It took three weeks for Arvind Mehrotra's translation of The Songs of Kabir, published by the New York Review of Books, to land in my hands. I made the mistake of looking through it in the middle of a work-day.
It took three weeks for Arvind Mehrotra's translation of The Songs of Kabir, published by the New York Review of Books, to land in my hands. I made the mistake of looking through it in the middle of a work-day. Bas, the work-day was shot. By the time I'd read half the poems, I wanted to run up and down the house shouting in excitement, I wanted to call up all my friends and tell them about it, I wanted to read it again before I'd finished it. Like a fantastic new album by a favourite artist, a great book of poetry becomes your current I Ching. You feel the world has been explained to you and you have been explained to the world. 
Most people claim they don't understand poetry. I don't think that's actually true. Poetry is around us all the timeu00a0-- in film lyrics and Nusrat's qawalis, for instance. It's just that we aren't taught the confidence to recognise poetry for ourselves. Our cultural journeys are obstructed by mediocre gatekeepers who tell us not to trust the things we love, not to trust our delight, but instead to trust their categories, canons and stuffy, double standards and so, keep them in charge of the toll-naka. Over time, we start believing that things we love instinctively are somehow inferior to things that are declared important by either the market or gatekeepers.
Kabir, a poet, or poetic tradition, is partially a victim of this gatekeeping. I remember my Hindi teachers not giving him much importance since he "was easy". He has also become a status symbol of harmony and progressive morality, which has the deadening effect of turning an iconoclast into a saint. Kabir interpretations are often discussed in the solemn context of preserving folk culture and rarely taken up and reinterpreted with a personal, creative energy.
Arvind Krishna Mehrotra pulls Kabir out of this mortuary through a rendition that's utterly liberated and therefore liberating, knowing and sexy, contrary and clever, erudite but non-doctrinaire. New poems burst out of old ones. In each poem you feel two poets jamming with each other, irascible Kabir and a rather cool as cool can be Mehrotra.
This is really folk culture for English readers because it draws from every type of reference, old and new, Cavafy, Hopkins, Leadbelly, AK Ramanujan, Coleridge, Kolkatkar, 'Vedic pundits and Faber poets' to join feeling and rhythm and the perception at the corner of your vision, in sharp dynamic linesu00a0--u00a0 "O Pundit your hairsplitting's/so much bulls**t. I'm surprised/ You still get away with it"; "If we're still strangers/To each other, who's/To blame? Did I/Blunder or did you/Never know what a heart desired?"; "Enough my lord/Invite me over says Kabir,/Or come over yourself"; "Except that it robs you of who you are/What can you say about speech?"
If a fifteenth-century poet sounds like he's talking about your life, what more can you want, boss?
Good art sweeps you up in its rhythms and the exhilaration of its play and riddles till all your senses are firing on all cylinders and you feel aware of the world with dazzling clarity. When this happens why wouldn't you trust your senses and persist even when you hit a line you don't immediately get? That's what this book eggs you on to do. So if someone divorced you from poetry when you were young, if you and poetry lost each other in a mela as children, buy The Songs of Kabiru00a0-- the Indian edition is out this month. It's your chance to get back together.
Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at www.parodevi.com.
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The views expressed in this column are the individual's and don't represent those of the paper.
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