I sat pondering upon what knowledge is, I was immediately reminded of a powerful anecdote from The Little Prince, an extremely influential  French novella penned by Antoine de Saint Exupéry.

The book contained an image (perhaps one of the most famous in world literature) and asked the reader to ponder upon what it was. At first glance, many readers would agree that the image was that of a hat. However, the author argues that it could very well also be a boa constrictor that had swallowed an elephant whole. I shall reference this allegory in the subsequent sections of this essay.

I believe that the Universe and the Truth that is associated with it is nothing but utter, absolute chaos. Knowledge to me is simply a proxy; a tool that we think allows us to infer truth about the Universe. And while knowledge does succeed in making sense of some parts of the Universe, there always comes a time when it fails to explain something and descends into futility.

I shall try to demonstrate the above statements using an allegory. Imagine that you are lying on the grass and you see a cloud in the shape of an elephant. The fact that you see an elephant in the cloud is like knowledge. The cloud is the truth. While the shape of the cloud is chaotic and inherently random, you try to build a model of an elephant around its shape in order to explain it and/or understand it better even though nature never intended for that to happen.

Therefore, the creation and pursuance of knowledge is nothing but a never-ending quest to form proxies that would help understand the Universe a little ‘better’ than what previous proxies could do. Ever since mankind was given the gift of sentience, it has indulged in an almost insurmountable quest of making sense of the chaos in the midst in which it found itself in.

The first humans were perplexed by phenomena such as lightning, rain, the stars and the endless cycle of day and nights. In its quest to make sense and gain knowledge of what was going around, mankind developed its first proxy: God. Alexander Drake, in his treatise The Invention of Religion, has argued that any sentient being when placed in an environment of zero knowledge will firstly and eventually develop the concept of God in order to explain phenomena that surrounds him/her.

However, mankind soon realized that the concept of an omnipotent being responsible for everything that surrounded them had its shortcomings. While it performed a satisfactory job of explaining events that had already occurred, it fell extremely short of predicting outcomes around circumstances that were extremely similar. And it is in this shortcoming that we see the genesis of science.

Although science understandably enjoys intellectual hegemony over religion, at its core, the two attempt at doing the same thing: making sense of the Universe. Science tends to enjoy superiority on account of its modeling prowess and predictability. For instance, when the laws of motion were formulated by Newton, it was possible to compute the velocity with which a ball would land if it fell from a certain height. This was true of every ball and every setting as long as the height remained the same. However, we often misjudge this discovery as ‘truth’. Scientific models were never the absolute truth. They were just proxies that explained a certain behavior of the Universe accurately. They were like the elephant in the clouds. The Universe simply does not care for scientific or mathematical laws. It isn’t aware of the laws of motion. It just so happens that in its chaos, we manage to sometimes find apparent order in it.

Since, by its very nature, knowledge is nothing but a collection of proxies, it always tends to break after a certain point of time. As an illustration, consider the evolution of the structure of the atom. In the beginning, it was believed that an atom was a blob of positive charge with negative electrons embedded in it. All phenomena observed in association with the atom could be explained by this model. But then came a period when something else about the atom was observed. The cloud did not look like an elephant anymore. So, now it was postulated that an atom was mostly empty space with a dense, positive nucleus at the center and negative electrons revolving around it. This model, in turn, was rendered useless when quantum mechanics was discovered.

Thus, we see that knowledge and its acquisition is merely the development of proxies that we presume are better on account of its potency to explain more facts about the Universe than its predecessors. The scientific world has a current set of proxies with which it understands the world. However, it is an absolute certainty that some phenomena will be eventually discovered that will render it impotent.

Now that we’ve established that knowledge is nothing but a proxy to create order out of something that is inherently chaotic, development of knowledge is simply an exercise of developing apparently more ‘potent’ proxies over existing proxies. Understandably, there is always a base set that arises out of nothing. In this essay, I will refer to these points of knowledge as axioms (akin to Mathematics). These are ‘facts’ that cannot be proved and are assumed to be the truth. All knowledge is built from this base set of axioms.

The potency of knowledge is constantly tested by ensuring it is consonant with the phenomena that it attempts to explain. Once it fails to explain something, it must be either discarded or modified in order to explain the aforementioned phenomena and still maintain consonance with everything that it has correctly explained before.

