Kabir Legends and Ananta-das's Kabir Parachai.

• Author: McLeod, W.H.

David Lorenzen has rescued from obscurity the collection of legends about Kabir which Ananta-das wrote towards the end of the sixteenth century. This short hagiographic work is the earliest known collection of stories concerning Kabir and for that reason alone it commands a substantial importance. It communicates very little concerning the actual biography of Kabir, but in Lorenzen's view it is important in that it helps us to trace the historical evolution of the Kabir legends.

The book begins with three chapters devoted to the legends of Kabir. In the first of these Lorenzen considers the references to the Baghel dynasty and their value in helping to determine the dates of Kabir. These dates, he maintains, can almost certainly be located in the late fifteenth century and the early sixteenth. He also considers the belief that Kabir was a disciple of Ramananda and argues that the claim can probably be sustained. The third and fourth chapters examine the actual legends, first those recorded in the Kabir Parachai and then those from other sources. These are valuable not for Kabir's own lifetime but for the light which they cast on the various concerns of their later authors.

Chapter 4 is an important one as in it Lorenzen argues why he has chosen to reproduce an edited version of the Niranjani-panthi text rather than the Dadu-panthi alternative. The latter certainly exists in the oldest extant manuscript (dated s. 1693 or A.D. 1636), but several reasons are given why a Niranjani-panthi text has been constructed. A text has been assembled using as a base text a manuscript dated s. 1843 (A.D. 1786) together with five others of the Niranjani-panthi tradition and two from the Dadu-panth. The Niranjani-panthi recension is superior to the Dadu-panthi one because:

(1) the claims of this recension to historical priority are no less convincing than those of the Dadu Panthi recension; (2) the Niranjani Panthi is superior in the sense that it is generally more consistent in terms of narrative logic and theology; and (3) the presence of the disputed first section in the Niranjani Panthi recension gives it a greater "genealogical" importance in the sense that the presence of this section strongly suggests that this recension was the source for Priya-das's commentary on Nabha-das's verse on Kabir and, through this commentary, the source of most post-Priya-das versions of the legends. (p. 81)

These claims are argued in chapter 4, together with a...