Oh well-born of Benares, I too am born well known:
My labor is with leather. But my heart can boast the Lord.
RAVIDAS, Adi Granth 38
Benares, Hinduism’s oldest city and a citadel of the Brahmin caste, fits along the left bank of the Ganges as if it were an elaborately embroidered sleeve. A long and complicated city, like the religious tradition it symbolizes, it opens at its southern extremity onto the spacious grounds of Banaras Hindu University, and for most people it stops there. But just beyond the high wall that surrounds the university, at its back gate, there is one more settlement, a dusty little enclave called Sri Govardhanpur. It is the last collection of houses before the country begins, and there is a reason that it has grown up where it has. This is a village inhabited almost entirely by Untouchables, outcastes. Even in a secular India committed by its constitution to the abolition of untouchability, their pariah identity still has its geographical symbol. (See figure L at the website http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/vasu/loh.)
The people of Sri Govardhanpur have no intention of accepting their lot as if it were decreed by fate or religion. Since 1967 they have devoted many of their efforts toward the completion of a large temple that is designed to put Sri Govardhanpur on the religious map of Benares. They hope that their four-story edifice will rival temples in other sectors of the city and become a familiar part of the pilgrims’ circuit—or if not that, at least serve as a magnet for low-caste people who are not always welcome in the city’s other temples. The project by no means belongs to the people of Sri Govardhanpur alone. Much of the organization came from a “mission” headquartered in New Delhi that was dedicated to advancing the Untouchables’ cause, and regular financial support has been provided by urbanites of Untouchable background who live in the distant but prosperous province of Punjab or lead even more comfortable lives in England and America. Clearly, even people who have managed to escape the worst strictures of caste care about erasing the shame of untouchability. In fact, many eschew the word: they are Dalits, “the oppressed.”1
The new edifice in Sri Govardhanpur is not just another Hindu temple. In fact, there is some debate about whether it should be called Hindu at all, for it is dedicated to the remembrance of a saint whose person, perspective, and teachings place him in a sense outside the Hindu pale. His name is Ravidas; he was a man of Benares; and though he lived in the fifteenth or sixteenth century, he still qualifies today as the great Untouchable saint of North India. If one means by Hinduism the religious system whose central rituals are entrusted to Brahmins, whose central institutions require a set of reciprocal but unequal social relationships, and whose guiding ideas set forth what life should be within this hierarchically variegated world and how it may rightly be transcended, then Ravidas was not really a Hindu. As he saw it, there was nothing fundamental about the institutions of caste. His position in society helped him see the point, for he was a leatherworker, a camar, a shoemaker, someone whose work brought him into daily contact with the hides of dead animals. Strict Hindus either shun the touch of such skins altogether, believing them to be polluting, or contact them only with the lowest portion of their bodies, the bottom of their feet. And that, by extension, is what the camar is in relation to almost all of Hindu society.
But Ravidas was special; he was a poet and singer, and the hymns he sang evidently had such a ring of truth that even Brahmins came to hear them. His poet’s charisma must have been equally powerful, for he says that the Brahmins actually bowed before him, in a total inversion of religious and social protocol (AG 38).2 Yet he never forgot his own condition. In praising God he habitually contrasted the divine presence to his own: God, he said, was finer than he, as silk was to a worm, and more fragrant than he, as sandalwood was to the stinking castor oil plant (AG 9).
Ravidas’s clear perception of his lowly condition made him poignantly aware that it did not belong just to him, but to every shoemaker and scavenger of this world. These, he felt, included not only his caste fellows but everyone who exists inside a body. No living being is spared the degradations of the flesh, and whoever prefers to think otherwise is dwelling in a world of make-believe (AG 9, 27). Ravidas thought it ridiculous that caste Hindus could set such store by rituals demanding the use of pure substances, when in truth there is nothing on earth that is not polluted. “Can I offer milk?” he asked in one poem, referring to the substance Hindus regard as purest of them all, since it emerges straight from the holy cow. His answer was that even it had been polluted by prior use: “The calf has dirtied it in sucking its mother’s teat” (AG 13).3 Nothing is spared the taint of the flesh, so he railed against anyone who treated another person as trash (AG 28, 31). Even kings, he said, dream that they are beggars; only the absence of love in one’s life makes one truly an Untouchable (AG 14, 35).
The wonder is that God is precisely the sort of being who cares for those who are troubled and lowly. As Ravidas puts it, he “rescues even tanners of hides” (AG 19). In relation to God, every person is untouchable; yet because God is who he is, every person is touched.
Such a message appeals on every front to the hardworking, socially oppressed people of Sri Govardhanpur; that Ravidas was a Benarsi makes him even more naturally their patron. But he does not belong to Untouchables alone. Ravidas is one of the bhakti family, and as such he is venerated by Hindus of all backgrounds and stations. The sharing in God that bhakti implies creates networks of human beings that cut across the divisions society erects—even those that it dignifies with religious significance. In many of its expressions bhakti has called into question that version of Hinduism that ties itself intimately to the caste system. Hence even upper-caste Hindus who regard themselves as its beneficiaries take care to include in the hagiographical pantheon at least one representative of caste groups normally considered too low to qualify as “twice-born”—ritually pure—members of society. When the camars of Sri Govardhanpur began building their temple to Ravidas, then, there was an aspect of Hindu religion to which they could appeal. On a bhakti construction of what Hindu religion is about, a temple to Ravidas had a genuine claim to being included in the religious universe of Benares.
