A decade ago, a Wipro Foundation team member, Anurag Behar, walked into the office of Kabir Project, an initiative founded by filmmaker Shabnam Virmani. He asked her how she planned to make all the incredible work that she was doing accessible to teachers and students.
"It actually nudged me to do something in this direction," says Virmani.
Wipro Foundation collaborated with the Kabir Project more than a decade ago to find creative ways to bring mystic poetry and music to school classrooms and the education sector, and to create a large web archive called 'Ajab Shahar,' which is now available to the public. This collection contains over 180 songs and 230 couplets composed by Kabir and other Bhakti poets, along with many reflections, films and stories pertaining to mystic poetry.
What got Wipro Foundation interested in the Kabir Project?
The Kabir Project is a one-of-a-kind Wipro Foundation collaboration with partners who want to transform education. Virmani believes that Kabir and other Bhakti, Sufi, and Baul poets, who were fiercely iconoclastic in their social critique, have the power to inspire us to go deep and transform.
Their poems, which insist on unflinching self-interrogation, can make us think about how we create and maintain narrow divides through identity. Do we realize how important this concept was in the past, and how much it is more so now? The Kabir Project fosters transformative ideas capable of causing social change.