Some knowledge is created by the easy modification of the current state of knowledge. An example of this is the evolution of Rutherford’s nucleo-centric model from Thomson’s positive blob. Some knowledge, on the other hand, requires a modification of the base axioms in order for it to come into existence. For instance, atoms were considered to be matter. This was considered base truth. However, when quantum mechanics emerged, this axiom had to be discarded in order to make room for the duality notion. It is at this point that I make a reference to the Little Prince hat. Knowledge to me is like that har. It is constantly changing and is never a reflection of absolute truth. For all we know, the shape drawn above is just a random collection of lines. Our observations and existing notions (knowledge) lead us to believe that it is a hat. However, should we see this hat starting to slither, we will evolve our understanding to label it as a boa constrictor that has swallowed an elephant. In the future, we may observe some other things that may not be cognizant with this model either. Then again, we will attempt at describing it as something that explains that particular phenomenon in addition to everything that was observed earlier.

With my thoughts on knowledge substantiated, I shall now turn my attention to what it is I know. If by the term ‘know’, I’m referring to the absolute truths about the Universe, I find it necessary to quote Socrates in saying that I know nothing. All I have with me is a set of useful proxies that allow me to make sense out of some components of the Universe I exist in. I am cognizant of the fact that they may be proved wrong in the future but so far, they have helped me in explaining everything that I have observed and/or experienced.

In the same breath, I would, therefore, say that my conquest of knowledge is simply the acquisition and development of better proxies that enable me to understand a superset of the components of the Universe that my present state of knowledge may fail to explain.

A stated several times in this essay since knowledge is nothing but a set of proxies, the question begs as to how do we actually develop these proxies. We do so by interaction and observation. We observe something that is happening in the Universe and try to construct causal reasoning behind it. If the reasoning (or model) holds for subsequent events of the same nature, it survives for the time being. If it doesn’t, the model is modified. In some other instances, we supply a stimulus and record the response. We observe how responses differ to different stimuli and again, we try and construct a model that is potent enough to extrapolate on stimuli-response pairs that haven’t been explicitly tested before. This relationship between stimuli and its corresponding stimuli is again something we construct. It doesn’t inherently exist. As before, it is like the elephant in the cloud.

If I am made aware of something that I do not ‘know’, it could mean one of two things. Either I do not have a proxy in my set of proxies that can help me understand it. Or I possess a proxy that had given me an incorrect result. In the first case, I simply add the state of the art proxy to my set and in the latter, I modify my existing proxy using techniques that I have explained above. There are several instances where the latter might cause cognitive dissonance in my head. In other words, the modification of a particular proxy threatens the existence of the other proxies. In such cases. I make a cost-benefit analysis. There is never a right answer to this question. It boils down to which I would consider being more taxing to my mental and ethical well being: the ignorance of one phenomenon that my premature proxy cannot explain or a major overhaul of my entire set of proxies altogether.

In the final sections of the essay, I will attempt at creating a narrating around me knowing my self. I have come to understand that there are four components to knowing me. The first is observations and a set of associated explanations that are public knowledge to me as well as others around me. The second are those that are known to me but not to others. The third is vice versa. The fourth and the final are things that are not known by anyone.

I have come to realize that I will never come to know the absolute truth about myself. In that sense, I am like the Universe in which I reside. I can only create proxies that help me to understand a component of myself better. The truth about me resides in the fourth component. The other three are merely observations and proxies created on account of it. There are things that I believe are true about myself. There are certain moral principles that I believe I adhere to. But I am cognizant of the fact that these may all be rendered false when I’m put in a situation that forces me to alter my vision of myself. I will never know who I truly am. I will only know parts of me as I progress through life that will hold true until they are broken under certain circumstances. In my pure essence, I am chaos. There is no inherent order to who I am. I can only run with assumptions and be resilient when faced with the prospect of changing my perspective of myself.

Populism and Rise of the Far-Right

Disclaimer: This post is part of a series of essays I wrote at the Young India Fellowship. This particular essay was written as a final paper for the course Globalization on Trial.

This essay attempts to illustrate that the world order tends to oscillate between globalism and populism. Globalism is always preceded and succeeded by populism and vice versa. Additionally, this essay argues that a shift from globalism to populism is almost always influenced by cultural factors rather than economic ones.

