The Bijak of Kabir.

• Author: Shapiro, Michael C.
• Position: Brief Article - Book Review

The Bijak of Kabir. Translated by LINDA HESS and SHUKDEO SINGH. Essays and notes by Linda Hess. New York: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2002. Pp. xiii + 200. $17.95.

The corpus of the fifteenth-century North Indian poet-saint Kabir is preserved primarily in the form of three textual traditions, namely a Rajasthani (or "granthavali") tradition, a northwestern one, found in the received text of the most sacred work of Sikhism, the Guru Granth Sahib, and an eastern one, known by the title Bijak, thought to have been compiled in what is now eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, and closely associated with the so-called Kabir Panth. In Western academic circles, the granthavali recension has received significantly more scholarly...