Kabir and the Doha

A loom has a rhythm before it has a cloth.

The shuttle goes across, the beater comes down, the treadles change, and the shuttle goes back. Kabir was a weaver, a julāhā of Banaras in the fifteenth century, and whatever else is uncertain about him, that much the tradition never forgot. He did not write. He spoke, and the people who heard him sang what he said, and the verses went from mouth to mouth across north India for a century before anyone wrote them down.

The verse he left most of is the doha: two lines, each with a pause in the middle, short enough to say in one breath and keep for life. It is the size of something said aloud in a crowded market, and one of the most quoted begins there. The Kabir page on hi.wikiquote.org gives its first line:

कबीरा खड़ा बाजार में, सबकी मांगे खैर।

kabīrā khaṛā bājār meñ, sabkī māñge khair

Kabir stands in the marketplace, asking good for everyone.

A doha does not count letters or syllables. It counts time.

Thirteen and eleven#

The beats are called matras. A short syllable, laghu, takes one. A long syllable, guru, takes two. Hindi prosody writes them with two small marks: a vertical stroke । for laghu and a hooked ऽ for guru, the way a drummer might jot a rhythm in the margin.

Each line of a doha is 24 matras, broken after the thirteenth:

Thirteen, a breath, eleven. Thirteen, a breath, eleven. The long-short close of each line is the beater coming down.

Counting on the fingers#

Here is a doha about patience, as printed on the same wikiquote page:

धीरे-धीरे रे मना, धीरे सब कुछ होय। माली सींचे सौ घड़ा, ॠतु आए फल होय॥

dhīre dhīre re manā, dhīre sab kuchh hoy mālī sīñce sau ghaṛā, ṛtu āe phal hoy

Slowly, slowly, mind: everything comes slowly. The gardener pours a hundred pitchers; the fruit comes with its season.

Count it the way it would be taught, one written syllable (akshara) at a time. Every Devanagari consonant carries a short a unless a vowel sign replaces it. Short vowels, a, i, u, ṛ, are laghu. Long ones, ā, ī, ū, e, ai, o, au, are guru.

 धी  रे  धी  रे  रे  म  ना   ·   धी  रे  स  ब  कु  छ  हो  य
 ऽ   ऽ   ऽ   ऽ   ऽ   ।  ऽ        ऽ   ऽ   ।  ।  ।   ।  ऽ   ।
 2   2   2   2   2   1  2 = 13   2   2   1  1  1   1  2   1 = 11
 
 मा  ली  सीं  चे  सौ  घ  ड़ा  ·   ऋ  तु  आ  ए  फ  ल  हो  य
 ऽ   ऽ   ऽ    ऽ   ऽ   ।  ऽ        ।  ।   ऽ  ऽ  ।  ।  ऽ   ।
 2   2   2    2   2   1  2 = 13   1  1   2  2  1  1  2   1 = 11

Both lines land: 13 and 11, 13 and 11, each closing हो-य, ऽ।.

Two small things in that count are worth stopping on. Sab, "all", is one syllable when spoken, but it is counted as two short beats, स and ब, because the written inherent vowel still keeps time in the verse. And the final य of hoy is a beat of its own, though modern Hindi hardly sounds it. The meter remembers a pronunciation the street has moved on from.

The second line also hides a typo. The wikiquote page prints the first word as ॠतु, with ॠ, the long vocalic ṝ, where ऋ, the short one, belongs. The two letters differ by a little hook. Read with the long one, the last half counts 12 and the doha limps. Read with the short one, ṛtu, "season", it counts 11, and the fruit comes on time. An eye skims past the hook; a finger counting beats stops on it.

A few more rules, learned the same way:

• A dot above, the anusvara ं, makes a syllable heavy: पं in पंडित is ऽ. The moon-and-dot, chandrabindu ँ, only nasalises and adds nothing.
• A short syllable right before a consonant cluster becomes heavy, because the first consonant of the cluster closes it: स in सत्य is ऽ.
• म्ह, न्ह, ल्ह are single breathy sounds, not clusters: कु in कुम्हार stays ।.

A doha that turns#

Some dohas are built like a loom, the second line passing back through the first. This one, from the same page, is about prayer beads:

माला फेरत जुग भया, फिरा न मन का फेर। कर का मन का डार दे, मन का मनका फेर॥

mālā pherat jug bhayā, phirā na man kā pher kar kā man kā ḍār de, man kā mankā pher

An age went by turning the rosary; the mind's turning did not turn. Drop the bead in your hand: turn the bead of the mind.

Everything turns: pherat, turning; phirā, turned; pher, the turn. And the last half is a pun the ear catches before the eye does. Man kā is "of the mind", mankā is "a bead", and they sound the same. Spoken aloud the line says both at once, and it scans perfectly.

When the count breaks#

Not every printed doha counts clean, and the places where it fails are not mistakes in counting. They are places where the text has moved.

A licence. The famous doha on reading:

पोथी पढ़ि पढ़ि जग मुआ, पंडित भया न कोय। ढाई आखर प्रेम का, पढ़े सो पंडित होय॥

pothī paṛhi paṛhi jag muā, paṇḍit bhayā na koy ḍhāī ākhar prem kā, paṛhe so paṇḍit hoy

The world died reading book after book, and not one became wise. Two and a half letters of love: whoever reads those is wise.

The last half, पढ़े सो पंडित होय, counts 12. A singer simply shortens the o of सो, and it is 11. Hindi verse allows ए and ओ to go short when the line needs it, and nobody listening hears a fault. (The ākhar of the line above stays light before prem, too: the cluster lengthening works inside a word, not across the gap between words.)

A modern dialect. The clay and the potter:

माटी कहे कुम्हार से, तु क्या रौंदे मोय। एक दिन ऐसा आएगा, मैं रौंदूगी तोय॥

māṭī kahe kumhār se, tu kyā raunde moy ek din aisā āegā, maiñ raundūgī toy

The clay says to the potter: why do you knead me? A day will come when I will knead you.

तु क्या रौंदे मोय counts 10; with the long तू it would count 11. And एक दिन ऐसा आएगा counts 15, two too many, because ek and āegā are modern standard Hindi. An older form often quoted, इक दिन ऐसा होइगा, counts exactly 13. The meter keeps the old dialect after the spelling has let it go.

Two endings. The same wikiquote page prints one doha twice, once ending दु:ख में करते याद ("remember in sorrow") and once दु:ख में किया याद. Spell the sorrow the folk way, दुख, and the first ending counts 11, the second only 10. (With a true visarga, दुःख, the first syllable turns heavy and the line overshoots to 12; the page sidesteps that with a typed colon.) The meter votes for करते, and for the spelling people actually say.

Why there is no single text#

Kabir's verses were written down in at least three separate traditions: the Bījak of the Kabir Panth in the east, the Guru Granth Sahib of the Sikhs in Punjab, and the manuscripts of the Dadupanthis in Rajasthan. Each copy took on the voice of its singers, Bhojpuri, Punjabi, Rajasthani, Braj, and modern print laid standard Hindi over all of them. One webpage, edited by many hands, repeats a doha with two endings and spells a vowel with the wrong hook.

None of this lets anyone recover the "real" Kabir by counting. What counting gives is narrower and better: a way to hear where a line was retuned. When a modern word breaks the beat, the break marks the spot where a newer mouth took over, and the older reading, more often than not, falls back into thirteen and eleven.

It is a weaver's test. Run a hand along the cloth, and the place where the rhythm of the loom faltered is the place to look.