Paper short abstract:

The paper will review the history of media through which Kabir's utterances have passed, showing how media affect text, transmission, and reception. Given the media complexity, it will also ask whether "oral tradition" exists; and it will evaluate the views of prominent twentieth century theorists of orality.

Paper long abstract:

The first medium is the body. Singing and recitation issue from the mouth and are received by ears, eyes, and other sense organs. If we accept Kabir's traditional death-date, 1518, and if we agree that he was an oral poet who did not write his compositions, then we can say that his multimedia history began 50-60 years after his passing. The first verified written collection of Kabir dates from the 1570s, with the Goindval Pothis—precursors to the Adi Granth. Manuscripts proliferate over the next two centuries until the advent of printed editions in 1868. From the first manuscripts until quite recently we can speak simply of oral and written traditions. But around the 1980s the media picture gets much more complicated. Along with oral, handwritten, and printed text, we must track radio, film, and television, then commercial audiocassettes, digital audio and video, and the endless networks of cyberspace mediated by computers and phones. Singers, the transmitters of oral tradition, are exposed to all these other media and often keep their own handwritten collections in notebooks. Amidst this complex and dynamic situation, can we still speak meaningfully of oral tradition? Is there really such a thing as "orality"? What about the idea of "secondary orality," which holds that electronic media function similarly to oral tradition? This paper will trace Kabir's media history, showing how different media affect text, transmission, and reception. It will also consider how well McLuhan and other twentieth-century orality theorists hold up under a twenty-first-century gaze.