Twenty-first-century politics has witnessed an alarming rise of populism in the United States and Europe. The first warning signs came with the UK Brexit Referendum vote in 2016 swinging in the way of Leave. This was followed by a stupendous victory by billionaire Donald Trump to become the 45th President of the United States in November 2016. Since then, Europe has seen a steady rise in populist and far-right parties that have capitalized on Europe’s Immigration Crisis to raise nationalist and anti-Europe sentiments. Some instances include Alternative for Germany (AfD) winning 12.6% of all seats and entering the Bundestag, thus upsetting Germany’s political order for the first time since the Second World War, the success of the Five Star Movement in Italy and the surge in popularity of neo-nazism and neo-fascism in countries such as Hungary, Czech Republic, Poland and Austria.

Brexit poses some real problems for the United Kingdom in the event of a no-deal

This rise of the far-right has also, quite obviously, resulted in the decline in popularity of the left and the center-left. The Democratic Party suffered perhaps its largest upset in American Political History when its Presidential Candidate Hillary Clinton was handed a defeat by Trump despite being a clear favorite in the polls. The center-left SpD party of Germany has, for the first time, garnered fewer votes than the right-leaning AfD. The Socialists and the Labour Party in France and the Netherlands respectively also have suffered heavy defeats in parliamentary elections, resulting in significant losses of seats.

With this concise introduction in hand, in the following section, the essay will attempt to illustrate as to why this isn’t a startling phenomenon and instead was extremely predictable given the passage of human political and economic history. As mentioned earlier, the world always oscillates between populism and globalism and one is always preceded and succeeded by the other. To prove this point, this essay will present several instances from world history that clearly illustrate this trend.

As a first example, this essay will consider the Thirty Years War fought in Central Europe between 1618 and 1648. The war, one of the deadliest in human history, recorded over eight million casualties. The political and economic atmosphere of Europe, prior to the seeds of the aforementioned conflict being sown, had many similarities with a globalist ‘state’. A large part of Europe came under the Byzantine Roman Empire and it was relatively alien to the concept of nation states. Since this was an empire, there was a free flow of people and goods. Most importantly, the Protestants and the Catholics, the two major schools of belief in Europe, were free to practice their faith.

The Thirty Years War

Tensions arose when the Holy Roman Emperor, Ferdinand II, tried to impose Roman Catholicism upon all his subjects. The result was a bloody war that lasted over three decades. The Thirty Years War validated the rise of the nation states after the end of the war. It led to the creation of the Dutch Republic, which was finally freed from Spanish rule (barring Southern Netherlands and Luxembourg). It established the dominance of France and the Bourbon Dynasty as well as facilitated the rise of the Swedish Empire.

This illustrates very clearly how a cultural clash (in terms of intolerance of a particular school of belief) triggered the shift of European political order from resembling globalism to nation states.

The following period, starting mid 17th century, saw the rise of East India Companies. The Thirty Years War was immediately followed by the Dutch Golden Age, a period facilitated by the Dutch East India Company, which went on to become the most valuable company of all time. This period also saw the beginning of British conquests into the eastern lands of India, China and Mesopotamia.

Continuing this trend into the 18th century, the European nation states colonized almost the entire known world. Aided by the Industrial Revolution starting in 1760, the world experienced globalization at a pace unparalleled until then. There was free (albeit controversial) flow of goods, people and ideas across continents. Thus, the European nation states built empires with lands spread across the world and brought in another era of globalism. In this way, the circle completed itself.

The Industrial Revolution

The next example follows the chronological timeline set by the previous; it starts its examination from the period prior to the outbreak of the First World War. The late nineteenth century was characterized by free trade between European Powers and their colonies (albeit at the expense of the colonies).

However, victories in the 1866 Austro-Prussian War and the 1870 Franco-Prussian war established Germany as a dominant power in Europe. This created tension with the British and French Empires and there was a constant struggle in Europe to ensure a balance of power. The balance broke with the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in June 1914 which plunged Europe, and eventually the entire world, into war.

The defeat of the Triple Entente (comprising of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy) to Allied Powers led to the rise of populism and the far-right in these countries. Starting the early 1930s, the Nazi party, under the leadership of Adolf Hitler, turned Germany into a far-right dictatorship. Italy witnessed a similar populist uprising in the form of Benito Mussolini. Hitler’s ideas of Lebensraum and the conviction of the superiority of the Aryan race led him to conquer Poland in 1939, which led to the outbreak of the Second World War.

