Ramdev Pir

Ramdev Pir

A hero-god of the western Deccan, worshipped by Hindus and by Muslims

Ramdev Pir is one of the most widely venerated figures in the religious landscape of Rajasthan and the western Deccan, and one of the most consistently misdescribed. Two habits of writing about him are wrong. The first is to date him precisely: he is placed in the fourteenth century by some accounts and later by others, and the association with a particular Rajput line is traditional rather than documented. The second is to call him simply an avatar of Rama. He is very often identified as an avatar of Viṣṇu or of Krishna, and he is very often not identified with any Vishnu-avatar at all. Both positions are held, in the same districts, sometimes in the same family.

What is certain is the social fact, and it is the most interesting thing about him. Ramdev is the patron of the pastoral castes of Rajasthan — the Raika and Rebari and the related herding communities — and he is worshipped by people who would describe themselves, without difficulty, as Muslims. The Kabirpanthi communities in particular hold shrines to him, and the title Pir, which is a Muslim term for a saint, is part of his name. A deity with a Muslim honorific, worshipped by Muslim devotees, in a shrine where Hindu offerings are also made, is a fact about Indian religious history that a corpus organised by tradition will systematically distort if it files him as one thing or the other.

The cult is one of a class of hero-deities — men held to have lived and died, some in battle, some by violence, some in a state of sanctity, who are afterwards remembered as protectors. Such figures are frequently the focus of a cult of miracles, of possession and of the resolution of disputes, and their shrines are often associated with kīrtan gatherings where the traditions of several communities meet. The Rajput patronage of some of these shrines and the pastoral devotion of others are not contradictions; they are different relationships to the same figure.

Two practical notes for a corpus. The previous revision printed the name in Gujarati script for a cult that is mainly Rajasthani, Maharashtrian and Deccan — an error that small numbers of readers will notice immediately. And the temple named in the frontmatter, at Tanwad, and the coordinates attached to it, were carried over without being checked and should be confirmed against a district gazetteer before the entry is used for anything.

Sources and what is still unverified

The Jodhpur and Pali district gazetteers, and the Rajasthan district gazetteers more generally, are the concrete starting point. What should be added is a named study of the rāma-dev cult and of the pastoral castes, and a study of the Kabirpanthi communities and their shrines. The previous revision's sources were the placeholders "Folk tradition" and "Bhakti movement", neither of which is a citation. Still unverified: the date of the historical figure, the Rajput association, the temple at Tanwad, the coordinates, the festival calendar, and the relationship between the Hindu and Muslim forms of the cult at any particular shrine. Left .