Documentary ‘Had Anhad’ Reclaims Kabir’s Notion Of Ram From The Ruins Of The Babri Masjid

On the afternoon of December 6, 1992, thousands of kar-sevaks, or volunteers mobilised by right-wing Hindu extremist organisations, gathered outside the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh, for what was ostensibly a symbolic ceremony. But soon the crowd broke past security barriers, climbed onto the mosque supposedly located on the exact spot where the mythical Hindu god-king Ram was born, and demolished it. By evening, the 16th-century three-domed structure built by Mir Baqi — a courtier of the first Mughal emperor Babur — was reduced to rubble. The demolition of the Babri Masjid was a pivotal moment in the history of modern India and deepened communal faultlines between Hindus and Muslims across the country. In the ensuing riots, almost 2,000 people died. India has never fully recovered from its aftermath.

In the decades that followed, Ram — once invoked as ‘maryada purushottam’ or the ideal man, a paragon of justice and fairness — became a symbol of Hindutva supremacy. And yet, there also exists another Ram — the Ram we see in the couplets of Kabir Das, a 15th-century mystic poet-saint of north India who defied the boundaries between Hinduism and Islam. In 2008, filmmaker Shabnam Vimani went searching for the Ram of Kabir’s syncretic song-poetry. During her journey across India and Pakistan, she found a myriad of answers that cut across the widening rifts — both real and imagined, political and cultural — between Hindus and Muslims, and across the two countries. Vimani’s seminal documentary ‘Had Anhad’ (Bounded Boundless, 2010) was the result and the record of this journey.

The film moves across borders following singers who carry Kabir in their voices. But it also moves across time, excavating the ambiguities that have always surrounded Kabir’s identity. Was he the Hindu weaver of folklore, discovered in a lotus by a Brahmin widow? Was he the poet raised by Niru and Nima, a Muslim weaver couple of Banaras? Was he both? Or neither? The legends contradict each other, and each community claims him differently. This ambiguity is both a historical puzzle to be solved and the very heart of Kabir’s enduring presence, who was both Hindu and Muslim, but also neither.

One of the most persistent legends about Kabir goes like this:

After his death, Hindus insisted he was one of them while Muslims insisted he belonged to them instead. But when they lifted the shroud to claim his body, they found only a handful of flowers. Unable to agree, the communities divided the flowers between them and performed funeral rites according to their own faith. In the act of claiming him, they dissolved him. It is a story India continues to repeat: the tragedy of needing to name and claim what was always meant to be shared.

‘Had Anhad’ frames Kabir’s Ram — and Kabir himself — as a profoundly elastic, border-crossing presence that cannot be confined to doctrine, lineage, or nation. Rather than presenting Ram as a Hindu deity anchored in the mythological narrative of the Ramayana, the film follows singers like Mukhtiyar Ali, Prahlad Singh Tipaniya, and Shafi Mohammad Faqir across India and Pakistan, all of whom who invoke Kabir’s Ram as the inner, formless essence accessible to all. By letting multiple musical traditions articulate Ram in their own idioms, the documentary reveals that Kabir’s Ram, unlike the Ram of Hindu supremacists, is not a figure of sectarian belonging but a shared spiritual language — one that dissolves the rigidities of Hindu–Muslim identity rather than reinforcing them.

In tracing Kabir’s verses through landscapes shaped by both syncretic histories and contemporary communal fractures, ‘Had Anhad’ contrasts Kabir’s boundless Ram with the bounded, politicised Ram of the modern Hindutva nation-state. The film’s movement across geographical, religious, and aesthetic borders becomes a way of enacting Kabir’s teaching: that the divine is not found in temples, mosques, or names, but in the porous interior space where the ‘bounded’ world meets the ‘boundless’ spirit.

Watch ‘Had Anhad: Journeys with Ram & Kabir’ here:

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