Kabir was an extraordinary oral poet whose works have been sung and recited by millions throughout North India for half a millennium. He was perhaps illiterate, and he preached an abrasive, sometimes shocking, always uncompromising message exhorting his audience to shed their delusions, pretensions, and empty orthodoxies in favor of an intense, direct, personal confrontation with truth. Thousands of poems are popularly attributed to Kabir, but only...