Table Of ContentSongs of the
Saints of India
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Songs o the
Saints o India ·
T EXT AND NOTES BY
John Stratton Hawley
'
T RANSLATIONS BY
J. S. Hawley
AND
Mark J uergensmeyer
OXFORD
V NIVERSITY PRESS
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OXFORD
Vl'IVBP.SITY PllBSS
Oxford University Pren is a depanment of the University of Oxford.
It funhers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trademark of
Oxford University Pren in the UK and in certain other countries
Published in India by
Oxford University Press
YMCA Library Building. 1 Jai Singh Road, New Delhi t 10001. India
©john Stranon HawleyfMark juergensmeyer 2004
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted
First published by Oxford University Press Inc .. New York. t 998
This English edition published by Oxford University Press. New Delhi 2004
Oxford India Paperbacks 2008
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced. stored in
a retrieval system. or transmined, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press. or as expressly permitted
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rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the·
address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
.
Reprinted by arrangement with Oxford University Press. Oxford. For sale in
India, Bangladesh, Nepal. Bhutan, Sri Lanka, and Myanmar only and
not for export therefrom
ISBN·l3:
978-0·19·56942~8
ISBN-10: 0·19-569420-1
Printed in India by Replika Press Pvt. Ltd
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For Ainslie Embree
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Acknowledgn:ients
The hdp of a number of friends and institutions has been essential in
the preparation of this book. For theit critical but sympathetic read
ing of the manuscript, in part or in whole, we sincerely thank Ainslie
Embree, Linda Hess, Lindsey Harlan, David Lorenzen, Philip
Lutgendotf, Gurinder Singh Mann, W. H. McLeod,
F~ces
Pritchett, and Michael Shapiro. The illustrations, a last-minute sur
prise, arc from the hand of Braj Vallabh Mishra, to whom we arc
most grateful For assistance: in translation we: arc indebted to San
dhya and -Shrivatsa Goswami, Om Prakash Jaiswal, and especially
Krishna Caitanya Bhatt. A great debt is also owed to the John
Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the Woodrow
Wilson International Center for Scholars for helping to provide us
with the time away from teaching that enabled us to bring the book
to completion. The National Endowment for the Hwnaniries has
given generous support for the critical edition and verse translation
of the poems of Surdas, upon which one chapter of this book is
based, and the American Institute of Indian Studies has made possi·
ble the research in India upon which the entire edifice rests. Cynthia
Read of Oxford University Press has been the soul of patience and
encouragement. Laura Shapiro is owed a special debt for giving the
whole manuscript the benefit of her conswnmate. editorial eye on
two separate occasions, and both she and Sucheng Chan have en·
durc:d a fair amount of talk about it in between.
Several of the translations have appeared-often in an altered
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form-in earlier publications, and we are graceful for permission to
draw upon them here. The books are as follows: Ainslie T. Embree,
of
ed., Sources Indian Tradition, vol. (New York: Colwnbia Univer
1
Thief
sity Press, 1988); John Stratton Hawley, Krishmi, the Butter
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983) and Stir Das: Poet,
Singer, Saint (Seattle: University of Washington Press and Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 1984); and Caroline Walker Bynwn, Sce
van Harrell, and Paula Richman, eds., GtndeY and Religion (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1986).
Finally, a word is in order co explain which· of us did what. For
years we have worked together as mutual editors-Hawley for prose
and J.ucrgcnsmeyer for poetry-and this volume grew out of that
collaboration. We decided to expand our efforts from Surdas to his
medieval poet-peers, and we did some of the field research as a team,
discussing the shape and content of the book at various stages. Ulti
n1acely it was Hawley who wrote the prose portions of the book; we
did the poems together. Typically, Juergensmeyer worked "from the
ground up" on the basis of a literal translation provided by Hawley,
though Hawley's verse translation is in the background on several
occasions. Then, of course, we argued abou'c the whole thing, not
just the poetry but the prose as well. Each of us happily acknowl
edges the other's sometimes irksome hc:lp. in a friendship that is now
many years old.
This book is dc:dica1ed to Ainslie Embree, a friend to both of us
and to India in ways too numerous to record.
New Yurk and Berkeley ].S.H.
October 1987 M.J.
