Raidas (Ravidas)

Before sunrise on the ghats of Kashi, a young man sits cross-legged over a stretched hide, an awl in one hand and waxed thread looped through the fingers of the other, and instead of the silence you would expect from a craftsman intent on his stitching, there is a low, continuous murmur rising from his throat: Ram, Ram, Ram, timed to the rhythm of the needle going in and out of the leather. Neighbors call him Raidas, sometimes Ravidas, the name softening into whichever tongue is speaking it, Kashi's own dialect or the Punjabi that would later carry his hymns far from the Ganga. He is the son of Santokh Dass and a mother remembered as Kalsa Devi, born in the small village of Seer Govardhanpur on the edge of the holy city, into a family whose trade was leather: sandals, harness straps, the skins stretched over temple drums. Customers who come to his stall for a pair of jutis leave, more often than not, with the odd sense that they have brushed against something the marketplace has no name for.

He was married young, in the way of his time, to a woman named Lona Devi, and they had a son, Vijaydas, and by every outward measure his was an ordinary householder's life: a trade passed down, a family fed, a hut with a hearth. But Raidas gave away more leather than he sold. Sandhus and wandering sadhus passing through Kashi found that he would cut and stitch them a new pair of sandals and refuse payment outright; beggars at his door were fed from the same plate his own family would have eaten from, before the family ate. His parents, who were not unkind people, only ordinary ones bewildered by a son who sang more than he counted coins, eventually told him to go make his devotions somewhere out of sight, at the back of the house. He did not argue. He built a small hut there with his own hands, no bigger than the room a man needs to lie down in, and turned it into a shrine for his beloved Thakurji, working leather by day at his usual bench and pouring out bhajans by night in that hut, content, by every account, in a poverty that his love for Ram made feel like abundance.

Tradition holds that he found his guru at the Panchganga ghat, in the circle gathered around the great teacher Ramananda, a Brahmin by birth who had thrown open the gate of initiation to whoever came to him in earnest: a leatherworker's son, a weaver remembered as Kabir, a barber named Sena, a farmer named Dhanna, a king who set down his crown to become the ascetic Pipa. It became one of the defining scandals and one of the defining glories of that whole generation of Bhakti saints, that a single guru's household could hold so wide a mixture of trades and stations, all equally welcome, all given the same Ram-nama to carry in the mouth and the heart. When Ramananda gave Raidas that mantra, it did not read, in any of the old tellings, as an elevation from one state into a higher one. It read as a confirmation of something that had been quietly true in him all along.

His fame is carried, above almost everything else, on the story of the kathauta, the wooden or leather-lined tub in which he soaked hides to soften them. A Brahmin visitor once came to his door, and Raidas, without much ceremony, pressed a couple of coins into his hand and asked him to carry them down to the river and give them properly to Mother Ganga, but only when she herself reached out a hand to receive them. The pandit went, more out of politeness than belief, and forgot the errand entirely until he was already waist-deep in his bath, at which point, so the story goes, a hand did rise out of the current. Startled into obedience, he flung the coins toward it and received back, in place of his own hand, a bracelet of gold set with jewels. Rather than deliver it, he gave it to his wife, who could not resist showing it off, and word of the beautiful thing eventually reached the palace, where the queen, delighted, demanded a matching one to complete the set. There being only one such bangle in the world, the pandit came back to Raidas in a state of open panic and admitted the whole deceit. Raidas, still bent over his work, did not even look up. He told the man to look into the kathauta at his feet. Inside the ordinary tub of hide-soaking water, the pandit saw the Ganga herself flowing, and bangles beyond counting resting in its current. Out of that morning came one of the most loved lines in all of north Indian devotion: man changa to kathauti mein Ganga, if the heart is clean, the Ganga herself will rise even in a cobbler's washtub.