Ravidas himself indicates the bhakti family in which he felt he belonged by naming in his poetry several of his predecessors in the faith. One of the names he gives is that of Namdev, a fourteenth-century saint of western India who was a tailor and a member of the relatively low caste associated with that profession (AG 11.4, 33.5). Another was Trilocan, also from the west (AG 33.5). A third—whose name he mentions more frequently than any other—was Kabir, the crusty fifteenth-century icon-oclast who, like Ravidas, lived in Benares (AG 11.3, 33.5, 39.6). Kabir too came from the lower echelons of society. He was a weaver and belonged to a caste, the julahas, many of whose members had found their place in Hindu society sufficiently distasteful that they had turned to Islam. In mentioning these three as recipients of divine grace along with himself, Ravidas underscored his sense of solidarity with a tradition of bhakti that flowed with particular animation in the lower ranks of society.
This, however, is only Ravidas’s immediate bhakti family, the one that he constructs for himself in several of the poems that have a good claim to being regarded as authentically his. These compositions are included in the Adi Granth, the bhakti anthology that serves as scripture to the Sikh community and features poems of the Sikh gurus. Its precursor, the Kartarpur Granth, was compiled in 1604 C.E. and contains the oldest substantial collection of poetry attributed to Ravidas: forty full-length poems (pads) and an epigrammatic couplet. All of them survive in the Adi Granth itself.
But many more poems than these are generally thought to have been sung by Ravidas,4 and many more connections between him and other bhakti figures are accepted by tradition. One of these traditional links is with Nanak—a connection that Sikhs see as almost a tenet of faith, since they understand Nanak, whom they regard as their founding guru, to have been inspired by the other poets anthologized in the Adi Granth. It is commonly accepted that Nanak and Ravidas were contemporaries who met at a place in Benares that is now called, fittingly, Guru Bagh (“The Gurus’ Garden”), but the estimation of who learned more from whom depends upon whether one is primarily a follower of Nanak or of Ravidas.5
Another saint mentioned in Ravidas’s company is Mirabai, the woman poet of Rajasthan, who is said in a modern text called the Ravidas Ramayana to have traveled all the way to Benares to obtain initiation from Ravidas.6 Another is Gorakhnath, a renowned yogi who is usually thought to have lived several centuries earlier.7 Still another is Ramanand, the Brahmin who is said to have played a critical role in the expansion of bhakti Hinduism by transferring it from its original home in South India to Benares, where he came to live. To judge by the account of Priyadas, the influential commentator who in 1712 fleshed out the skeleton provided by Nabhadas’s somewhat earlier anthology of bhakti saints (the Bhaktamal, ca. 1600), Ramanand managed to gather around himself a more dynamic circle of devotees than North India has seen before or since. As indicated in a list given by Nabhadas himself, both Kabir and Ravidas were included in their number.8
These and many other traditions about Ravidas’s place in the community of bhakti saints abound. Unfortunately, they cannot all be taken at face value. There is some indication, for example, that Ramanand lived a full century before Ravidas, which makes it hard for any but the most committed (who are willing to grant Ravidas a life span of 150 years or so) to think that the two could have met. Nor is there anything in the oldest collection of Ravidas’s poetry to point to Ramanand. With the Mirabai story too there are problems. It appears that the tale concerning her was grafted onto Priyadas’s similar but earlier account of a Jhali-lineage Rajput queen who, like Mira, came to Ravidas from the city of Cittor to be initiated by him as his spiritual child. In time the Jhali queen was forgotten as the fame of Mira, the queen’s musical counterpart, grew.9 But the debatable accuracy of these stories matters less than the spirit that gave them rise. What is important is that for many centuries after Ravidas, and right down to the present day, there has been a persistent desire to connect the cobbler-poet with a larger network of bhakti heroes. Ravidas’s low-caste followers are not the only ones to have felt this urge; other writers, including Brahmins, have done the same.10
The reason is that the bhakti tradition by nature runs in families—this is a piety of shared experience, of singing and enthusiastic communication—and each clan, to be inclusive, needs to have at least one representative from the Untouchable castes. In South India, where the bhakti movement can be traced back much farther than in the north, this meant that Tiruppan, an Untouchable, and Tirumankai, a member of the thief caste, were set alongside Brahmins and high-status Vellalas in building the family of Alvars—devotees to Vishnu who lived from the sixth to the ninth century. In the west of India one found Cokhamela, the Untouchable who on occasion transported carrion, and Namdev, the lowly tailor, in the company of such higher-caste divines as Jnandev and Eknath. And in North India, Kabir and especially Ravidas filled out the family of saints by providing it with poor cousins from the lower end of the social spectrum. The message proclaimed by this tradition of family associations is that the love of God transcends the givens of the social order, bringing together people who otherwise could not have met and creating an alternate, more truly religious society capable of complementing and challenging the one established by caste. It was often the saints situated on the lower rungs of the social ladder who envisioned this other society most clearly.
Some of the most vivid episodes in the traditional life stories of Ravidas take up this point. They reconstitute society according to a bhakti definition by showing that Ravidas belongs at its religious apex, that is, in the company of Brahmins. In all of these tales, those who are Brahmins by blood are the last to see the point.
