Bhagat Kabir

Kabir was a weaver of Varanasi, born into a family of Muslim julahas, probably in the fifteenth century. Legend says he was found as a baby floating on a lotus in a pond and raised by the weaver Niru and his wife Nima, and that he tricked the Vaishnav teacher Ramanand into accepting him as a disciple by lying on the steps of the ghat where Ramanand bathed at dawn, so that the teacher stepped on him and cried 'Ram, Ram'.

He never stopped weaving, and the loom runs through his poetry. His verses mock the pandit with his sacred thread and the mullah with his call to prayer alike: if God lives in the mosque, whose is the rest of the world? He sang of one formless God, of the Name repeated within, and of death that comes for king and beggar. His sayings, the dohas and sakhis, spread across north India in many dialects and became proverbs.

Guru Arjan included more than five hundred of his verses in the Adi Granth, more than any other bhagat, and the Sikhs revere him as the voice that came closest to Guru Nanak's own. When he died at Maghar, an unlucky place where tradition said one would be reborn a donkey, he had chosen it deliberately. The story goes that Hindus and Muslims quarrelled over his body and found only flowers, which they divided.