Kabir Singers at Yale

The South Asian Studies Council at Yale has organized a small Kabir Festival at Luce Hall spanning two days. The event will start off with the screening of Had-Anhad��Bound-Unbound�: Journeys with Ram and Kabir by Shabnam Virani on April 9th, and a public performance by Prahlad Singh Tipanya, renowned Kabir folksinger on April 10th at the Luce Hall Auditorium. The international travel for the troupe was made possible with a generous support from the Indian Council of Cultural Relations (ICCR).

Kabir, one of India�s great religious poets, lived in Varanasi (in the present state of Uttar Pradesh) in the fifteenth century and remains extremely popular within and beyond the large Hindi-speaking areas of North India today. Kabir�s oral traditions have gone on continuously since his lifetime, producing a rich array of musical forms, folk and classical. He himself did not write but composed orally. Later generations collected his poetry in written form. Over the centuries the body of work attributed to Kabir has grown, due to the dynamic and fluid nature of oral tradition. In far-flung regions, Kabir is sung in different dialects and local musical styles among various communities.

Kabir was unclassifiable as Hindu, Muslim, or yogi, though he bore marks of all these traditions. He belonged to a family of Muslim julahas (weavers of shudra caste status) and is believed by many to have been the disciple of the Hindu guru Ramanand. Fiercely independent, he has become an icon of speaking truth to power. Often abrasive and uncompromising, he exhorted his listeners to shed their delusions, pretensions, and orthodoxies in favor of an intense, direct confrontation with the truth. He was an incisive satirist, exposing violence, hypocrisy, and greed�especially among the religious. Belonging to a social group widely considered low and unclean, he cut through the absurdities of caste ideology and declared the equality of all human beings.

Kabir is associated with the nirgun or sant stream of devotional religion that flourished in central and northern India from around the fourteenth century. The sants spoke of an ultimate reality resistant to description and immediately accessible in every human body. This truth was nirgun�beyond qualities, uncontainable. External practices would never reveal it. But they consistently spoke of it experientially in terms of sound. It arises as shabda, the word; nam, the name; avaz, a voice; or dhun, a melody. It is heard in the gagan, which means both the sky of the outer world and the yogic inner space located in the dome of the skull. As a beautiful Kabir song puts it:

Gagan me ek avaz ho rahi hai jhini jhini – A voice vibrates in the sky, subtle, very subtle …

Stanford faculty member Linda Hess is instrumental in bringing the Kabir singers to the US and also to Yale. Linda has been a scholar of Kabir poetry for nearly 20 years and has published a number of articles about Kabir’s work, including her book - The B?jak of Kabir / translated by Linda Hess and Shukdev Singh. She along with Shabnam Virmani has been involved with the Kabir Project. Started in 2003, the Kabir project brings together the experiences of a series of journeys in quest of this 15th century mystic poet in our contemporary worlds. It consists of 4 documentary films, 2 folk music videos and 10 music CDs accompanied by books of the poetry in translation.

The film Had-Anhad��Bound-Unbound�: Journeys with Ram and Kabir encapsulates, how Kabir defied the boundaries between Hindu and Muslim, by refusing to be labeled himself and sharply criticizing sectarianism. His name and upbringing were Muslim but his poetry often uses Hindu concepts and Hindu names for God, especially Ram. The film journeys in search of the �Ram� invoked in Kabir’s poetry, delving into the heart of divisive Hindu-Muslim politics of religion and nationalism, encountering singers and others in India and Pakistan, probing the forces of history and politics that have created disputatiously diverse Rams, while also spawning many Kabirs. Powerful music by singers in India and Pakistan enriches this exploration.

Prahlad Singh Tipanya lives in Lunyakhedi village in the Malwa region of Madhya Pradesh, near the cities of Dewas and Ujjain.� A rural schoolteacher, he began singing in the late 1970s after being attracted by the sound of the folk tambura. His rare talent, passion, and insight have caused him to be increasingly recognized as a remarkable exponent of Kabir�s music and meanings. �Among many other honors, he received the prestigious Sangeet Natak Akademi award�in 2008.� (Sangeet Natak is India�s national academy of performing arts.)��Tipanyaji is one of the main artists featured in Shabnam Virmani�s films. A grant for the musicians� international travel has been generously provided by the Indian Council for Cultural Relations.

Award-winning filmmaker Shabnam Virani has spent the last six years producing four feature-length documentaries on living Kabir culture, focusing on music and musicians, all embedded in various social, political and religious contexts. Along with these films she has produced ten remarkable audio CDs and a set of beautiful books to accompany CDs and DVDs. This work has been generously supported by Ford Foundation and by Srishti College of Art, Design, and Technology in Bengaluru, where Shabnam is artist-in-residence. �Two of these films were recently broadcast on NDTV-Delhi. Had-Anhad: �Bound Unbound� was one of two films selected to share first prize at the recent One Billion Eyes Film Festival in Chennai. For descriptions of the films and other creations, please visit�www.kabirproject.org. �