The story of Queen Jhali (Priyadas talks as if this was her proper name) is a good example. Priyadas says that she traveled to Benares with some of her court Brahmins, who were then scandalized at her choice of gurus. They went to the king of Benares for justice, expecting a sympathetic ear, but the wise ruler, who had already had some experience with Brahmins jealous of Ravidas, submitted the matter to even higher arbitration. He brought both the Brahmins and Ravidas into the presence of the royal icon and announced that he would value the claim of whoever could show that the Lord inclined in his direction. The Brahmins chanted the correct Vedic verses, but these seemed to have no effect. When Ravidas began to sing, however, intoning a verse in which he asked God to reveal himself as the one whose nature is to rescue the fallen (patit pavan), the image responded by jumping directly into the poet’s lap.11
Queen Jhali insisted on taking Ravidas to her home in Rajasthan for a time, and the disgruntled Brahmins could do no more by way of protest. Yet nothing could persuade them to share a meal with the Untouchable saint. When the queen prepared a great feast to honor her newfound teacher, these religious aristocrats declined to eat from the same vessels that he did. Jhali bowed to their compunctions by giving them the ingredients separately, so that they could cook their own meal, and Ravidas issued no protest. When they all sat down, however—Ravidas on his side of the hall and the Brahmins on theirs—and the Brahmins raised the food to their mouths, they discovered to their horror that between each of them a Ravidas had miraculously materialized. Evidently he belonged in their row after all. They fled in consternation and challenged him on his right to be there, but when they did so he peeled back the skin from his chest and revealed a golden sacred thread that lay within, clear evidence of his inner brahminhood.12 (See figure M at the Web site http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/vasu/loh.)
The camars of Sri Govardhanpur love to tell this story, along with others testifying to Ravidas’s spiritual superiority. Another favorite is the tale of how the Ganges herself, a Hindu goddess with intimate ties to a wide range of brahminical rituals, acknowledged Ravidas’s claim. When the Brahmins of Benares challenged Ravidas’s right to preach as he did, the two sides agreed to let the river goddess decide the case: if each threw something into the water, which would she support on her surface? The Brahmins tossed in a piece of wood, but it sank like a stone. Yet when Ravidas threw a stone into the river, it floated.13
The people of Sri Govardhanpur find such stories about spiritual brahminhood congenial enough, but they are understandably reluctant to accept any hint that Ravidas was physically a Brahmin or even that he desired to be adopted into the spiritual care of Brahmins. The story that Ravidas sought initiation at the hands of Ramanand, a Brahmin, is an old one—it is told by Priyadas—but the Untouchables of Sri Govardhanpur deny it. Pursuing the new historical connections first suggested by B. R. Ghera, a retired civil servant living in Delhi who was the intellectual spearhead of the Ravidas mission in Sri Govardhanpur, they insist that Ravidas’s teacher was instead a certain Saradanand, about whom little has hitherto been heard.14
They are even more vehement in contesting the validity of another story told by Priyadas. They refuse to accept that Ravidas was a Brahmin in the life that preceded his incarnation as a camar. That they should find such a story offensive is no surprise, since it suggests that no leatherworker can become a saint unaided, but several details reported by Priyadas are particularly heinous. His explanation of why Ravidas was born a camar is that in the saint’s former life as a pupil of Ramanand he compromised his teacher’s Brahmin purity by offering him food donated by a merchant who had been tainted by business dealings with camars. According to the story, Ramanand could tell instantly that the food was contaminated by its distant association with Untouchables. Equally offensive is Priyadas’s depiction of what happened when this Brahmin pupil died and was reborn into a family of leather-workers. He says that as a baby Ravidas refused to receive milk from his own camar mother. Only when Ramanand heard of the newborn’s distress and came to adopt him would the child take sustenance.15
No one can deny that such stories are ex post facto attempts to brahminize Ravidas, and it is hard not to feel exactly the way the people of Sri Govardhanpur do about the light that they cast on camars. Still, the desire of Brahmins to claim Ravidas’s charisma as their own is worthy of note. What galls the inhabitants of Sri Govardhanpur and other low-caste communities, however, is that this ecumenical spirit is almost never extended from the realm of bhakti hagiography into the real world. The people of Sri Govardhanpur had to appeal to the city government for more than a decade before the road that passes by the new temple was grudgingly paved. They know, too, that many of the Brahmins of Benares scoff at the procession that passes through the city each year on the day they celebrate Ravidas’s birth. And they have often had to endure humiliations such as those suffered by a group of Benares Ravidasis who traveled the long road to Rajasthan to visit the temple of Mirabai in her natal village of Merta, only to be denied entrance once they arrived.
The question that lingers here is whether the message of bhakti is a message of social protest. Is the equality it celebrates fundamentally a social reality—and therefore something revolutionary in its Indian context—or is it only spiritual, in which case it can coexist with brahminical Hinduism even if it does not endorse it?
