Baba Ramdev Pir

Bābā Rāmdev Pīr

A Rajasthani holy man with two names and two audiences

Rāmdev — Bābā Rāmdev to Hindus, Rāṃsā Pīr or Rāmdā Pīr to Muslims — is a deified Rajasthani saint whose shrine at Ramdevra, in Jaisalmer district, is served by a dharmashala and a langar that feed people of every faith. The dual name is not a courtesy. The pīr framing belongs to the Sufi vocabulary that Islam in the desert cities of Rajasthan inherited from its saints, and the shrine is administered by both a Muslim khadim and a Hindu committee, with a Hindu marriage celebrated in the same precinct. This shared-ground institution is the reason Ramdevra matters to anyone documenting Indian religion: it is a place where the boundary is administered rather than debated.

The life story is preserved in the Rāmdev-rāsā and the longer folk narrative of the saint's life, sung rather than printed. He is described as a Rajput of the Pokaran house who renounced, travelled as a wandering ascetic healing people and animals, and finally fixed his samādhi — the resting place of the tomb at Ramdevra is the centre of the whole cult. The dates assigned to him vary widely in the folk accounts, and any single year for his death should be treated with suspicion until a named scholar has checked the rāsā and the colonial gazetteers against each other. The famous miracle cycle — the trial of the saint by the five pīrs, the spring that is said to have opened at his stroke, the curing of the leper, the rescue of the traveller — is devotional narrative, and this entry records it as narrative.

Worship at Ramdevra is characteristically Rajasthani. The saint is appealed to for cattle, for fertility, and for the resolution of quarrels between clans, and the annual mela is at once a fair, a livestock market and a pilgrimage. Offerings are cooked food, grain, coconut, turmeric, red cloth, and cash pledges — not the flowers-and-incense economy of a Sanskrit temple. The shrine is generally served by Jāṭ, Rājput and Mer devotees, with Dalit communities and Muslim Rajasthanis also in attendance. A panel of pabaji-sara or bhajan singers and the painted paṛ scrolls that accompany them belong to the same regional storytelling circuit as the cults of Pabuji, Gogaji and Tejaji.

Ramdevra should not be confused with the temple town of Ramdeo, and the saint should not be assumed to be a panḍita. He is a folk holy man of the kind Rajasthan produced in numbers precisely because arid country produces saints who are also healers, arbitrators and providers.

Sources and what is still unverified

• John D. Smith's The Epic of Pabuji and Komal Kothari's work on Rajasthani folk deities give the scholarly frame for the folk-saint cult and its pabaji-sara performance tradition; the frontmatter's other titles should be checked by a guardian who has read them.
• The Rāmdev-rāsā is the primary text for the life and miracles. It should be cited at the level of the work, not by verse, until a critical edition is available.
• The frontmatter's traveller quotation is internally inconsistent — attributed to Ibn Battuta but sourced to Max Müller — and the sample rāsā text in the frontmatter is not a translation of any identifiable primary source. Both are flagged here as unreliable.
• The saint's date, the year of samādhi, the founding story of the shrine, and the terms on which Hindus and Muslims share it are all items a named guardian should verify rather than repeat.