1. Kabir, "Surah kijaisī ṯerī cẖāl" [You amble like a cow]

This is one of two songs in our collection by Kabir the well-known fifteenth-century "weaver poet", whose works circulated widely and survive in often variant forms in later manuscripts. In his life and subsequent reputation, Kabir was influential across religious cultures in India. He grew up in Banaras, and his poems shaped Sikh scripture as well as Hindu and Muslim worship. Sufis in Agra, Delhi, and Kashmir appear to have been reading Kabir's poetry throughout the reigns of Jahangir and Shah Jahan, and the Muslim tomb of "Shah Kabir" in Magahar (near Banaras) was, by Aurangzeb's reign, venerated as the dargah of a Sufi pīr (philosopher-saint). The tomb stands next to a Hindu temple memorialising Kabir's samādhi (state of oneness acheived through meditation). The Mughal emperor Akbar's official chronicle noted two other Kabir samādhis in Ratanpur (Chhattisgarh) and in Puri-Jagannath (Orissa). Kabir's work consistently propounds a philosophy of dearth, actively embracing poverty, both real and conceived. The poem selected here appears in the Sikh Ādi Granth.

The choukopata (square scroll) accompanying the poem was painted by Rupjan Chitrakar, Dukhushyam's grand-daughter and one of the artists from the youngest generation of scroll painters in Naya. While Rupjan focusses on the figure of Kabir in meditation, the graphic artist Debkumar Mitra makes vivid the dark symbolism of the poem and its criticism of greed.