On the one hand it seems clear that a poet like Ravidas raises crucial questions about the social order. His perception of Brahmins and others who set store by standard Hindu texts and rituals is scarcely complimentary, and he has contempt for all who denigrate people belonging to other sectors of society than their own (AG 31). He insists that
A family that has a true follower of the Lord
Is neither high caste nor low caste, lordly or poor. (AG 29)
The number of times he refers to his own caste position suggests that he was always mindful of it.16 On the other hand, he does not propose any religious legislation that would change the current social order. To the contrary, it often seems that he values his own lowly position as a vantage point from which the truth about everyone comes more clearly into view. His bhakti vision seems to be not so much that God desires to reform society as that he transcends it utterly, and that in the light of the experience of sharing in God, all social distinctions lose their importance. At the end of the poem most recently quoted he speaks of how the person of faith may “flower above the world of his birth” as lotuses float upon the water (AG 29). And he often dwells on the miracle that God has come to him as an implicit sign of how remarkable it is that the holy should touch any human life (AG 9, 30, 33).
Ravidas’s bhakti, then, is an answer to caste Hinduism, but not explicitly a call for its reform. Even though he speaks of a kingdom “where none are third or second—all are one” and where the residents “do this or that, they walk where they wish,” still he admits that it is his “distant home,” and he issues no direct call for realizing it here on earth (AG 3).
Indeed, when he speaks of earth his emphasis is quite different. He characterizes life in this world as an inevitably difficult journey and asks God for help along the way (AG 4). Death stands waiting at the end of the road, he knows (AG 4, 26), and when it strikes, even one’s closest relatives scurry to keep their distance (AG 27). As for the body, it is a fiction of air and water, nothing more than a hollow clay puppet (AG 19, 12). About all there is to do in such circumstances—as bewildering to human beings as the wider world is to a frog in a well—is cry for help (AG 5). Fortunately, remarkably, there is a friend who answers that lonely call, someone who is at times confusingly, disconcertingly near, someone to whom people are tied by what Ravidas calls on several occasions “the bonds of love” (AG 10, 15, 18). That friend, of course, is God.
The bhakti of Ravidas, then, is a gritty, personal faith, so it is fitting that the response of Untouchables to it and to him has a number of facets—social, liturgical, conceptual, and, of course, personal. The first of these responses is indeed the demand for social reform, and at various points over the past several decades it has been couched in frankly political terms. One of the organizations involved in building the Ravidas temple in Sri Govardhanpur was called the All India Adi Dharm Mission, a body established in 1957. Working from a heritage that extends back into the early years of the twentieth century, it has at its core the idea that the lowest echelons of modern Indian society are the survivors of a noble race who inhabited the subcontinent long before the Aryan Hindus arrived from Central Asia. They were a people who “worshiped truthfulness, justice, simplicity and who were benevolent and helped one another at the time of difficulty.” This was India’s adi dharm, its “original religion” or “original moral order,” something that was substantially destroyed by the Aryan incursion, but that God saw fit to revive by raising up sages and gurus such as Nanak, Kabir, and preeminently Ravidas.17
Over the course of its episodic but now relatively long history, the Adi Dharm (or, as it is sometimes called, Ad Dharm) movement has attempted to mobilize the lower castes of North India, particularly in the Punjab, to achieve greater social justice.18 Even the establishment of the Ravidas temple in Sri Govardhanpur serves a potentially political purpose. The current plan to extend the educational activities of the temple by founding a Ravidas college in Sri Govardhanpur is aimed at preparing lower-caste people for jobs in a literate society and enlarging the pool of candidates available to fill positions in government service that are reserved for members of the lower castes.19
When Ravidas’s name is sounded in religious circles, then, the social message associated with him is never inaudible—even if, to judge from the compositions anthologized in the Adi Granth, the saint himself was not entirely preoccupied with the matter. But this is only one facet of the modern response to Ravidas. Another is more specifically cultic and ceremonial: at Sri Govardhanpur and a number of Ravidas deras (sacred compounds) in the Punjab, he serves as the actual focus of the community’s worship.
Considering the liturgical importance of Ravidas, it is surprising that for years none of the verses most likely to have come from the mouth of the master himself played a role in the worship services that take place at Sri Govardhanpur. When the old liturgist sat down in front of the large, handwritten book from which he chanted, the turgid verse he intoned had almost no relation to the vivid compositions collected in the Adi Granth. Though each of the poems he recited bore Ravidas’s oral signature, as is customary in the pad genre he employed,20 these dutiful compositions seem to be about Ravidas, rather than by him. Each of them praises the greatness of one’s guru and underscores the importance of preserving one’s fealty to the master. The following, the second in the book, is typical:
Project the guru’s image in your mind,
hold it ever steady in your thought.
Purity, charity, making yourself a name—
these only bolster your pride,
But to utter the name of the guru in your heart
will make you unshakably wise. . . .
And so forth, ending with the phrase, “so says Ravidas.”21 The language of this poem is flatter and more plodding than what one meets in the Adi Granth. Its simplicity has the advantage of making the verse easily intelligible to its hearers, but because its style is so different from those likely to be authentic, the chances are that the poem is not very old. Though it purports to be the verbiage of Ravidas himself, it has a flaccid, contemporary ring and could scarcely have been produced before the nineteenth century. Even that seems improbably early.
