DISTANCE IN STATUTE MILES
“Company Period”: The details are from Stuart Cary Welch, A Flower from Every Meadow: Indian Paintings from American Collections (1973).
SONGS OF KABIR
KG 170: The shaven-headed men are the Nath-panthis, belonging to a religious sect of the Hatha Yoga school. Several reasons have been given for the practice of smearing the body with ashes. “They signify death to the world . . . or they may indicate that the body must be reduced to ashes ultimately, or they may be a sign that the Yogi has abandoned the world.” (G. W. Briggs, Gorakhnath and the Kanphata Yogis, 1938, pp. 16–17).
KG 174: John Stratton Hawley and Mark Jurgensmeyer, who have translated this poem in Songs of the Saints of India (1988), say in a note, “The practices of wandering naked, shaving the head, and learning to retain the semen all pertain to yoga in some form” (p. 185). The first two stanzas of the poem are almost identical with those by Saraha, written half a millennium earlier: “If going naked means release / then the dog and the jackal / must have it; / if baldness is perfection / then a young girl’s bottom / must have it” (Roger R. Jackson, Tantric Treasures: Three Collections of Mystical Verse from Buddhist India, 2004, p. 56).
KG 182: In the original, the caste mark is specified: “teeni dandi” or “three lines.” The lines “refer to the tridandi or tripunda, the three horizontal lines traced on the forehead of a Shaivite Brahman at the time of his initiation” (Charlotte Vaudeville, A Weaver Named Kabir, 1993, p. 218). On circumcision Vaudeville says, “Kabir was strongly opposed to circumcision. The gibe at that Muslim practice suggests that low-caste converts to Islam such as the Julahas resented the practice which orthodox Muslims tried to enforce on them” (p. 219).
KG 129: What has here been translated as “walking mosque” is, in the original, a “mosque with ten doors,” the ten doors being the nine holes of the human body and “(in yoga) the opening at the top of the skull through which the soul is said to escape to union with the absolute, or in death” (Oxford Hindi–English Dictionary).
KG 84: In the original, the paradise is baikuntha, “or the Paradise of delights which is supposed to be the residence of god Vishnu” (Vaudeville, A Weaver Named Kabir, p. 265).
KG 160: In his essay “Men, Women, and Saints,” A.K. Ramanujan calls saints the “third gender”: ‘Just as the male saint-to-be drops his caste, wealth, and intelligence, he finally drops his masculinity, becomes a woman, so that he can be open to the lord. The male saint yearns to achieve a woman’s state in his society, so he can yearn for and couple with god—to accept the feminine side of himself, as Jung would say, shedding his machismo.” Women saints similarly “may take on the characteristics of men: they leave the house questing for their personal god (not their husband’s or father’s) and a community of their own choosing” (The Collected Essays of A.K. Ramanujan, 1999, pp. 290–91).
KG 62: Yama, the Lord of Death, is sometimes represented as carrying an iron rod in one hand and a noose in the other.