Bhagat Ravidās Jī

Bhāgat Ravidās

The poet-saint of the Kori, and the shrine that claims his birth

Ravidās (also Rāidas, Raidas, bhagata Ravidāsa) was a North Indian devotional poet and saint of the fifteenth century, remembered as a śūdra — a non-twice-born — who wrote bhakti poetry in Braj and in Awadhi about the ineffable and about the futility of outward ritual, and who is claimed as a contemporary, and in several traditions a disciple, of Kabīr and of Nānak. The grouping of Ravidās with Kabīr and Nānak is not a modern invention — their verses stand together in the Ādi Granth, in the bhagata section, under their own authorial signatures, and in Sikh gurbāṇ literature the pair is a fixed conjunction. Ravidās's status is different from theirs in one respect that matters: he was not a śūdra reformer preached at by twice-born teachers but a poet who claimed the mantra himself, and the Dadupanthi and other later sects of the Kharar sadhu orders hold him as a founder alongside Kabīr.

His janmabhūmi is claimed at Seer Govardhanpur, in Varanasi district, where the community maintains a shrine in the Seer country of the Govardhanpur nadis — a landscape of sadhu orders and of the Radha-centred cults of the eastern Gangetic plain. The claim of a birthplace is a sectarian and devotional claim, and it is rivaled by other Bhakti traditions' claims on their own saints; the entry should record it as the tradition of this shrine and not as a biography. The śūdra dimension is also live and political: Ravidās is claimed today by kori, droma and other śūdra communities as proof that bhakti makes no jāti distinction, and the shrine's identity has been shaped by that claim as much as by its poetry.

Ravidās's own verses were collected and transmitted rather than fixed in a lifetime, and the corpus attributed to him differs between the Padma Purāṇa-allusive "Kabir-Ravidas" traditions, the Sikh Gur Granth Sahib, and the printed Ravidāsa collections. Nothing in this entry should be treated as a securely edited text of Ravidās. A study of the Ravidās traditions in Hindi and Bhojpuri is the missing source.

Sources and what is still unverified

• Guru Granth Sahib (Ādi Granth) — for his pad; cited at work level, no hymn number.
• Kabir, Ravidās and Nānak in the bhakti literature — work level.
• Karandhar, on the bhakti movements of north India — to be cited properly.
• Varanasi District Gazetteer (Government of India gazetteer series) — for the site.
• Unverified: the frontmatter's "15th c." chronology, the specific janmabhūmi claim's provenance, and any date of the shrine's establishment.