When spiritually defunct interpret or translate the holy texts, the results are disastrous. Such is the plight of a few below mentioned Swamis and authors who lacked spiritual interface to decipher the coded language of the texts but made an utterly disgraceful attempt to still try and reach meaningless conclusions. The biggest amongst them is Swami Dayanand Saraswati who attempted a translation of the vedas and made a mess ot it. Then there have been a few so called "eminent authors" and "scholars" who by the virtue of being spiritually hollow debased the texts and speeches of great saint like Kabir. The list is by no means exhaustive but I felt compelled to write about the mentioned few who have done gross injustice to the Vedas and Kabir Sahib.
Dayanand Saraswati
Dayanand Saraswati can be called the biggest dolt of the century. Once someone gets aversed with his literary work of Satyarth Prakash and his attempt at translation of vedas, one realises how despicable a man Dayanand was and how hollow his spiritual understanding remained.
In his translation of the vedas, he has moulded the context and the meanings as per his own whims. Due to his internal bias and poor knowledge about God in general, when translating the vedas he has deliberately twisted the meanings or omitted the words altogether which did not fit his agenda and understanding. Thereby he made a real mess of the vedas. It would have been better had he not touched them at all. Now Sant Rampal Ji has corrected those follies which have impregnated the society and done lasting damage. Restoration work is always slow and thereby is taking time to filter through to the devotee society.
Nikky-Guninder Kaur Singh
Nikky-Guninder Kaur Singh feels the teachings of Kabir Ji are not in agreement with those of Guru Nanak Dev. Her view is that while Guru Nanak Dev promoted feminism, Kabir ji opposed it or held a derogatory view of females in general.
Cursory glance in to her text also shows that she considered Kabir ji to be an ascetic. This shows how shallow her understanding of Kabir ji and his spiritual knowledge is. She doesn't even know what Kabir Ji preached. She then draws a contrast with the teachings of Guru Nanak Dev where she claims that Guru Nanak Dev was against asceticism. The irony is that had she read Kabir Ji properly she would have realised that Kabir ji was a staunch opposer of any asceticism, ostentations, arbitrary rituals, pilgrimages, fasts, unncessary festivals and plenty other useless practices prevalent at the time in Hinduism and Islam.
Her own understanding of the teachings of Guru Nanak Dev is also very superficial. She builds up the case where a bride seeks union with the divine. Had she had a bit more intellect, she would have realised that a soul has been attributed the gender of a "women" in the bani, who is seeking union with the Supreme Lord. She then contrasts it to the teachings of Kabir Ji and claims that Kabir Ji is proposing the opposite. Henceforth she concludes that Guru Nanak Dev could not be a follower of Kabir Ji as the teachings are not concordant.
It is a travesty that lack of understanding on the part of the author lets her conclude a completely arbitrary inference. The fact remains that Guru Nanak Dev himself invokes Kabir in his bani in Shri Guru Granth Sahib (in Rag Siri, Mehla 1, Ghar 4, page 24 & Rag Tilang, Mehla 1, page 721) and eulogises him.
Likewise Nikky-Guninder Kaur Singh tries to build a narrative around Guru Gobind Singh Ji in Bachhitar Natak and Chandi Di Var and tries to dissociate the devotion of Guru Gobind Singh Ji to Goddess Durga by calling it a praise rather than any sort of invocation. She even tries to translate the word "Bhagauti" as "Sword" rather than a salutation to the Goddess itself, as in her own mental bias she is opposed to Hinduism. She is simply unable to digest the fact that Hinduism had a bearing on Sikhism, rather Sikhism originating from Hinduism. Nikky-Guninder Kaur Singh is a proponent of Sikhism and has tried her best to prove it to be far superior than any other religion, Hinduism in particular but sadly is oblivious to the truth.
Karine Schomer & Wendy O'Flaherty
These two authors claim that Kabir was a misogynist. What more can one say if an author draws this conclusion by studying a saint.
Kabir ji has himself said in his speech, that if someone tries to decipher holy texts without the guidance of a guru, then this is what the end result is i.e. they remain ignorant. Karine Schomer and Wendy O'Flaherty are a prime example of this. Nothing more needs to be said about these two who wasted their time studying Kabir and drew this useless conclusion by reading things out of context and having no basic understanding of spiritual concepts.