Adolf Hitler

The Second World War was the deadliest conflict in human history, with over 50 million fatalities. An Allied victory ensured the decimation of the far-right in Europe. The end of the Second World War thus marked the beginning of another shift from nation states and populism into globalism.

The second half of the twentieth century witnessed some amazing developments from the perspective of globalization. The United Nations (UN) was formed in 1945 to maintain international order and ensure that conflicts such as the Second World War didn’t take place again. The European Union was formed in 1957 with the ambitious plan of politically and economically uniting the entire continent of Europe. Economic Liberalization took place in the two largest countries in the world (by population): China, in 1978 and India, in 1991. The World Trade Organization (WTO) was founded in 1995 to regulate international trade.

But perhaps the most aggressive agent of globalization has been the dawn of the Information Age. The invention of the internet and the exponential increase for the demand in IT and software has connected the world like never before. The world has truly become a global village with everyone in the vicinity of communicating with everyone else.

If the aforementioned two examples are anything to go by, it suggests strongly that this wave of globalism will be followed by populism. This is exactly what is being witnessed in the global political landscape today. Therefore, two facts can be concluded beyond a reasonable doubt: globalism and populism operate in a cyclical manner and the preceding decades of globalism have ensured a rise of populism today.

The following sections of this essay will attempt at answering why globalism is succeeded by populist movements (usually by the far-right) by critically analyzing the economic and cultural effects of globalization. The essay will attempt to demonstrate that the latter plays a far larger and significant role than the former.

With the political climate shifting towards the idea of the nation-state (or nationalism), there have been fears of a decline in the popularity of the ideas of globalization, free trade, and open borders. Globalization has come under fire and has been castigated by populist governments worldwide. Some of the most audible dissent to globalization are economic, with the loss of jobs to immigrants, outsourcing and the dying of the manufacturing sector on account of trade and decentralization of production. Donald Trump secured a significant portion of his voter base by appealing to these sentiments. His campaign, with the tagline of Make America Great Again, promised stricter immigration laws, preferential treatment to American production and priority to jobs for Americans. Since becoming president, he has imposed trade tariffs worth hundreds of billions of dollars on countries such as Canada and China in an attempt to correct America’s trade deficit, withdrawn from the Paris Climate Agreement to save the dying coal mining industry and removed the US from the Trans-Pacific Partnership in a bid to further isolate the US from global politics and pump the budget inward.

Henry Hazlitt

The economic arguments against globalization are, however, extremely weak and lack statistical backing. The Economist Henry Hazlitt attempts at distilling the entire field of economics to a single principle:

The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.

Globalization almost always leads to creative destruction; the phenomena of loss of livelihood to superior technology, innovation or automation. It happened with the Industrial Revolution, it happened with colonization and now, it’s happening with the advent of the Internet.

Phenomena associated with globalization such as automation, free trade, decentralization of production and the internet have led to the loss of livelihood for many people, especially those employed in blue-collar manufacturing jobs.

However, this has also ensured that more output is created with lesser input thus driving down prices and increasing the variety of goods and services available to consumers. In its essence, this is the duty of an economy: to produce as much as possible at the lowest cost. Productivity is the only thing that should count. Lower prices of goods implies consumers have more disposable income in their hands. This stream of extra money, therefore, has the potential to create new industries and jobs for goods and services that people can afford now with the extra money. With Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand argument, it can be shown that the displaced people can actually move to these industries, thus returning the economy back to a stable equilibrium.

Therefore, it can be seen quite clearly that, in the long term, globalization affects all groups positively even in the face of creative destruction.

It is indeed true that globalization displaces some communities in the short run. However, the number of people displaced is dwarfed by the number of people reaping economic gains. It doesn’t make any economic sense at all to discard globalization for its minimal short term side effects. For instance, there are 135,000 works in the US Apparel Industry and 45 million Americans who live below the poverty line. It doesn’t make any economic sense to increase the price of clothing for millions of poor Americans (by banning clothing imports) to ensure a few hundred thousand get to keep their low income, low skill jobs. Following Hazlitt’s principle, it is in the greater interest of a society or country to only produce those goods and services it has a competitive advantage over and imports the rest. Globalization facilitates this and thus ensures stronger economies.

