Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa
Imagine an elephant strumming a guitar, an ox on the drums, a crow crashing the cymbals!
A donkey in a dancing skirt, a buffalo saying its prayers — the whole world turned upside down.
This one is about using funny, impossible pictures to point at something real.
This is a Kabir poem of the "ulat-baasi" kind. That means an "upside-down" poem. Feel rabaabee balad pakhaavaj ka-oo-aa taal bajaavai — the elephant plays the guitar, the ox plays the drum, and the crow bangs the cymbals. A donkey dances in a skirt, and a buffalo says its prayers.
It sounds like a silly nonsense rhyme, and children usually love it right away. But Kabir is not just being silly. These scenes are riddles.
They point to a real change that happens inside a person who wakes up to the One. Things that seemed impossible start to happen. The proud become humble. The restless become calm. The ones called "lowest" begin to shine.
Think of a magic trick that makes you gasp. It makes you look twice. Some truths are too deep and too strange for plain, sensible sentences. So Kabir turns the world upside down to point at them.
Why might a wild, impossible-sounding riddle sometimes say more than a plain sentence?
Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa·How we use AI