The Bhakti Movements 193‘Dependency is evil, the dependent are miserable—
Ravidas considers dependency the lowest of all (Shalvan Patrika,
25 June 2001).The dominant account can be disputed on good grounds: Ravidas
himself never mentions Ramanand, who seems to have lived a full
century before Ravidas. The santsmentioned in Ravidas’ own
poetry—those he considered his ‘family’—include the Maharashtrian
tailor Namdev and the weaver Kabir (Hawley and Juergensmeier
1988: 9–23).
Ravidas is depicted as having high-caste disciples. Among these are
two Rajput women, Mirabai and Queen Jhali, who is said to have
met Ravidas on a trip to Banaras. According to the story, she accepted
Ravidas as a guru, against the strong advice of her Brahman advisors,
and when she prepared a feast to honour him, the Brahmans declined
to eat from the same vessels or sit in the same row with him—but
they found that a Ravidas had miraculously materialised at the side of
every Brahman. When they challenged his right to be there, ‘he peeled
back the skin from his chest and revealed a golden sacred thread that
lay within, clear evidence of his inner brahmanhood’ (Ibid.: 14–15).
In the end, Ravidas’ bhajansreflect both a sense of poverty and
caste humiliation and a desire to find a utopia without suffering,
taxes or property; one that is, above all, a Begumpura or ‘Queen
City’ of companionship:The regal realm with the sorrowless name
they call it Begumpura, 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...
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 (Adi Granth#3).Kabir: Pandit, Youve Got it Wrong
Pandit, look in your heart for knowledge.
Tell me where untouchabilityaround the 14th century and gathered together a circle of devotees,
becoming the guru of many famous sants, including both Ravidas
and the weaver Kabir. In contrast to the self-questioning fostered by
Buddhism, Brahmanism had always insisted that it was necessary
to approach god or cosmological questions with the help of a guru.
It was the guru who gave a mantra, a verse or word or phrase, that
the seeker would repeat as a kind of self-hypnosis; and it was
the guru who taught the ‘secrets’ of the tradition. The guru, ideally,
would be a Brahman—like Ramananda. Making a Brahman a
guru, and imposing the guru tradition on the bhakti movement, has
been an important aspect of the ‘brahmanising’ process that it
underwent.
As in the case of Nandanar, the documentation of the north
Indian bhakti movement was done centuries later by literate high-
caste men. An early account was written by Nabhadas around
1600, the most influential commentary on which was by Priyadas
in 1712. These not only make Ramanand into Ravidas’ main guru,
but ‘Brahmanise’ Ravidas himself, analogous to the way that
Nandanar’s devotion was made acceptable through his being puri-
fied by fire and shown as being ‘truly’ a Brahman. In the case of
Ravidas, he is said to have been a Brahman in his previous life, but
because he offered Ramanand some food that had been given by a
merchant who had dealings with Chamars, he was reborn as a
Chamar after he died. This itself indicates the degree of purity–
pollution behaviour observed even by Brahman ascetics; but worse
if anything is the story that as a baby Ravidas would not accept the
milk of his Chamar mother, but only of a Brahman woman
(Hawley and Juergensmeier 1988: 15–16)!
Radical Dalits today question the Brahmanical interpretation of
Ravidas. They claim that his guru was Sardanand, and emphasize
his ability to defeat Brahmans time and again in debates. The
Adi-Dharma, a radical anti-Hindu sect founded in the 10th cen-
tury in the Punjab, takes Ravidas as a non-Hindu, anti-caste and
a founder of practically an independent religion. Indeed, such
‘vanis’ as the following are impressive, if not substantiated as
‘original’:
Ravidas says not to honour (do puja to) Brahmans, who are without
merit;
honour instead the feet of Candalas who are full of merit...192 Buddhism in India