To understand this poetry, one must know who created the book in which it is inscribed. It was B. R. Ghera, the retired civil servant who was so critically involved in launching Ravidas on his most recent career. His intention, like several Adi Dharmis before him, was to draw together the poems of Ravidas into a collection that would rival the anthology of poems that Sikhs take as their scripture, the Adi Granth. To do so, he made frequent trips between 1963 and 1967 to a teacher named Harnam who lived in a dera in Moradabad District, not far east of Delhi. Ghera reported that Harnam, who himself came from a lower-caste background, was exclusively a follower of Ravidas, so his collection of Ravidas poems was to be trusted as authentic. Ghera intended to use it as the basis for a series of volumes he would entitle the Guru Ravidas Granth. The title has a familiar ring. Ghera’s idea was that when this Granth emerged before the public eye, it would be received as comparable in size and depth to its Sikh namesake.22
These efforts were not entirely successful. In the 1980s the modest audience that assembled morning and evening heard only a small selection of these didactic verses from a manuscript version of Ghera’s work, and since then the scriptural initiative has passed firmly into the hands of Ghera’s parent organization, the dera of Sant Sarvan Das located in the Punjab. There was a dispute in which issues of property ownership, institutional authority, and scriptural correctness were at stake. It was said that Ghera’s version of the temple’s founding events substituted his own agency for that of Sant Sarvan Das, and that he had obscured the words of the true Ravidas and put his own in their place. The whole thing landed in the courts, and they ruled against Ghera.23 In the end a very different version of Ravidas emerged in the songs sung daily at Sri Govardhanpur. Nowadays the liturgist chants the whole of a little red book in which are printed the forty-one compositions that appear in the Adi Granth, simultaneously connecting Ravidas with the Sikh context and liberating him from it. In preaching from the text he aligns Ravidas with God and the inner soul, and the service concludes with a recitation of the guru lineage going back to Sant Sarvan Das. Copies of the little red book, published by Sant Sarvan Das’s organization, are available to the public at the spacious Ravidas Park that has opened on the banks of the Ganges not far away.
The consolidation of the community’s identity behind the figure of Ravidas proceeds apace. He has become their guru—the founder of their faith and the source of their inspiration—as Nanak is for Sikhs. But he has also become the sort of guru that would be familiar in many Hindu communities. Whereas Sikhs proscribe the use of any image in their places of worship (gurdvaras), preferring to meet Nanak and his successors entirely through their words, the Ravidasis of Sri Govardhanpur can establish visual contact with the master, as Hindus typically do. A multicolored, life-size image of the great saint is installed at the center of the altar area, and there is another upstairs in the pilgrims’ dormitory. As songs praising the guru’s greatness are sung, he receives the community’s adoration in person.
A third way in which the sixteenth-century camar saint matters in the lives of his latter-day caste fellows goes beyond social reform and religious cult. Through Ravidas, Untouchables are able to map out their relation to other aspects of Indian society in a manner that is clearer and more satisfying to them than the conceptual grids through which others are apt to see them.
One expression of this process of conceptual clarification is an enormous construction effort long under way on the opposite side of Benares from Sri Govardhanpur. There, on a bluff overlooking the Ganges, one of the most important Untouchable political figures of recent memory, Deputy Prime Minister Jagjivan Ram, began building a temple to Ravidas as the last great project of his career. Work proceeds at a slow but regular pace, and the edifice is splendid indeed. Covered entirely with marble on the inside, it contains a vast sanctuary, a huge kitchen, and quarters for ascetics and visiting scholars. It will also house a museum in which will be deposited not only memorabilia relating to Ravidas but those documenting the life of Jagjivan Ram as well. In the circular appealing for funds, in fact, these two share the spotlight: a picture of Jagjivan Ram is on one side of the page, and a picture of Ravidas is on the other.24
Jagjivan Ram’s temple says many things. First and foremost, of course, it says that Ravidas belongs on the highlands along the Ganges as much as any other Hindu god or saint. Fortunately Jagjivan Ram’s political connections enabled him to acquire from the government the land necessary to make such a statement. Second, the temple says something about Ravidas’s place among the other bhakti saints of North India: it puts him right in the center. Near the temple’s entrance a picture of Ravidas was for many years flanked by others depicting Kabir and Surdas, and in the sanctuary one finds not only a central altar dedicated to Ravidas but an ancillary shrine to Mirabai. Third, the structure states the relation between the veneration of Ravidas and India’s major religious communities. Spires on each of the corners symbolize Sikhism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam, and in their midst one glimpses the great spire to Ravidas. The message is that what Ravidas represents stands at the center of all the great religions and illumines them equally. Hinduism is notably occluded.
Finally there is a political message. The person long charged with day-to-day operations at the temple, Ram Lakhan, a former member of Parliament and minister in Indira Gandhi’s government, declared it to be “the people’s temple,” with the implication that the people provide the basis upon which all other structures rest. To speak this way is to cast Ravidas in the role of vox populi and to suggest not too subliminally that the Congress Party, in which both Jagjivan Ram and Ram Lakhan served, is the organization best able to unite adherents of all communities.25 But nowadays there is stiff competition for lower-caste votes from parties whose social base is actually there.
The people of Sri Govardhanpur and their many pilgrim visitors do certainly visit this new monument, but they are well aware that it was Jagjivan Ram’s establishment connections that made its construction possible. Some quip that it is less a temple to their saint than to the political figure who posed as his devotee. And they have their own way of charting the territory that ties them, through Ravidas, to the wider world. The contents of their own Ravidas edifice may be less imposing than what is being assembled across town, but they serve essentially the same function.
