SOURCE: Vaudeville, Charlotte. “Kabīr's Language and Languages.” In A Weaver Named Kabīr: Selected Verses With a Detailed Biographical and Historical Introduction, pp. 109-30. Delhi, India: Oxford University Press, 1993.

In the following essay, Vaudeville explores the complex subject of the language of Kabīr's poems, discussing the languages in which the verses were written, his own spoken language, the language of the literate versus the non-literate people of his day, and the poet's spontaneous style.

There is no evidence that Kabīr ever composed a single work or even wrote a single verse—though a large number of works has been attributed to him by the Kabīr-panthīs, Kabīr's followers. The list of works attributed to Kabīr varies from forty to eighty or more. Though Kabīr's followers believe that Sat Kabīr was omniscient from the age of five, they do not assert...