Place · Kabir death-place town · India
Maghar
Also known as Maghar — Kabīr’s tomb and samādhi
The Gorakhpur-district town where Kabir died about 1518, chosen — tradition says — precisely because dying at Maghar was held to forfeit the liberation that dying at Kashi guaranteed, which was his argument about both places made as an act.
- Function
- Burial and funerary
- Tradition
- Bhagat bani in the Guru Granth Sahib
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 26.750, 83.130
Worth knowing
A tomb and a samadhi stand side by side within one compound, because Muslims wanted to bury him and Hindus to cremate him and the story is that they found only flowers under the shroud. Both communities maintain their half, which is the most literal surviving monument to what the Kabir Panth was for.
Connections (3)
- Samadhi atKabīr
Kabīr chose Maghar to die in because tradition held that dying there cost you liberation, and dying in Banāras bought it — a proposition he thought absurd. The grave and the samādhi stand a few metres apart, one built by Muslims and one by Hindus, on the same plot and over the same man.
- Mythic displacement toKāshī / Vārānasī / Banāras
Banāras promised liberation to anyone dying in it and Maghar was said to cancel it. Kabīr went to Maghar deliberately, and the couplet about it is one of his most quoted: what is Banāras worth, he asks, if the heart is empty. The two towns are an argument with each other.
- Refusal of the tirthaKabīr Chaurā, Varanasi
Kabīr left Kāshī to die at Maghar, a place said to deny liberation, precisely to deny that any place could grant it. The Kabīr Chaurā maṭh in Banāras and the twin shrines at Maghar are the two ends of that argument — the city he worked in and the town he chose against it, both now keeping his memory as institutions he would have distrusted.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Maghar”. The Guru Granth Sahib, bhagat bani; David Lorenzen, Kabir Legends (1991).
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