First of all, there is a life-size statue of the bespectacled Sant Sarvan Das, the Punjabi religious leader whose Ravidas following contributed the financial means that made the temple possible and whose far-off dera welcomes pilgrims from Sri Govardhanpur into what seems a pan-Indian community.26 Through the years, the pictures that line the walls of the sanctuary have served a similar purpose. For instance, there used to be a map of India recording in careful detail the journeys that Ravidas took around the subcontinent. It showed how he traveled from Kashmir in the north to the Deccan in the south and spanned the distance between Puri and Dvaraka, two great hubs of pilgrimage on the east and west coasts—a total journey of 5,946 kilometers, as the legend announces. This map had the effect of placing Ravidas in the great tradition of philosophers and theologians who circled the land to establish the paramount legitimacy of their views.
Other illustrations do the same thing in other ways. One painting, for instance, depicts the moment in which Ravidas initiated Mirabai. It relates him to the figure who is probably the most popular member of the North Indian bhakti family, but who stands at the head of no formalized cult or community of her own. This makes it less dangerous than it otherwise might be for these lower-caste people to assert their guru’s primacy over her, and thereby suggest that he is the ultimate cause of her celebrity. Another picture once showed the master’s own lineage, situating him as the central figure in a genealogy of revelation that extends from the present era of world history all the way back to the beginning of time.27
Of course, the people of Sri Govardhanpur are aware that other people see things other ways, and they themselves have not always accepted everything these pictures imply. No problem. They understand that history has a tendency to be forged after the fact by communities that wish to shape it. After all, how many stories of Ravidas himself have been suppressed or twisted by upper-caste groups eager to rewrite history so that it serves their own interest? Furthermore, they take it as given that things seem different from different perspectives, and that people emphasize what matters most to them. In this perception they are not alone. This feature of Hindu thinking seemed so pervasive to the pioneering Indologist Max Müller that he felt he had to coin new words to describe it. He spoke of “kathenotheism” and “henotheism,” both referring to the Hindu tendency to worship gods one at a time yet regard each as ultimate for the period during which that god is at the forefront of the believer’s attention.28 Similarly, when it comes to saints and society, Hindus find it natural that people should draw toward their own point of focus all that concerns them, as the Untouchables of North India have consolidated much of the general bhakti heritage around Ravidas.
The henotheistic habit of mind makes it possible for people like those who live in Sri Govardhanpur to assign themselves a convincingly important position in the broad sweep of Indian society and religion. If others do not orient themselves by the same map, it does not greatly matter. For these Benarsis the figure of Ravidas, a gift from the past, serves as a major point of reference, and for that reason he is very much alive in the present, shaping the world half a millennium after his death.
Translated with Mark Juergensmeyer
I’ve never known how to tan or sew,
though people come to me for shoes.
I haven’t the needle to make the holes
or even the tool to cut the thread.
Others stitch and knot, and tie themselves in knots
while I, who do not knot, break free.
I keep saying Ram and Ram, says Ravidas,
and Death keeps his business to himself.29 (AG 20)
A family that has a true follower of the Lord
Is neither high caste nor low caste, lordly or poor.
The world will know it by its fragrance.
Priests or merchants, laborers or warriors,
half-breeds, outcastes, and those who tend cremation fires—
their hearts are all the same.
He who becomes pure through love of the Lord
exalts himself and his family as well.
Thanks be to his village, thanks to his home,
thanks to that pure family, each and every one.
For he’s drunk with the essence of the liquid of life
and he pours away all the poisons.
No one equals someone so pure and devoted—
not priests, nor heroes, nor parasolled kings.
As the lotus leaf floats above the water, Ravidas says,
so he flowers above the world of his birth.30 (AG 29)
The house is large, its kitchen vast,
but after only a moment’s passed, it’s vacant.
This body is like a scaffold made of grass:
the flames will consume it and render it dust.
Even your family—your brothers and friends—
clamor to have you removed at dawn.
The lady of the house, who once clung to your chest,
shouts “Ghost! Ghost!” now and runs away.
The world, says Ravidas, loots and plunders all—
except me, for I have slipped away
by saying the name of God. (AG 27)
The day it comes, it goes;
whatever you do, nothing stays firm.
The group goes, and I go;
the going is long, and death is overhead.
What! Are you sleeping? Wake up, fool,
wake to the world you took to be true.
The one who gave you life daily feeds you, clothes you.
Inside every body, he runs the store.
So keep to your prayers, abandon “me” and “mine.”
Now’s the time to nurture the name that’s in the heart.
Life has slipped away. No one’s left on the road,
and in each direction the evening dark has come.
Madman, says Ravidas, here’s the cause of it all—
it’s only a house of tricks. Ignore the world. (AG 26)
The regal realm with the sorrowless name:
they call it Queen City, a place with no pain,
No taxes or cares, none owns property there,
no wrongdoing, worry, terror, or torture.
Oh my brother, I’ve come to take it as my own,
my distant home, where everything is right.
That imperial kingdom is rich and secure,
where none are third or second—all are one.
Its food and drink are famous, and those who live there
dwell in satisfaction and in wealth.
They do this or that, they walk where they wish,
they stroll through fabled palaces unchallenged.
