¹ Preceded by the anthology he edited for the National Book Trust, Kabir: sakhi aur sabad, New Delhi: National Book Trust, 2007Google Scholar, whose themes and chapter titles foreshadow the present book.

² Some may have seen the long interview with him in Lalit Vachani's second film on the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, The Men in the Tree, 2002.

³ Dharmavir, , Kabir ke alocak, New Delhi: Vani Prakashan, 1998 (2nd ed.)Google Scholar.

⁴ ‘If colonial power was creating famines, colonial epistemology (j–aankan d) was creating a famine of memory. If colonial power was destroying trade, colonial epistemology was systematically destroying the memory of the role trade had played in Indian history, and proving instead that Indian society had always run on the basis of caste, the jajmani system and oriental despotism’ p. 123.

⁵ Hawley, J. S., ‘The Received in Kabir’, originally published as an afterword to Robert Bly'sKabir: Ecstatic Poems (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004)Google Scholar and now reprinted in Three Bhakti Voices: Mirabai, Surdas, and Kabir in Their Times and Ours, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005, p. 271.

⁶ Hawley, J. S., ‘Author and Authority in the Bhakti Poetry of North India’, originally published in the Journal of Asian Studies 47:2 (1988): 266–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and now reprinted in his Three Bhakti Voices: 21–47. See also the chapters on ‘Mirabai in Manuscript, ‘The Early Sursagar and the Growth of the Sur Tradition’, and ‘Kabir in His Oldest Dated Manuscript’, all collected in this volume.

⁷ Christian L. Novetzke, ‘Divining an Author: The idea of authorship in an Indian religious tradition’, History of Religions (2003): 238–239.

⁸ The story is given quite a different twist in the Persian Bhagatmala composed by Ram Soni in 1682 in Ghazna (ms 1478, cat. 4300/1247, University of Punjab, Sherani Collection), in line with the ‘Persian prism’ of the work: here Ramanand appears as an Yber-Brahmin who is nevertheless oblivious of the fact that blessing a Brahmin widow with the promise of a son is inappropriate and prophesizes a kind of Christological birth for Kabir; see F. Orsini and S. Pell, ‘Bhakti in Persian’, unpublished paper presented at the panel ‘Rethinking Bhakti’ at the XXI ECMSAS conference in Bonn, July 2010. The work nevertheless suggests that stories about Kabir's only being raised as a Muslim may not have been confined to the Kabir panth in the late seventeenth century.

⁹ See Mathur, A.D., Medieval Hindu Law: historical evolution and enlightened rebellion, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁰ Nabhadas, in his Bhaktamal (circa 1600) lists Kabir among Ramanand's disciples, though Hawley argues that ‘when he speaks of [Kabir] directly, any sectarian interest falls away’; Hawley notes that Kabir never mentions Ramanand in his poems and concludes that he finds ‘no way to resuscitate this connection from the hagiography’, ‘The Received Kabir’, p. 272.

¹¹ English readers can enjoy the brilliant detective work in Agrawal's article, ‘In Search of Ramanand: the Guru of Kabir and others’, in Banerjee-Dube, I. and Dube, S. (eds), From Ancient to Modern: Religion, Power, and Community in India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2008Google Scholar.

¹² According to Hawley, ‘Ramanand solves too many problems on too little evidence. He supplies the missing link that would relate Kabir's non-theist ‘eastern’ Banarsi side to the theist bhakti personality so prevalent in manuscripts that show up farther west. He locates Kabir in a specific monastic lineage—the Ramanandis’—whilst also providing the means for him to have come from a Muslim family, as his name suggests, and then later be aligned by conversion with a kind of bhakti that at least some Brahmins could call their own. It is all too neat, and too un-echoed in the poems themselves. I have to side with lower caste critics who think this connection between Ramanand and Kabir was just a pious invention, a way to deny Kabir his roots’, ‘The Received Kabir’, p. 272. For an opposite view, in line with Agrawal's, see Lorenzen, David, Kabir Legends and Ananta-das's Kabir Parchai, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991, pp. 9–18Google Scholar, 78–79.

¹³ Dabistan-i mazahib, tr. D. Shea and A. Troyer (1843), reprinted Lahore: Khalil & Co., 1973, p. 262, cit. p. 285.

¹⁴ See, for example, Shukla, Ramchandra, Surdas, Kashi: Nagari Pracharini Sabha, 1973Google Scholar ed.

¹⁵ Hawley, ‘Kabir in his Oldest Dated Manuscript’, p. 295; the references and Hawley's translations are of the last lines of poems 8 and 12, on pp. 294, 295.

¹⁶ New Delhi: Manohar, 2000.

¹⁷ See Hawley, ‘Kabir in his Oldest Dated Manuscript’, who explains it in terms of the anthology in which the poems are included: ‘Given the work's general orientation, it will come as little surprise that he feels a good bit more Vaishnava than some other Kabirs we know and love’, p. 283. He also notes that in the poems’ invocation to Krishna's various names but also to Ram suggests that the scribe responsible for the selection (rather than Kabir himself) ‘understands Vaishnavism (if he would use the term) in quite a catholic way’; ibid., p. 285.

¹⁸ We may also recall that only a handful of the most popular Kabir songs today are to be found in Kabir's oldest manuscripts; Lorenzen, D., ‘Kabir's Most Popular Songs’, in Praises to a Formless God: Nirgun i Texts from North India, Delhi: Sri Satguru Publications, 1997, pp. 205–223Google Scholar.

¹⁹ Though Pashaura Singh has argued that the ways in which the gurus incorporated poems of other sants (called bhagats) in the Adi Granth include both agreement and support as well as subtle differentiation; The Bhagats of the Guru Granth Sahib: Sikh self-definition and the Bhagat Bani, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003.

²⁰ Pollock, S., ‘India in the Vernacular Millennium: Literary Culture and Polity, 1000–1500’, Daedalus 137.3 (1998): 46Google Scholar.

²¹ See Bryant, Kenneth E., Poems to the Child-God: Structures and strategies in the poetry of Surdas, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978Google Scholar and ‘Sant and Vaisnava poetry: some observations on method’ in Juergensmeyer, Mark and Barrier, Gerald N. (eds), Sikh Studies: Comparative perspectives on a changing tradition, Berkeley: Graduate Theological Union, 1979, pp. 65–74Google Scholar; Hess, Linda, ‘Kabir's Rough Rhetoric’, Introduction to The Bijak of Kabir, tr. Hess, L. and Singh, S., San Francisco: North Point Press, 1983, pp. 7–37Google Scholar.