Buddhism in India

The Bhakti Movements 191

Ravidas: ‘lowering above the World of Birth’

While Nandanar has become well-known only in Tamil Nadu and

has had no recorded influence on other bhakti sants, the Chamar

or leatherworker, Ravidas, who lived in the 15th century, is one of

the most famous of santsin north India and has influenced many

others. Many of his songs survive in some form or the other. There

are countless stories about him and he is widely known as one of

the greatest of sagunadevotees, i.e., devotees of God ‘with form’,

who take Shiva or Ram or Krishna or one of the many incarnations

of Vishnu as their personal deity.

Ravidas is associated with the other great north Indian sant,

Kabir, in a story where a great debate between them is represented

as a sagunaversus nirguna(without qualities) devotion debate. He

is also linked to the Rajput princess Mirabai, most famous of the

women devotees, who took him as her guru. His compositions are

included in the Adi Granth, the scriptures of the Sikh community

(Hawley and Juergensmeier 1988: 9–23).

His many songs show both humility and devotion: ‘I am a peddlar

for Ram; I traffic in his easy ecstasy. I’ve loaded myself with the

wealth of Ram’s name while the world is loaded down with poison’

(ibid.: 29). They also show the aspiration to go beyond caste, though

the translated poems, available from ‘authenticated’ collections,

lack the bitter condemnation of Brahmanism and caste that can be

found in Kabir and Tukaram.

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, labourers or warriors,

halfbreeds, 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...

no one equals someone so pure and devoted –

not priests, not heroes, not parasolled kings.

As the lotus leaf floats above the water, Ravidas says,

so he flowers above the world of his birth (Adi Granth#38).

The dominant tradition traces the north Indian bhakti tradition to

Ramananda, a Brahman who moved to Varanasi from the south

Was this transformation a blessing bestowed upon Nandanar by
the Brahmans to reveal his true worth, or does it mask the murder
of a rebel, as recent radical interpretations would have it (ibid.:
47–48)? A 12th century account of a person who lived over 400
years earlier can be expected to give little evidence; in any case the
very lack of historical records about Nandanar reveals the power-
lessness of the Dalits. Somewhere in the decisive period of trans-
formation between the 7th and 12th centuries, as the village society
got stabilised, untouchability had become institutionalised with it.^1
What is emphasised in bhakti, as revealed in the story of
Nandanar, is humble though ardent devotion, throwing oneself on
the mercy of the deity, craving for God—a very different personal
response from the self-controlled questioning called for by classical
Buddhism.
What the life of this first untouchable santshows is that, in spite
of the claimed openness of the god to devotees of all castes,
Nandanar could not as a Paraiya worship the deity within the
temple. He could only do so after it is revealed that he is a Brahman.
Thus, whether or not he was in actuality a rebel, the story itself
reaffirms caste and untouchability. The records of the Shiva and
Vaishnava devotional movements remained under Brahman control
and upper caste control, and even the role of low-caste bhaktas in
them was used to increase its mass appeal and not to provide any
moral support for a rebellion against caste.
The Tamil movement originated before other bhakti move-
ments. While the early period recorded conflict with Buddhism
and Brahmanism, by the 12th century—which was also the time
it spread to north India—the relevance of this conflict was lost.
Buddhism was nearly wiped out of India; Jainism survived only
in enclaves. The coming of Islam provided a more important
context, particularly as the bhakti movement spread to Maharashtra
and to north India where they began in the late 13th and 14th
centuries.

190 Buddhism in India

(^1) See H. Kotani, one of the noted Japanese scholars on Maharashtra, who notes that
‘we know, in fact, that Indian society in general began to change from the bottom in
the seventh or eighth century...and that this transformation gave rise to the predominant
features of medieval India such as the village community...by the twelfth century’
(in Kotani, 1997: 56).