Oh, says Ravidas, a tanner now set free,
those who walk beside me are my friends.31 (AG 3)
1. I mean no disrespect by retaining the term Untouchable here. I do so only because Ravidās refuses so pointedly to avoid it. The literature on Śrī Govardhanpur is principally confined to Julie Womack, “Ravidas and the Chamars of Banaras,” an essay written for the Junior Year Abroad Program of the University of Wisconsin in Benares, 1983. Also relevantare B. R. Gherā, Śrī Guru Ravidās jī kā Samk
ipt Itihās (n.p.: All India Adi Dharm Mission, n.d.); Mark Juergensmeyer, Religion as Social Vision: The Movement against Untouchability in 20th-century Punjab (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 260–62; and R. S. Khare, The Untouchable as Himself: Ideology, Identity, and Pragmatism among the Lucknow Chamars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 40–50, 94–104.
2. This and most other citations of poems of Ravidās are drawn from the series recorded in the Sikh scripture, called Ādi Granth [AG] or Gurū Granth Sāhib. They have been sequentially numbered by Padam Gurcaran Simh, Sant Ravidās: Vicārak aur Kavi (Jullundur: Nav-Cintan Prakāśan, 1977), 191–204.
3. Ravidās was not the first poet to voice this sentiment. For an earlier example from South India, see A. K. Ramanujan, Speaking of Śiva (Baltimore: Penguin, 1973), 90.
4. Printed collections of poetry attributed to Ravidās are given a systematic listing in Darshan Singh, A Study of Bhakta Ravadāsa (Patiala: Punjabi University, 1981), 3–4. To this list should be added the edition compiled by Candrikāprasād Jijñāsu, Sant Pravar Raidās Sāhab, rev. ed. (Lucknow: Bahujan Kalyā
Prakāśan, 1969 [1959]), and, notably, the two-hundred-odd poems assembled in B. P. Śarmā, Sant Guru Ravidās-Vā
ī (Delhi: Sūrya Prakāśan, 1978), 66–142. The most ample English translation is that of K. N. Upadhyaya, Guru Ravidas: Life and Teachings (Beas, Punjab: Radha Soami Satsang Beas, 1981),76–210.
5. The version reported at Śrī Govardhanpur is that Nānak came to Guru Bāgh in quest of the meaning of spirituality. Ravidās satisfied him with a sermon on the subject, in consequence of which Nānak took initiation from Ravidās before departing (Kāfi Dās, interview, Varanasi, August 20, 1985).
6. The standard version of this text is that of Bakhsīdās, edited by Rājā Rām Miśra (Mathura: Śyām Kāfi Press, 1970); the Mīrābāī section occurs on pp. 67–81. An entirely revised and even more recent version is to be found in Girjāśa
kar Miśra, Raidās Rāmāyaa (Mathura: Bhagavatī Prakāśan, 1981), 92–98.
7. Bakhsīdās, Ravidās Rāmāyaa, 81–82; Miśra, Raidās Rāmāyaa, 98–102.
8. Nābhādās, Śrī Bhaktamāl, with the Bhaktirasabodhinī commentary of Priyādās (Lucknow: Tejkumār Press, 1969), 282, 471–72, 480–81. There is a second major source of early hagiographical writing about Ravidās, Kabīr, and a number of other nirgua saints: the paricayīs (accounts) of Anantdās, which purport to have been written near the end of the sixteenth century and therefore to have been approximately contemporary with the core text of the Bhaktamāl—Nābhādās’s own verse. Anantdās’s paricayīs are considerably less well-known than the Bhaktamāl and have not been published until very recently, so I will focus on the Bhaktamāl here. Valuable work on Anantdās has been done by Trilokī Nārāya Dīk
it, Paricayī Sāhitya (Lucknow: Lucknow University, 1957), Lalitā Prasād Dūbe, Hindi Bhakta-Vārtā Sāhitya (Dehra Dun: Sāhitya Sadan, 1968), and David N. Lorenzen in collaboration with Jagdish Kumar and Uma Thukral, Kabir Legends and Ananda-Das’s Kabir Parachai (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991). Readers of English have access to Anantdās’s paracaī on Ravidās through the translation provided by Winand M. Callewaert in The Hagiographies of Anantadās: The Bhakti Poets of North India (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 2000), 303–35.
9. Priyādās’s account is found in Nābhādās, Bhaktamāl, 477–78. In recent times, perhaps because of renewed awareness of the Bhaktamāl, there have been different attempts to clarify the relation between the two queens of Cittor. One oral tradition, alive at the temple of Mīrābāī in Brindavan, specifies that Jhālī was Mīrā’s mother-in-law and states, following Priyādās, that it was she, not Mīrā, who took initiation from Ravidās. The conclusion drawn in Brindavan is that Mīrā herself was not Ravidās’s pupil and that the popular legend to that effect is a case of mistaken identity (Pradyumna Pratāp Sih, interview, Brindavan, August 30, 1985). On the other side are those who are committed to retaining the tradition that Mīrā accepted Ravidās as her guru. The author of the Ravidās Rāmāyaa, for example, retains both stories but recounts that of Mīrā first and at greater length, relegating Jhālī’s encounter with the master to the end of the book and giving the queen’s name not as Jhālī but as Yogavatī (Bakhsīdās, Ravidās Rāmāyaa, 111, 117–19; cf. Miśra, Raidās Rāmāyaa, 114–16).
10. An influential example is V. Raghavan, The Great Integrators: The Saint-Singers of India (New Delhi: Publications Division, Government of India, 1966), 52–54. This book is based on a series of lectures broadcast over All India Radio, December 11–14, 1964.
