With elections around the corner, the Ravidassia community of Punjab is being wooed once again. They identify as neither Sikh nor Hindu and follow the teachings of Saint Ravidas, or Raidas, who was born in Banaras in the medieval period, before the establishment of the Mughal empire.
According to the several hagiographies, Kabir and Ravidas were peers. In a famous painting made during the reign of Emperor Shah Jahan (1628-1658), the two most illustrious saints of Banaras are shown together – Kabir working on his loom, and Raidas sitting in contemplation on a carpet in front of a hut. Both have ‘malas’ (rosaries) and the upper parts of their bodies are uncovered.
Today, both Raidas and Kabir have been largely incorporated, though not fully assimilated, into Hinduism. Both sects have lost the unequivocal anti-Brahminical edge that their preceptors emphasised in their powerful poetry. Raidas’s followers are better organised than Kabir’s, and in Punjab, they are a much more cohesive unit than branches in other states like Madhya Pradesh and Bihar.
According to hagiographical sources, Raidas was born in a wealthy ‘Chamar’ merchant’s family in Banaras. The first three centuries of the second millennium were a period of immense social change as the old Brahminical system had been defeated squarely by the end of the 12th century in the Ganga plains covering present day Uttar Pradesh, and Bihar. From Delhi to Bengal, power had been taken over by Delhi Sultanate, the provinces were run in its name by their officials who were Muslims, as well as Hindus.
In north India, this was a period when caste-based discrimination was being challenged by the likes of Kabir and Raidas. Kabir is considered the Guru or the teacher of all non- elite caste Bhakti saints in at least north India. Raidas’s journey from being a cobbler’s son, and therefore an untouchable to becoming a saint follows the classic arc of rejection by learned Brahmins, then the performance of miracles, usually in front of a ruler, followed by the humbling of Brahmins who accept him to be a saint.
In Raidas’s case, the miracles attributed to him point towards the same theme as other Bhakti saints i.e., devotion is the only condition for receiving the lord’s grace or mukti or moksha. That ‘ishwar’, or the supreme being, does not require knowledge of Vedas and Shastras, performance of rituals, or birth into an elite caste. Kabir and Raidas indicted both Hindu and Muslim orthodoxy and redrew and redefined religious boundaries and religion itself. Their significant contribution was a delimitation of what worship meant. This led to their immense popularity among the working classes such as cobblers, carpenters, weavers, and other professions considered to belong to the non-elite castes, known as shudras, and now dalits. Raidas is particularly unique in that he owned up his so-called lower caste identity of chamar. His followers continue to take pride in their caste identity.
Creation of the Ravidassia community in Punjab
The first, known as Dera of Ravidassias in Punjab, was founded at village Ballan in Jalandhar district by Pippal Dass in the 1900s. This was likely the first step towards what would be a century-long journey of Ravidassias formally declaring themselves to be a separate religion. In the turbulent 1920s when identity-based politics was animating the life of Sikhs and several other communities who were asserting their non-Hinduness, a new religion, supported by Pippal Dass, known as Adi Dharma came into being. It arose as a protest against discrimination subjected upon lower-caste Sikhs. Raidas had famously said that the caste system is like the leaves of a banana plant. It creates layers of hierarchy and discrimination, disallowing equality even among lower castes. Importantly, the Adi Dharma movement was a revolt against casteism which had crept into SIkhism, which itself was founded by Guru Nanak on the premise of equality between all. Adi Dharma would become the precursor to the Ravidasia sect whose largely ‘Chamar’ followers in the Doaba region of Punjab had acquired economic wealth due to the high demand for leather goods by the British colonial army and other wings of administration. Social respect was still not accorded to them though.
Basing their new religion on Raidas (who was christened ‘Ravidas’ in Vaishnava hagiographies of Bhakti saints), the Adi Dharma successfully lobbied the British for recognition as a distinct religion in Census exercises. They also created their own holy book on the lines of the Adi Grant, Quran and the Bible, it contained teachings attributed to Ravidas and was called Adi-Prakash.
Ravidas Mandal came into being in 1956; it was more than a rechristening of Adi Dharmis, and this new identity sought to address the internal paradoxes and contradictions within the Adi Dharmis who wanted to denounce Hindu status but also take advantage of reservations that had been started to be given to marginalised communities from only Hindu, Sikh and Buddhist religions.
The revival of Ravidas in politics
The Ravidassia sect today is dominated by the Punjab based branch as well as the ‘Chamar’ and other castes, with roots in Punjab. The community prizes its ethical teachings of equality and also material wealth; they are affluent with large congregations in North America, Europe and other parts of the British Commonwealth such as Fiji. Since the late 1970s Dera Sach Khand Ballan and Seer Gobardhunpur in Banaras, the birthplace of Raidas have become the two largest ecclesiastical centres of the sect. Followers converge at Banaras on an annual basis on the occasion of Raidas jayanti, usually marked in the month of February. The sect also prides itself on ‘Begumpura’ or a city without sorrow that Raidas had conceived of. Akin to Ram Rajya, an utopian form of governance, today, Begumpura exists as a Ravidassian symbol; a train was named after this utopian city in 2000, it connects Varanasi to Jammu Tawi. On 25 May 2009 the sect’s internal politics as well as its tense relationship with the Akal Takht over worshipping Ravidas and other living gurus, which was considered blasphemous by Sikh fundamentalists, led to the killing of the two top gurus of the Dera Sach Khand Ballan in distant Vienna. Following the attack, the Ravidassias compiled a new holy book, the Amritbani Guru Ravidas ji and started to replace the Guru Granth Sahib with it in Ravidassia temples everywhere including in Banaras. Today, Ravidassias are demanding the inclusion of a new category in the Census i.e the Ravidassia religion.