Songs of Kabir

According to the introduction, by Evelyn Underhill who worked with Tagore on the book, the poems are from the Hindi text of Kshitimohan Sen, who gathered together a large collection of Kabir’s songs from both written and oral sources.

Tagore had at his disposal an unpublished former translation of 116 songs, also extracted from Sen’s collection, made by Ajit Kumar Chakravarty.

[7] The introduction tells us that Sen gathered “sometimes from books and manuscripts, sometimes from the lips of wandering ascetics and minstrels – a large collection of poems and hymns to which Kabir’s name is attached, and carefully sifted the authentic songs from the many spurious works now attributed to him.

These painstaking labours alone have made the present undertaking possible.”[8] The uniformity of thought and style throughout bears witness to the success of these efforts.

“Home” is a frequent metaphor for the body of the individual (where divinity resides waiting to be discovered), while the “forest” is the world around us which distracts us from the path of knowledge.