208. caste
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 him-
self 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 theAdi Granth.Though each of the poems he recited
bore Ravidas’s oral signature, as is customary in thepadgenre 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 sim-
plicity has the advantage of making the verse easily intelligible to its hearers, but be-
cause 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 in-
scribed. 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, theAdi
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 re-
ported that Harnam, who himself came from a lower-caste background, was exclu-
sively 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