Word Within the Word
Essay by Deepa Dhanraj

This essay accompanies the screening of Word Within the Word.

Watching Word Within the Word is an invitation to experience Darshan, translated as being in the presence of a saint, deity, or sacred place.

Rajula Shah’s film starts with unremarkable images of a 21st century Indian urban landscape: from rain drenched sparrows perched on telephone lines, to rows of ugly plastic water tanks on the terrace of a water-stained apartment building. On the soundtrack we hear the ecstatic poetry of Kabir, the 15th century mystic weaver/poet, sung by the late Pandit Kumar Gandharva. We are gradually drawn into a still meditative space.

Pandit Kumar Gandharva, considered one of the greatest Hindustani classical singers, was diagnosed with tuberculosis at the age of 28 and forbidden to sing again. He traveled to Dewas, Madhya Pradesh (Central India) to convalesce. As he lay on his sickbed, he heard ordinary people pass by: farmers, shepherds, artisans, weavers, and potters singing Kabir in folk style. Disguised, he attended their singing sessions at night to steep himself in their folk musical tradition. When he returned to singing in classical concerts, a startling new sound emerged. It combined the intention of the direct ‘singing to God style’ of the oral folk tradition with the rigor of classical vocal training. While his rendition of Kabir was readily accessible to audiences across the country on LP records, and now on CDs, it was harder to locate the oral folk tradition sung by thousands of ordinary people across North India and Pakistan. By committing thousands of poems to memory, they sang Kabir as part of their spiritual practice.

For some of us urban, middle-class Indians living in the 21st century, our first exposure to this 15th century mystic/weaver poet was in school during Hindi language class. In classrooms, his poetry is taught as exemplifying the use of metaphor, rhyme, and meter. He composed his poems in popular Hindi rather than Sanskrit, which was the language of upper caste scriptural orthodoxy.

As a poet in the Bhakti (Devotion) tradition, he insisted on simplicity and directness. The metaphors and images he used were all drawn from everyday life. This makes it easy for common people, farmers, artisans, and people of all castes and religions to access profound spiritual truths. Beware of scriptural authority, abstractions, and philosophizing. Trust direct ecstatic experience of the divine. Reject all religious institutions. Interrogate all received wisdom. These were his core teachings. They were often delivered in a provocative style intended to shock and challenge the assumptions of his listeners.

The film travels to Malwa, in search of the oral folk tradition. Rajula engages with a farmer, a fruit seller, a sweet maker, and a rope maker. We see them work, sing, debate, and interpret Kabir’s texts. Atypically, Rajula chooses not to contextualize the poor in a socio-political space. She, instead, interacts with them as philosopher poets, embodying Kabir’s path of poetry as praxis.

Forgoing the standard interview mode, she seeks neither personal nor sociological information but engages with them as co-seekers, asking for clarity on concepts or offering a story as a parable.

As Rajula wrote to me “I did not want to look only at the performance aspect, in my wish to enter the space where each sings to her/himself I feel very grateful to have found it with all these people who talked and sang as if I wasn’t there and then suddenly stopped and asked, now you sing one too.”

In classic Kabir style of using the present moment as a pedagogic opportunity, the fruit seller gives an example of impermanence and asks Rajula, “What will happen to your camera once you die? It will roll in the dust!”

There is neither information on the biographical details of Kabir nor on the history of his time. Neither does Rajula touch on the superficial secular appropriation of his philosophy, which represents him as the best icon of Hindi Muslim syncretism, religious iconoclasm, and anti casteism.

Instead using cinematic means, exquisite visuals of landscapes, the beauty of watching people work and sing, long shots held with slow-paced rhythmic editing, she takes us on an inner journey to give us a taste of his teachings. It is a sensory experience that goes deep.

Curator Biography

Deepa Dhanraj has been involved with the women’s movement in India since 1980, around the time she started making films. Since, she has directed documentaries that have screened at festivals around the world. Themes have consistently related to women’s status, political participation, education, and health. Dhanraj has a special interest in education; she makes films that enable communities to identify barriers faced by first generation learners from marginal communities, especially girls, with a view to enable access to schooling. She has contributed papers to conferences relating to feminist research and teaches video to women activists from Southeast Asia.