Understanding Kabir: radical thinker or mainstream Icon? An analysis of some processes of cultural normalisation

Scholarly literature on Kabir, both by Western and Indian scholars, usually abounds with terms emphasising his radicalism, crudeness, rebellion, dissent, and opposition (Vaudeville, Partin 1967: 192; Hess, Singh 1986: 7; Hess 2017: 344; Lorenzen 1996: 248sgg.; Lorenzen 2014: 169-187 etc.; Dvivedi 1942: 185; Siṃh 1982; Wakankar 2005: 102, etc.). Moving from this seemingly established academic consensus on the radical character of Kabir’s teachings, the present paper explores theoretical literature on radicalism (Berki 1972; Sedgwick 2010 etc.) before examining a few selected compositions to provide also for internal evidence. From popular media of contemporary Indian culture (audio and video recordings, publications, internet sites, etc.) a different landscape however emerges, where Kabir is mostly presented and represented as an icon of universal wisdom, and even as a divine or quasi-divine being. Taking for granted a certain knowledge of such cultural landscape, the present paper deals with this apparently irreconcilable opposition, investigating the dynamics by which the ‘radical’, oppositional claims conveyed by Kabir’s poetry have been variously metabolised and finally subsumed within the dominant cultural sphere. It thus identifes and shortly describes five different processes that can be held responsible for such a shift, arguing that all of them can be interpreted as drivers of a cultural ‘normalisation’, intended as a reduction of centrifugal forces to the established set of mainstream values. It does not directly deal with the causes which, in a historical perspective, have brought about this change, although the analysis that is carried out may shed light on its genesis and the objectives of the actors therein involved. To support such analysis, it embraces the notion of “refracted literature” (Lefevere 1982) as main heuristic tool, rejecting the concept of “corpus literature” and adopting the idea of a continuum of diverse forms of refractions.