a dalit poet-saint. 209
entitle the Guru Ravidas Granth. The title has a familiar ring. Ghera’s idea was that
when this Granth emerged before the public eye, it would be received as compara-
ble in size and depth to its Sikh namesake.^22
These efforts were not entirely successful. In the 1980s the modest audience that
assembled morning and evening heard only a small selection of these didactic verses
from a manuscript version of Ghera’s work, and since then the scriptural initiative
has passed firmly into the hands of Ghera’s parent organization, the dera of Sant
Sarvan Das located in the Punjab. There was a dispute in which issues of property
ownership, institutional authority, and scriptural correctness were at stake. It was
said that Ghera’s version of the temple ’s founding events substituted his own
agency for that of Sant Sarvan Das, and that he had obscured the words of the true
Ravidas and put his own in their place. The whole thing landed in the courts, and
they ruled against Ghera.^23 In the end a very different version of Ravidas emerged
in the songs sung daily at Sri Govardhanpur. Nowadays the liturgist chants the
whole of a little red book in which are printed the forty-one compositions that ap-
pear in theAdi Granth, simultaneously connecting Ravidas with the Sikh context
and liberating him from it. In preaching from the text he aligns Ravidas with God
and the inner soul, and the service concludes with a recitation of the guru lineage
going back to Sant Sarvan Das. Copies of the little red book, published by Sant Sar-
van Das’s organization, are available to the public at the spacious Ravidas Park that
has opened on the banks of the Ganges not far away.
The consolidation of the community’s identity behind the figure of Ravidas pro-
ceeds apace. He has become their guru—the founder of their faith and the source
of their inspiration—as Nanak is for Sikhs. But he has also become the sort of guru
that would be familiar in many Hindu communities. Whereas Sikhs proscribe the
use of any image in their places of worship (gurdvaras), preferring to meet Nanak
and his successors entirely through their words, the Ravidasis of Sri Govardhanpur
can establish visual contact with the master, as Hindus typically do. A multicolored,
life-size image of the great saint is installed at the center of the altar area, and there
is another upstairs in the pilgrims’ dormitory. As songs praising the guru’s greatness
are sung, he receives the community’s adoration in person.
A third way in which the sixteenth-century camar saint matters in the lives of his
latter-day caste fellows goes beyond social reform and religious cult. Through Ravi-
das, Untouchables are able to map out their relation to other aspects of Indian soci-
ety in a manner that is clearer and more satisfying to them than the conceptual grids
through which others are apt to see them.