Finally, it is a misconception that the financial crisis created by globalism led to the rise of populism. Many associate the 2008 Economic Crisis as the starting point of Trumpism. However, by the time Americans were voting in 2016, the economy had fully recovered. Also, contrary to what Steve Bannon had claimed, a Gallup poll showed conclusively that non-supporters of Trump were just as likely as the supporters to be unemployed. Shifting our focus to the east, there is almost zero correlation between economic prosperity and the rise of the far-right in Europe too. Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Poland and Finland, all have right-wing populist ruling parties in spite of being some of the most economically prosperous countries in Europe. Therefore, it is imperative that we search for a stronger, alternate reason to explain these shifts.

Apart from economic crises, another school of dissent against globalization comes from cultural homogenization. Since globalization, by its very nature, results in the migration of people from one place to another, it also leads to the transport of cultures. More often than not, tensions arise as a result of the clash of cultures and this leads to the creation of nationalistic sentiments, often at the expense of the immigrants.

Migration is often cited as one of the biggest problems of globalization. However, the economic argument against migration is extremely weak. Take the United States, for instance. Only 33% of Americans hold college degrees and there are simply not enough Americans available to fill in for high skilled jobs. This availability gap is often filled by immigrants. Immigrant communities from India and China are significantly more prosperous, wealthy and educated than the average American.

The phobia against migration stems from xenophobia. Humans are, anthropologically speaking, xenophobic by nature. It is a trait that has allowed mankind to survive and eventually dominate the planet. Humans tend to form communities around ideas or traits and this sense of community is amplified when it comes in conflict with a rival community.

The Syrian Civil War

The Syrian Civil War resulted in one of the biggest refugee crisis of all time. This European Refugee Crisis is one of the main reasons for the rise of the far right in Europe. Most of the refugees from the Middle East were Muslims and the integration of Islamic values and traditions at such a humongous scale was the seed of conflict between the immigrants and the largely Christian natives.

Populism, therefore, is fed by xenophobia and racism. It stems from an inherent fear of the European natives for a loss of their culture and identity. Islam is seen as a direct threat to their culture. Harmonic multiculturalism, although a novel concept on paper, is extremely difficult to witness in practicality.

This fear is amplified by a fear of security. Since the starting of the refugee influx into Europe, there have been several, large scale terrorist attacks in major European cities with refugee perpetrators. France witnessed attacks in Nice and Paris in 2015 and 2016 that resulted in hundreds of death. Great Britain, too, has had its share of violence in the form of the Manchester Bombing in 2017 and semi-regular instances of refugee violence in London.

These attacks have led people to associate all refugees as terrorists, rapists, and haters of Europe; although an extremely negligible fraction of them are involved with extremism. Similar rhetoric was used to great success by Donald Trump through his stance on immigration and the wall on the US-Mexican border.

As we have already seen, cultural factors usually are the trigger for the genesis of populist movements. The Thirty Years War started when Catholicism was forced on the people. World War 2 occurred largely in part of Hitler’s goal to establish Aryan dominance and decimate any race that he thought inferior.

Therefore, it can be stated that globalism leads to multiculturalism which in turn leads to a clash of cultures and idea. These clashes form the breeding ground for chauvinism and populist movements and play a far greater role in the shift than economic concerns.

In conclusion, this paper has illustrated through historical examples, how globalism leads to populism and vice versa. They are states through which global political order regularly oscillates between. Finally, the paper demonstrated how cultural and not economic factors played a larger role in aiding shifts from globalism to populism.

References

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Were all poetry attributed to Kabir written by one person?

Disclaimer: This post is part of a series of essays I wrote at the Young India Fellowship. This particular essay was written as a final paper for the course Kabir: The Poet of Vernacular Modernity.

Kabir

The premise of this essay is to discern if all the works attributed to the saint, reformer and poet Kabir were written (or enunciated) by one person or if there is a possibility that the name ‘Kabir’ was a pseudonym used by multiple poets to broadcast their views between the 14th and 16th century.

The essay argues that the former is more likely. In other words, although historical evidence suggests that a weaver poet named Kabir did live in Benaras somewhere in the 15th century, the works attributed to him were not his original work alone.

