Shifts in Kabīr Contexts and Texts from Mughal to Modern Times

Kabīr’s extraordinary popularity was made possible by the fact that his poetry could be adapted to various contexts and was able to speak to various communities over the times. New interpretive communities recontextualised Kabīr’s text through various means, such as selection, textual variation or providing a new context to existing textual strategies. After a survey of the major receptive communities and presenting possible reasons for neglect from Sufi and early Kabīrpanthī circles, this paper analyses textual variation in ten poems in the pada form as they transited from one receptive community to another. Each of these poems had been recorded by at least two of the six clusters of sectarian sources produced by Sikh, Vaishnava, Dādūpanthī, Kabīrpanthī, Radhasoami and Nāthpanthī compilers between the late sixteenth and the early twentieth century. Many of their variant readings are indicative of sectarian preferences. Divine names, the importance of the guru and hagiographic details were particularly contested aspects of the padas.