11. Priyādās in Nābhādās, Bhaktamāl, 477–78. His account is extremely condensed at points; it is reported here as interpreted by Sītārāmśara Bhagavānprasād Rūpkalā.
12. Priyādās in Nābhādās, Bhaktamāl, 478. It is possible that the model for this story was provided by an incident included in relatively recent tellings of the Rāmāyaa, in which Hanumān’s unparalleled devotion to Rām, Sītā, and Lakma is proved by his tearing open his chest to reveal their images ensconced within. See K. C. Aryan and Subhashini Aryan, Hanuman in Art and Mythology (Delhi: Rekha Prakashan, n.d.), 78, pls. 31, 111, 112.
13. Dhannū Rām et al., interview, Śrī Govardhanpur, August 13, 1985. Versions of this story appear in Bakhsīdās, Ravidās Rāmāyaa, 51–52, and Miśra, Raidās Rāmāyaa, 57–60; and the temple to Ravidās now being built in memory of Jagjīvan Rām at Rājghāt in Benares (see further text discussion) is said to mark the spot where this miracle occurred.
14. Gherā, Sa
kipt Itihās, 1. Gherā reports (p. 3) that it was not Ravidās who sought instruction from Rāmānand, in fact, but precisely the other way around. In other Ravidās communities it is not disputed that Rāmānand was Ravidās’s teacher, but it may be pointed out that Ravidās substantially changed the nature of what he was taught. This view has been expressed by Mahadeo Prashad Kureel (interview, Lucknow, November 28, 1986).
15. See Priyādās’s commentary in Nābhādās, Bhaktamāl, 471–172.
16. In “signing” his poems, he refers to himself in AG 3, 4, 5, 9, and 19 as “Ravidās the leatherworker” (ravidās camār, ravidās camārā) and as “Ravidās the slave” (ravidās dās, ravidās. . . dāsā). Or he may speak of his low birth directly, as in AG 2, 30, 38, and 39.
17. B. R. Gherā, All India Ādi Dharm Mission (New Delhi: All India Ādi Dharm Mission, n.d.), 5–6.
18. Juergensmeyer, Religion as Social Vision, 33–155.
19. B. R. Gherā, personal communication, December 9, 1983. Cf. Juergensmeyer, Religion as Social Vision, 254.
20. Some traditions also attribute dohās—couplets—to Ravidās, but only one of these is found in the Ādi Granth.
21. Poem no. 2 in the Guru Ravidās Granth (handwritten in Devanagari on the basis of a published original in Gurmukhi) as transcribed for Virendra Singh. I am grateful to Virendra Singh for permission to make use of this copy.
22. B. R. Gherā, personal communication, December 9, 1983. Another anthology of Ravidās’s poems in current use is that of Candrikāprasād Jijñāsu, Sant Pravar Raidās Sāhab. It contains 102 pads (poems) and 18 sākhīs (couplets).
23. Prakāś Māhī, Bījendra Kumār Pradhān, and Sant Aughad Nāth Kavi, interviews, Śrī Govardhanpur, November 11, 2003.
24. Jagjīvan Rām, “Appeal: Nirmāādhīn Guru Ravidās Mandir, Kāśī” [1985].
25. Rām Lakhan, interview, Varanasi, August 19, 1985.
26. On Sarvan Dās and his derā at Ballan, see Juergensmeyer, Religion as Social Vision, 84–85, 260–61, 264, and the sixth unnumbered plate.
27. Other figures included in that genealogy are Lonī Devī, the goddess of “the original inhabitants” (ādivāsīs) of India, whose power is in effect from the beginning of time; Śabuk, belonging to the third world age (tretā yug), counting back from present time; Sudarśan, belonging to the second (dvāpar yug); and Dhanā and Cetā in our own era, the kali yug.
28. F. Max Müller, Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion (London: Longmans, Green, 1882), 277.
29. In Ravidās’s usage, the term Rām refers not to Rāmacandra, the hero of the Rāmāyaa and the seventh avatar of Vishnu, but to God in general. In part because it rhymes with the Hindi word for “name” (nām), Rām is a name of God especially worthy of human contemplation. The phrase rām nām is also used in AG 27 below.
30. In the phrase “Priests or merchants, laborers or warriors” Ravidās lists the four classical divisions (vara) of Indian society. But even beneath the lowest of these, the laborers, are others: “half-breeds” (ca
ār), “outcastes” (malech), and “those who tend the cremation fires” (om) These are all Untouchables.
31. The phrase “Queen City, a place with no pain” translates the Hindi begam purā. Purā means plainly “city,” but begam has two possible meanings. The easiest way to construe it is as the Urdu word meaning “a lady of nobility”—whence the translation “queen”—since Indian cities with a Muslim past often have names such as this. The alternative, however, is to hear it as a compound of be, “without,” and gam, “pain.” The translation attempts to preserve the ambiguity. This poem is notable for the extent of its Urdu vocabulary, but that should occasion no surprise. If Ravidās has a poem that borders on being genuinely political, it is this, and the overriding political institutions of his time were Muslim. The friend or friends mentioned in the last line may be any companion in Queen City or that special companion, God.
This essay was previously published as “Ravidas,” in J. S. Hawley and Mark Juergensmeyer, Songs of the Saints of India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004), 9–23, 175–78.