a dalit poet-saint. 211
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 impos-
ing 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-offdera 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 in-
stance, 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 Ravi-
das 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