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When around 1500 the Muslim weaver Kabir sang his songs in Banaras, nobody could imagine that at the end of the twentieth century he would be the most frequently quoted bhakti saint in north India. Five hundred years after Kabir was born in Banaras and after at least 80 years of scholarship, do we have any certainty that the songs attributed to him and published in critical and uncritical editions and translations, are by Kabir? I doubt it more and more. Between Kabir and our computer age lie 150 years of oral transmission (which never stopped) and nearly 400 years of scribal transmission. We have no oral recordings of Kabir scolding his audiences and I take it for granted that he did not write down his compositions. What we have are manuscripts in which his popular repertoire was written down, first by travelling singers, and later, in a more respectful and professional way, by devoted scribes. But what, do we have of Kabir in those repertoires? I argue that with certainty we can only say that the version of Kabir's songs found in the seventeenth-century manuscripts is the version commonly used and sung by singers then. Among the pad-s in the Vani of Kabir we can earmark those that may have been popular in the repertoires around 1550, that is two generations after the death of Kabir and one generation before the first manuscripts still preserved now were written. The norm is occurrence' in Punjab and/or Rajasthan. When everything is said and done, one question remains: How could Kabir become so charismatic that many devotees, possibly during his lifetime and definitely after his death, were happy to insert his name as bhanita in their own compositions and let those songs circulate with his name, not their own? What was his genius that eventually was changed into a social consciousness strongly influencing later generations?
