a dalit poet-saint. 207
what Ravidas calls on several occasions “the bonds of love” (AG10, 15, 18). That
friend, of course, is God.
THE RAVIDAS LEGACY
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, con-
ceptual, 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 subcon-
tinent 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 de-
stroyed 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 jus-
tice.^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 prepar-
ing lower-caste people for jobs in a literate society and enlarging the pool of candi-
dates 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 as-
sociated with him is never inaudible—even if, to judge from the compositions an-
thologized 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 Ravi-
das deras (sacred compounds) in the Punjab, he serves as the actual focus of the com-
munity’s worship.