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Contents I
I
Prefa ce the Rn>ised_ Ei;litian
~ Xl
Guid~ to Transutemtian and Prrmunci4tian xxi
Introduction 3
ONE Ravidas 9
Kabir 35
TWO
Nanak 63
THREE
Surdas 91
FOUR
FIVE Mirabai 119
SIX Tulsidas 143
Notes 175
Select Biblwgraphy 217
Glossary 225
Index 234
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PREFACE TO THE REVISED EDITION
•
Songs of the SRints of India bas been in print for the better part of two
decades now, but somehow it bas never made it to India. In one way, this
makes sense. The book was conceived as an effort to introduce Engiish
speaking We.sterners to a religious world that would seem distant and
perhaps strange to most. It was translation not just in the linguistic/
literary sense, but in the cultural sense as well. With the passage of time,
however, it has become ever more clear that India and the West are not
. airtight entities. Increasingly they converge-the here and there are
everywhere-and it is a pleasure to launch this revised South Asia edition
onto that complex, miscegenous sea.
For all the interchange, though, it may seem inappropriate for a
Westerner to "translate" India to India. Several things make me hope the
effort may be worthwhile. First, there's the hope that travellers, diplo
mats, business people, students-anyone who drops in on an Indian
bookshop-might be looking for a volume that would make it possible
to hear more clearly some of the major strains that run through the
religious life of North India. For that, perhaps, a fellow traveller's
account will serve well.
Second, there's the realization that translation is sometimes requisite
even in India itself, and that the medium of English serves as a powerful
broker of intercultural and interregional exchange. As the language of
so much that happens in Indian education, business, and government;
there's really no way of avoiding its idiom, even when the subject at hand
is tied closely to a home-grown mother tongue. Linguistic isolation is not.
an Indian thing. I wonder if Hindi- , Gujarati-, and Punjabi-speakers may
find that the stimulus of thinking about Kabir or Mirabai or Nanak in
English opens up new ways of hearing the original.
Then there's the political dimension. We don't land on it hard in these
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pages, but chere's no 3voiding the fact that b/J11/iti (intense religious
devotion) continues to have massive ramifications on the public stage.
For many people living in South Asia, the words of Kabir provide a
beacon of interreligious sanicy, a way to get beyond the trauma of
Hindus and Muslims at one another's throats. For others, a Nanak or
a Tulsidas charts a course toward cultural and religious hegemony
for Sikhs on the one hand, for Hindus on the other. Can·such reasoning
be sustained if one digs deep into the saints' own words?
Finally, there's the matter of scholarly perspective. For people who
Jive in Nonh India-er in "Nonh India" abroad- the six poet-saints to
which this book provides an introduction are lived realities. People feel
they know who Mirabai or Ravidas or Surdas is. They have grown up
with these bh11kti saints, hearing about them from mothers and
teachers and grandfathers and aunts, and in streets and schools as
well. In that sense, t:1ese saints are their contemporaries.
One of the book's key concerns is to complicate that sense of well
known tradition by creating an awarenes·s that what seems common
place and commonsensical is actually an anifact 'of time. Each of the
poet-saints described and translated in this book has ·a history-a
history that begins with an individual life (at least we can affirm this
in most cases) and grows into a stream of remembrance that adds layer
upon layer to lives that were first lived in the fifteenth or sixteenth
century. In thinking and speaking about them, later generations kept
these lives alive in o:her centuries, and changed them in the course of
doing so. The same is· true of the poets' words, which have been
performed, amplifie•:I, and altered over the course of half a millennium.
With each of these bhnkti poets, I anempt to discriminate berween
the old and the new and the in-be!Ween, searching out and evaluating
the manuscripts that ·promise co reveal these saints as they were
appreciated close to the titne in which they themselves lived. It often
turns out that the persons who emerge in this act of historical sleuthing
are measurably, sometimes remarkably different from the poet-saints
we think we know io well. Many of the songs of Surdas and Kabir that
are widely celebrated today- the cornerstones of what mothers and
grandfathers and t:'ie popular media convey-turn out to be entirely
absent from the manuscripts circulating most closely co their ov.in
times.
The poets whose words are translated here :ire nor the "received"
poets. bur those v. . t.om the oldest available manuscripts reveal. It turns
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