Kanika Pruthi, Piyush Kukrety and Borayin Larios(v0.1, 20 May 2026)
At Kabīr Chaura in Vārāṇasī, one encounters another Rām.
Not the crowned king of Ayodhyā appearing in bazaar posters and devotional calendars, but a name encountered through song, reflection, breath, and repetition. At Kabīr Chaura, verses drift through courtyards and temple compounds, carried by singers, passing conversations, harmoniums and tambourines, and moments of shared recitation. The name appears collectively in satsang (devotional gathering), but also quietly, interior and unadorned, where repetition gradually loosens language from fixed image and form. It joins the breath.
The Rām invoked here does not always remain tied to the narrative world of the Rāmāyaṇa. In the poetry of Kabīr and associated nirguṇ bhakti traditions, the name often points toward something more difficult to fix: a presence beyond a stable image and identity, carried to one’s own voice and breath. The name invokes the divine without ever capturing its form.
Kabīr occupies an unstable and deeply generative place within South Asian devotional history. Claimed across Hindu, Muslim and Sikh traditions, the figure of the sant (saint) repeatedly appears at the edges of religious boundaries while refusing to settle fully within them. Stories surrounding his life are contested and claimed by different communities and regional flavors. So are the meanings attached to his songs.
Kabīr’s verses challenge not only theological authority, but also the social hierarchies intertwined with it. They question ritual exclusivity, caste privilege, and claims to singular truth, while moving the name of Rām beyond established centres of religious authority into other social worlds: among weavers, laborers, wandering singers, oral performers, and devotional communities formed outside elite structures of knowledge. In many contexts, Kabīr’s poetry continues to resonate through movements concerned with caste critique, social equality, and forms of devotion that resist religious and social exclusion.
In these settings, sound carries particular importance. The name circulates collectively through singing, performance, repetition, and shared participation. Meaning emerges through voice and encounter as much as through doctrine. Songs lengthen and contract. Verses are forgotten, improvised, translated, and taken up again in new settings. Listeners join refrains even when individual words remain partially unfamiliar. The boundaries between performer and audience start to dissolve.
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Shabnam Virmani’s Had Anhad: Journeys with Ram and Kabir traces some of these journeys across North India, following how Kabīr’s songs continue to circulate through villages, festivals, recordings, archives, and everyday devotional life. In the performances of singers such as Prahlad Tipaniya, the name of Rām becomes at once intimate and expansive, carrying meanings that move beyond singular religious ownership. References to Rām may coexist alongside invocations of Allah, Khudā, the guru, or the formless divine.
Virmani created and directed a series of films as part of the Kabir Project, including Had Anhad: Journeys with Ram and Kabir, Kabira Khada Bazaar Mein: Journeys with Sacred and Secular Kabir, Koi Sunta Hai: Journeys with Kumar and Kabir, and Chalo Hamara Des: Journeys with Kabir and Friends. Together, these films document the breadth and vitality of Kabīr’s poetic and devotional traditions across diverse oral, musical, and performative communities in India.
The visual world surrounding these traditions also remains fluid. Kabīr appears as a poet, saint, mystic, social critic, guru, and folk singer. Ravidas, Guru Nanak, and other sant figures circulate through posters, calendars, murals, shrines, processions, WhatsApp images, and devotional recordings. Saints themselves are continually being remade through performance, memory, publication, pilgrimage, and media circulation.
Here, the name of Rām does not disappear into formlessness entirely. Rather, it remains suspended between sound and image, presence and absence, devotion and critique. Repetition does not stabilize the name into a single meaning. It keeps it moving.
