# Raidas' songs and the evolution of their repertoires **Presenter**: [[Peter Friedlander]] **Session**: [[Session 5. Devotional Repertoires]] **Abstract**: This paper addresses this question: what happened to Sant verses, such as those by Kabir and Raidas, during the period between ca. 1720 to 1820? The last half a century has seen considerable progress in scholarship on Kabir and Raidas. It has focused on two key eras: first, ca. 1570 to 1715, the era during which Sant literatures began to be recorded in manuscripts, and second, ca 1870 to 1920, the era in which Sant literatures assumed their print literature forms. However, this paper asks the question, what happened in the development of these verses between these two eras? To answer this question, I draw on two sources. First, repertoires found in manuscripts that Winand Callewaert and I studied in our, The life and words of Raidas (1992). Second, what happened to these repertoires in manuscripts with colophons copied between 1722 and 1826. Sant studies textual scholarship in the nineteen eighties identified how different manuscripts contained overlapping, but different, repertoires of verses attributed to individual Sants. However, this presented as a problem when seen through the lens of Ur text textual studies according to which there should have been an identifiable core text within the songs found in the manuscripts. However, since Hawley’s A storm of Songs (2015) and Linda Hess’s Bodies of Song (2015) many have rejected the Ur text model for studies of Sant verse Indic texts. Instead, of focusing on Ur texts and their transmission within a Bhakti movement, we should instead be looking at how songs evolved as they were transmitted within a Bhakti network. This paper argues that the shifting repertoires of Sant verses redacted in individual manuscript ‘snapshots’ of their traditions support the hypothesis that these songs were transmitted within a complex interplay of oral and manuscript traditions reflecting their transmission within Bhakti networks.