The poet Kabir, a selection from whose songs is here for the first time offered to English audiences, is one of the most interesting personalities in the history of Indian mysticism. Born in or near Benares, of Mohammedan parents, and probably about the year 1440, he became in early life a disciple of the celebrated Hindu ascetic Ramananda. Ramananda had brought to Northern India the religious revival that Ramanuja, the great 12th-century reformer of Brahmanism, had initiated in the South. This revival was in part a reaction against the increasing formalism of the orthodox cult, in part an assertion of the demands of the heart as against the intense intellectualism of the Vedanta philosophy, the exaggerated monism that that philosophy proclaimed. It took in Ramanuja’s preaching the form of an ardent personal devotion to the God Vishnu, as representing the personal aspect of the Divine Nature: that mystical “religion of love” that everywhere makes its appearance at a certain level of spiritual culture and that creeds and philosophies are powerless to kill.

Though such a devotion is indigenous in Hinduism and finds expression in many passages of the Bhagavad Gita, there was in its mediaeval revival a large element of syncretism. Ramananda, through whom its spirit is said to have reached Kabir, appears to have been a man of wide religious culture and full of missionary enthusiasm. Living at the moment in which the impassioned poetry and deep philosophy of the great Persian mystics Attar, Sadi, Jalalu’ddin Rumi and Hafiz were exercising a powerful influence on the religious thought of India, he dreamed of reconciling this intense and personal Mohammedan mysticism with the traditional theology of Brahmanism.

This version of Kabir’s songs is chiefly the work of Mr. Rabindranath Tagore, the trend of whose mystical genius makes him–as all who explore these poems will see–a peculiarly sympathetic interpreter of Kabir’s vision and thought.