The first argument relates to the exact timeline of Kabir’s life. To date, there is not enough historical evidence that puts this matter to rest. Mentions of Kabir can be found from as early as the starting of the 14th century to as late as the end of the 16th. In his book Kabir, Prabhakar Machwe gives us the wildly different timelines that have been proposed. The most widely held view, as purported by Kabir Charith Bodh, was that Kabir was born in 1398. However, in his work Khajinat-ul-Asafiya, Maulvi Ghulam insists that Kabir was born in 1594, two full centuries after the date suggested by Kabit Charith Bodh. But more than his birth, it is the year of his demise that is more hotly contested. A certain sect of scholars believe the date to be somewhere between 1448 and 1450. In fact, the Archaeological Society of India has suggested that a tomb of Kabir was built somewhere during 1450.

Sikander Lodi

However, this date of 1448 is rejected by other sects of scholars who believe Kabir was a contemporary of Sikander Lodi, a sultan who ruled Delhi between 1489 and 1517 and visited Kashi in 1494. A death in 1448 would not have made the fabled meeting between the two possible. The Ain-e-Akbari, a pivotal historical work published in 1596 by Abu Fazl also mentions Kabir as one of the great poets who is no longer alive.

Finally, there is a ‘middle-man’ view which suggests that Kabir lived through it all, between 1398 and 1518 to a ripe old age of 120. A possible reason for such immense confusion in his timeline could be because poetry in his name was being propagated and produced throughout this period of more than a century which led different people to believe that Kabir was alive at a different point of time. It is extremely unlikely that a man in the 15th century survived to the age of 120. What is more likely is that a group of poets published and produced poetry under the pseudonym Kabir over this very long timeline.

The second argument is that of Language. Kabir is extremely well known for rejecting the polished languages of Hindi and Persian in favor of a language more understandable to the masses; a language alluded to as Saddhukari by modern scholars. However, Kabir’s poetry is riddled with several languages. In Linda Hess’ The Bijak of Kabir and Prabhakar Machwe’s Kabir, this fact is alluded to in detail. His poems seem to have traces of Hindi, Persian, Marwari, Urdu, and Bengali. Additionally, there is evidence which suggests that his language style tends to change with the subject matter and does not have one particular style (that most other poets spend a lifetime to carve).

These facts can be used to postulate a very likely scenario: it is possible that several poets lived in several different regions and wrote on several different topics. Each poet had a distinct voice of his/her own and had issues and topics that s/he deeply cared about. However, they all came to use the pseudonym of Kabir as their signature. Therefore, the richness and diversity of language and the style of language being dependent on the topic.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Published by Penguin Classics.

The third argument is that of Women. Kabir’s views on femininity remain one of the most controversial facets of the poet. Kabir is known to have been extremely vocal about his condemnation and denunciation of women. His seemingly misogynistic attitude is however not an anomaly amongst the great poets of the world. In his Thus Spake Zarathustra, the German Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche famously wrote:

Everything about women is a riddle and everything about woman has one solution: it’s called pregnancy.

Kabir’s views were far stronger and far more blasphemous. For instance, one of Kabir’s couplets goes as follows:

Kabit naari parai apni, bhugtya narakahi jaye,
Aag aag sab ek hai, tamain haat na baahi

Translated by Gupta in 1986, this translates to:

Kabir says he who associates with a woman, whether his own or another’s, is going to hell
All fires are one; so don’t burn your hands in it.

Modern scholars argue that Kabir isn’t speaking against women in his poetry but is merely using women as a metaphor for all that is wrong and evil and unjust with the world.

This point of view would have been acceptable if not for another facet of Kabir: his love and eroticism for his God, Rama. As stated by Purushottam Agarwal in his essay The Erotic to the Divine: Kabir’s Notion of Love and Femininity, there are over 270 verses in which Kabir exhibits eroticism and a poignant desire to become one with his God. Furthermore, he does so by assuming the form of a woman. Assuming that Kabir had no qualms regarding homosexuality, it seems apparent that he believed that he could only make true love to his God by adopting the form of a woman. This, in turn, alludes to the fact that Kabir believed that the epitome of sexual desire and fulfillment, of unconditional and intense love, of devotion, could only be achieved by the feminine. The female was more capable of giving love to the male than the vice versa.

