The Man Who Picked No Side
Kabir was born into a Muslim weaver family in Varanasi sometime around 1440, and he spent his life in a city where the Ganga and the call to prayer existed within earshot of each other. He was not a scholar. He did not write treatises. He wove cloth and composed couplets, dohas, that circulated orally among ordinary people who could not read Sanskrit or Arabic. That accessibility was deliberate. He wanted to be heard by the person who had no access to the temple priest or the maulvi, and he wanted what he said to land without the cushion of religious authority softening the blow.
