Mehrotra's Kabir

For votaries of mystic religion, Kabir's poetry still has an immediacy and a relevance which even being sodomized by Michelle Obama on Fox News somehow lacks.

This at any rate is my conclusion after leafing through Prof. Amul Dairy Mehrotra's 'Songs of Kabir'

In other words

All your Religions are shite

But my God is all right

Say his name bitch

Or  go die in a ditch.

What is the fucking point of this sort of translation? Rama aint an English name. It looks odd. How do you pronounce it? Rammer? Saying 'Rammer' is the only thing that can save me from death? Why? How come? Is it a Gay thing? Will the Grim Reaper turn his back and run from me if I grin evilly and shout 'Rammer!' and charge at him with an erect cock? 

It seems this Kabir dude was a weaver. I don't suppose that's a real high I.Q. type job. Them weavers bent over their looms probably did have to watch out for 'Rammers'. Not unnaturally, they get to talking and comparing notes and moaning about the bad pay and conditions and how like India is totally a shithole and then one of them pipes up and says- 'talking of shitholes, my last Rammer did a real number on mine'- and then everybody starts riffing on this theme till Kabir- the idiot of the group- jabbers out this so-oooooo excellent poem.

Punditry is a joke word. Penance might mean something profound- like repentance- but because it is paired here with punditry the reader is already in a Monty Python sketch with a four armed god and some stoned hippy running around saying 'Keep cool. Everything is going to be fine and dandy. Just wipe that shit-eating smile off your face, it aint fooling nobody, and don't do no coveting while praying to that stone idol coz that will spoil its mojo. Okay, all set? Make your wish and blow.'

Why is this stoned hippy saying this shit? Oh. It's that idiot Kabir. He thinks we want to get to his Rammer quicker coz we must be into rough trade otherwise why else would we be slumming it down his neck of the woods? 

But Mehrotra isn't finished with Kabir- 

Deer aint naked. They wear deer-skin. Some dudes wear deer-skin which, I guess, is a possession and giving up possessions can be thought of as a kind of liberation from the bondage of materialism.

Ewes don't have shaven heads. Steers don't hold back semen. Who is writing this shite? Oh. It's that fuckwit  Kabir babbling brokenly about his Rammer. Some one must have told him to apply a salve or a lotion after his last reaming and perhaps that's how he hit upon the word salvation. Actually, this last is  kinda sad.

Maybe that's Mehrotra's point. Apparently, he's a Eng Lit Prof at a Uni in the cow belt and probably has to teach a whole bunch of Backward Caste types like Kabir.

Fuck me. Mehrotra, though shitting on Kabir, shitting on the Hindi, yet is a greater writer than Pankaj Mishra or Amitav Kumar or even V.S. Naipaul because, in the space of a few stanzas he PROVES North India is, was and always will be a complete and utter shit-hole without any Literature or Culture or capacity for connected thought.

I need hardly mention that Wendy O'Doniger wrote the introduction to this masterpiece.

Why are these people Professors?
How stupid are the people they teach?