It is in these two aforementioned facts that lie the greatest contradiction and paradox regarding the poet. On one hand, he uses women as a symbol of all that is evil and unjust with the world and strongly denounces any form of interaction or contact with it. On the other hand, he becomes a female and asks the male God to become one with her. Even if we assume that Kabir’s usage of femininity is metaphorical, it is astounding that he would use the same metaphor to denote two completely contrasting ideas.

As with the previous two arguments, this contradiction can be fixed if we assume that the works are by separate poets. One poet used femininity as a metaphor for evil. The other used it as the epitome of love, desire and affection to God.

Virginia Woolf

A related question could be: why does Kabir find a need to convert to the female form to show his love for God? Why doesn’t he make God female instead? While the explanation that the woman is a metaphor for the zenith of love, affection, and desire is convincing, we should not rule out another equally plausible explanation: the existence of a female poet writing under the pseudonym of Kabir. Why a female poet would do is extremely obvious and has been brilliantly elucidated by Virginia Woolf in her essay, If Shakespeare Had A Sister. If this were indeed the works of a woman, it would have been very unlikely that it would have reached the levels of popularity they enjoy to this day. Combine this with the fact that a woman expressing her erotic desires would have been extremely taboo in the conservative 15th century India. The Bhakti poet Meera did but she lost all her material possessions in the process. In other words, there was plenty of incentive to write under the pseudonym of a famous male poet.

Thus far, this paper has discussed certain facts about Kabir that hint at the possibility of the existence of multiple poets rather than one. The rest of this paper will focus on plausible reasons as to why there was an incentive to do such a thing.

William Shakespeare

The premise of multiple poets writing under one common pseudonym is not a new idea. It has also been proposed in relation to probably the greatest poet of all time, William Shakespeare. There are some startling similarities between the two giants. Both were born into illiterate households. There is historical evidence suggesting that Shakespeare’s father and son were both illiterate. It seems highly unlikely that the intermediate generation reached the epitome of literacy. Secondly, there are the circumstances surrounding his death. He makes no mention of his books, plays or poems in his will or his documents. The only theatrical references were interlined in his will which cast deep suspicion on the authenticity of his requests. Diana Price, in her essay Reconsidering Shakespeare’s Monument, argues that Shakespeare’s works were authored by aristocrats such as Derby and Oxford under the pseudonym and they did so to bypass the “stigma of print”, a convention that restricted works by aristocrats to be published only in private circles and not be made available to the public. Another reason may have been because Shakespeare’s plays clearly advocate a Republican form of government and therefore its author was always at risk of being prosecuted by the monarchy.

The aforementioned point finds a great amount of relevance in the context of Kabir. Kabir’s poetry contained vast amounts of criticism for every major religion that existed in the subcontinent in the 15th century, be it Hinduism, Islam or Buddhism. Criticism of religious beliefs and thoughts do not go down well even in the 21st century so one can imagine the magnitude of possible repercussions five centuries ago. Writing under the pseudonym of Kabir, a lower caste, illiterate Muslim weaver was the perfect deception. It would have helped all these poets with blasphemous views find a voice without facing the risk of prosecution.

With time, it is possible that the name of Kabir became synonymous with rational thought, the denunciation of any form of God and a rejection of irrational practices of Hinduism and Islam. In such a scenario, it made even more sense to continue using the name of Kabir long after the original weaver was dead. Kabir, in this way, becomes a symbol.

In conclusion, this essay does not reject the existence of a weaver-poet named Kabir. It is very likely that such a person did exist. But what is equally likely is the possibility that all works written in his name were not written by one person. They were written by poets in different regions in different languages advocating different thoughts. Kabir, therefore, was more of a symbol; an amalgamation of revolutionary thoughts and the epitome of South Asian Literature between the 14th and the 16th centuries.

References

1. Hess, L. & Singh, S. (Tr.) (1986) The Bijak of Kabir
2. Agrawal, P. (2011) The Erotic to the Divine: Kabir’s Notion of Love and Femininity
3. Machwe, P. (1968) Kabir
4. Woolf, V. (1929) A Room of One’s Own
5. Price, D. (1997) Reconsidering Shakespeare’s Monument
6. Agrawal, P. (2004) Thematology: Seeking an Alternative to Religion Itself