Images of Kabir

Kabir is a vital presence in India. Of late, scholarship has especially addressed the question of his impact on society at large and its various cultural components. How do people express their own conditions and feelings through recourse to Kabir? How do contemporary thinkers relate to him? How does he challenge contemporary writers? Does he still scandalize us or has his work become a purely academic or aesthetic issue? In tackling such questions, the distinction between the seemingly objective position of scholars and the subjective position of creative writers and social activists are often blurred, as is shown by several contributions in this volume. Alongside these are papers of textual scholarship engaging in the history of the transmission of Kabir’s work. The volume unites articles of scholars, critics, and creative writers. It represents the proceedings of an international symposium entitled ‘The Six-Hundredth Anniversary of Kabir’, held at Heidelberg in 1999.