SOURCE: Underhill, Evelyn. Introduction to Songs of Kabir, translated by Rabindranath Tagore, pp. 5-43. New York: Macmillan Company, 1915.

In the following essay, Underhill provides a historical context through which to consider Kabir's work, positing that the poet was “plainly a heretic” whose unorthodox view of the human relationship to God “was independent both of ritual and of bodily austerities.”

The poet Kabīr, a selection from whose songs is here for the first time offered to English readers, 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 Rāmānanda. Rāmānanda had brought to Northern India the religious revival which Rāmānuja, the great twelfth-century reformer of Brāhmanism, had initiated in the South. This revival...