- Lived:
- c. 1440–1518 by the reckoning this book follows (a rival tradition holds c. 1398–1448); born in Kāśī (Banaras, today's Varanasi), died — deliberately, tradition insists — at Maghar, a small town eastward said to be cursed
- Field:
- poetry and mysticism — the sant tradition of north India: low-caste, vernacular, scripture-refusing devotion to a God without form
- The Big Idea:
- God is not in the mosque, the temple, the book, the ritual bath or the caste you were born into — and this can be said in two lines of street Hindi so sharp and so funny that five centuries later both establishments are still smarting.
- In their words:
- "Pebble by pebble, stone by stone, they piled up a mosque — and the mullah climbs on top of it to bellow. Has God gone deaf?" (attributed; the rendering, like all in this chapter, is ours)
- If you remember one thing:
- A weaver who by his own account never touched ink or paper left more quoted lines than any writer in the Hindi language — and refused, alive and dead, to let either religion own him, choosing to die in "cursed" Maghar to prove that no place, no book and no priest can save anyone.