Kabir is the most alive of all dead poets. He is a fabric without stitches. No centres, no edges. Anand threads his way in.
Over the years, as a publisher and editor, Anand immerses himself in the works of Babasaheb Ambedkar and other anticaste thinkers. He gives up his practice of music and poetry, blaming his disenchantment on caste. One day in Delhi, Anand starts looking for Kabir. He finds him here, there, everywhere. He begins to pay attention to the many ways in which Kabir’s words are sung, and translates them. Soon, Kabir starts looking out for Anand.
The songs of Kabir sung by a range of singers-Prahlad Tipaniya, Fariduddin Ayaz, Mukhtiyar Ali, Kumar Gandharva, Kaluram Bamaniya, Mahesha Ram and other wayfarers-make Anand return to music and poetry. Anand translates songs seldom found in books. Along the way, he witnesses Kabir drawing on the Buddha, often restating ancient suttas in joyous ways.
The Notbook of Kabir is the result of this pursuit with no end in sight. This is the story of how Anand loses himself trying to find Kabir.
Review
To read Anand writing about Kabir, to read Kabir’s words through Anand’s rendering-this is a book (sorry, a notbook) that keeps on giving. It is history and politics, it is poetry and philosophy, it is prose at its most precise, it is simultaneously tender and savage. Anand’s rendition establishes Kabir as a living testament to life itself. - Meena Kandasamy, poet, novelist, translator
Drawing on the rich experience of hearing Kabir and singing Kabir, Anand has brought us the rare gift of a set of translations that have been mined in the heart and refined in the head. - Jerry Pinto, poet, writer, translator
Kabir is mysterious, unknowable, playful, intimate, ubiquitous. Anand’s remarkable collection does everything a translation should: it invites the reader to revel in the mysteries of Kabir by whatever means necessary. There is something for everyone: the nagari version, the transliteration, the joyous English translation, and notes which connect us to other avenues to the poet, to the versions of performers, the opinings of scholars and the interpretations of thinkers. - Daisy Rockwell, Booker Prize–winning translator
The Notbook of Kabir embodies the dialectic of one becoming many and many becoming one, capturing the universe’s whispers in an embrace of uncertainty. It merges Anand-singer, poet, thief, translator, editor, madman, woman-into a singularity that implodes outward. - A/nil, author of The Absent Color
Playful, deep, beautiful, strange. The poet-musician Anand has taken Kabir and been taken by Kabir to places that are utterly different, unexpected, nyaaraa. I went a little crazy at first trying to compare the English to the original. ‘That’s not what it says in Hindi,’ I grumbled. But then I just gave up and read the poems, swam, strolled, rolled, was startled, delighted, bemused. These are songs made of words by a person who hears the music. Kabir and Anand have inspired each other. As they say together, ‘Such a large lock jangles on your heart/ Who but a poet can pick it apart?’ - Linda Hess, translator-schola
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