Abook by Purushottam Agrawal, former professor at Delhi’s
Jawaharlal University and presently member Union Public Service Commission
(UPSC), Akath Kahani Prem Ki: Kabir ki Kavita aur Un ka Samay (An
Untellable Tale of Love: Kabir’s Poetry and his Times) has created
quite a stir in the Hindi-speaking world. The book deserves to be
translated in English, and soon, for it’s sure to raise a similar global
storm.
Agrawal has been engaged in a long-standing love affair
with the weaver from Kashi. This much is obvious every time he puts pen to
paper but there is more. Each time he does so, he shatters some
long-standing myths. The myth, for example, that Kabir was an ambassador
of inter-communal amity. Not so, argued Agrawal in an essay he wrote for
Communalism Combat (July 1999), marking the 600th anniversary of
the sant-poet. Contrary to the popular perception of his being an ‘apostle
of Hindu–Muslim unity’, Kabir’s notion of the individual challenges both
the Varnashrama and the Islamic belief system, Agrawal argued and
convincingly so. "No one knows Kabir except me," claims the Pakistani
qawwal Farid Ayaz in Shabnam Virmani’s outstanding documentary,
Had-Anhad (Bounded-Boundless). There is none like him, the iconoclast
who demolished mandir and masjid with equal fervor, he adds.
Ayaz speaks of ‘knowing’ Kabir with the possessiveness of
a jealous lover but clearly Agrawal too is intimate with the one who
continues to invite us – ‘jo bare ghar aapna, chale hamare saath
(come join me, if you are prepared to set your own home on fire) – to
break all barriers and reach for the boundless.
Now with Akath Kahani Agrawal shatters an even more
deeply held myth, the myth that men like Kabir,
Tukaram, Namdeo, and Ravidas were social freaks who lived outside their
day and age. Akath Kahani is not only a ‘tale’ of Kabir, other sant-poets
and the India of their time. It is also a tale about us. And what it says
about us – the English-educated, English-speaking, English-reading public
– is deeply disturbing. Agrawal tells us that English may well be our
window to the world but because it came to us as part of the colonial
agenda it also colonised our minds. The colonial masters have left long
ago but our intellectual imprisonment continues, says he. Akath Kahani
simultaneously challenges both the Hindu-nationalist notion of our ‘golden
past’ and the modernist/Marxist notion that India was all darkness where
men like Kabir were freaks until the Angrez Sahebs brought us modernity
and enlightenment. English education such as it was taught us that the era
of book burning and inquisition marked the onset of modernity in Europe
while despite the huge social upheaval and churning in the then India
articulated by men like Kabir, we remained an "area of darkness". The
colonial masters used different intellectual frameworks to understand
their own social reality and ours and they taught us look at our own
reality through their lenses.
Akath Kahani is a compelling tale that can help us
reconnect with our own past and once we do that we can begin to appreciate
that there modernity arrived in India long before the British did, that
men like Kabir were not freaks but simultaneously its product and
promoters. Agrawal’s book needs to be translated in other languages
because it has relevance for all Indians. It is Communalism Combat’s
privilege to have taken the first step in translating excerpts from the
book for its readers.
It is a matter of great shame for all Indians in general
and Muslims in Kashmir valley in particular that for over two decades tens
of thousands of Kashmiri Pandits have been forced to live as refugees in
their own country. Thanks to some recent developments, the return of
Kashmiri migrants to the Valley at long last seems a real possibility. We
have in this issue a special report on this most welcome development.
For many, the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on
Divorce) Act, 1986 remains a shameful capitulation of the
secular Indian state to the demands of the orthodoxy following the Shah
Bano judgment. But ever since, courts across the country have been
interpreting a clause in the much-criticised Act to the great advantage of
divorced Muslim women. In a well-argued piece, women’s rights activist,
lawyer and founder of Majlis, Flavia Agnes draws attention to this little
known fact.
— EDITORS