Includes bibliographical references and index.

Machine generated contents note: -- Transliteration -- Acknowledgements -- Preface -- 1. "You Must Meet Prahladji!" -- 2. Oral Tradition in the Twenty-first Century: Observing Texts -- 3. "True Words of Kabir": Adventures in Authenticity -- 4. In the Jeweler's Bazaar: Malwa's Kabir -- 5. Oral Tradition in the Twenty-first Century: Exploring Theory -- 6. A Scorching Fire, A Cool Pool -- 7. Fighting over Kabir's Dead Body -- 8. Political/Spiritual Kabir -- References -- Index.

"Kabir was a great iconoclastic-mystic poet of fifteenth-century North India; his poems were composed orally, written down by others in manuscripts and books, and transmitted through song. Scholars and translators usually attend to written collections, but these present only a partial picture of the Kabir who has remained vibrantly alive through the centuries mostly in oral forms. Entering the worlds of singers and listeners in rural Madhya Pradesh, Bodies of Song combines ethnographic and textual study in exploring how oral transmission and performance shape the content and interpretation of vernacular poetry in North India. The book investigates textual scholars' study of oral-performative traditions in a milieu where texts move simultaneously via oral, written, audio/video-recorded, and electronic pathways. As texts and performances are always socially embedded, Linda Hess brings readers into the lives of those who sing, hear, celebrate, revere, and dispute about Kabir. Bodies of Song is rich in stories of individuals and families, villages and towns, religious and secular organizations, castes and communities. Dialogue between religious/spiritual Kabir and social/political Kabir is a continuous theme throughout the book: ambiguously located between Hindu and Muslim cultures, Kabir rejected religious identities, pretentions, and hypocrisies. But even while satirizing the religious, he composed stunning poetry of religious experience and psychological insight. A weaver by trade, Kabir also criticized caste and other inequalities and today serves as an icon for Dalits and all who strive to remove caste prejudice and oppression"--

"North Indian poetry, music, religion, and politics come to life in Bodies of Song, a textual and ethnographic work on the oral traditions of Kabir, one of the great fifteenth-century iconoclastic poet of Hindi literature. Linda Hess's book provides stories of individuals and families, villages and towns, religious and secular organizations, castes and communities of those who sing, hear, celebrate, revere, and dispute about Kabir"--