Crowds began arriving to hear him sing and to sit in his presence, in such numbers that devotees eventually raised a proper hall for him, hung with canopies and banners, so that kirtan and satsang could go on there without interruption; the sources say the sight of it, and the sheer press of people, made the place feel like the Bhakti Mahārānī's own court come down to earth. This success did not sit well with some of the city's ritual specialists, who felt their monopoly on holiness threatened by a leatherworker drawing bigger crowds than their own temples did. They carried their resentment to whoever would listen. But grace, as the old telling puts it, is the greater player of the two, and it moved through the very people who had come to resent him: sitting down to a shared meal one day, each of these learned men found, to his private astonishment, the same quiet figure of Raidas seated at his own elbow, as though one man had somehow become present at every single place at the table at once. Whatever explanation each of them reached for privately, the pride cracked open. Many of them wept, folded to the ground before him, and numbered themselves among his students from that day on.

The most storied of his royal encounters unfolds in Chittor. A queen of Mewar, remembered in some versions of the story as Jhali and in others simply as the Rani, had never received initiation from any teacher until she traveled to Kashi, heard Raidas sing, and asked to become his disciple on the spot. When she returned home and it became known that a queen of Chittor now called a leatherworker her guru, the court's Brahmins were incensed and marched to the king in a body demanding that the matter be settled. The king, wanting peace, devised a public test: an image of the Lord was placed on a high throne before the whole assembly, and it was declared that whoever could call the deity down from that seat would be recognized as the rightful teacher of Chittor. For hours the priests took turns, one after another and then in great massed choruses, pouring out Vedic hymns and mantras learned since boyhood. The image did not so much as tremble. When Raidas was finally called forward, he did not recite anything elaborate. He simply asked the Lord, gently, not to delay any longer, to come and make good, here and now, on the very name Patitpavan, the purifier of the fallen, that everyone in that hall already called him by. Before the assembly's eyes, the murti left the throne and came to rest against Raidas's chest, and the hall broke into a single unbroken shout of jai, jai. Tradition has folded this scene, in the centuries since, into the memory of his most famous disciple of all, Mirabai of Mewar, whose own bhajans name him outright: guru milya Raidas ji, dinhi gyan ki gutki, I have found my guru in Raidas, who placed in my open hand a small, dense store of wisdom. A modest chhatri still stands near her temple in Chittorgarh carved, the local memory insists, with his footprint. Later generations added the darker chapters of her life to this same bond, the cup of poison said to have been sent to her by unhappy in-laws after her husband's death, and the old conviction that she drank it without flinching because her mind was fixed entirely on her guru's name; whatever one makes of that story as event, it has always mattered more as a description of where her fearlessness was said to come from.

Another memory, gentler and stranger, tells of a wandering figure, spoken of in hushed tones as Ram himself walking about in the guise of an ordinary sadhu, who came to Raidas's hut one day and asked him to keep a small stone safe until he returned. It was, the visitor mentioned in passing, a paras, a philosopher's stone capable of turning iron into gold at a touch. Thirteen months went by. When the visitor finally came back and asked after his stone, Raidas pointed to the exact spot where it had lain the whole time, untouched, gathering dust under an ordinary weight in the corner of the hut. Pressed on why he had never used it, not even once, not even to end the family's poverty, Raidas is remembered to have said something very close to this: my wealth is Ram, a stone is nothing to me; take it back, or throw it in the river, whichever pleases you more. The visitor left the encounter more pleased with him than any hoard of transmuted gold could have made anyone.

What holds all of these stories together is not spectacle but a single insistent teaching, repeated in dozens of forms across the verses that survive in his name: that the door to God does not check the door of your birth. Jaati-paati puchhe nahi koi, hari ko bhaje so hari ka hoi, he sang, let no one ask after lineage or clan; whoever loves Hari belongs to Hari, and that is the whole of the matter. In another verse he compared the layered claims of birth and rank to the leaves of a banana stem, jaati-jaati mein jaati hai, jo ketan ke paat, peel one husk away and there is only another beneath it, and at the center, when you have finished peeling, no separate substance at all, only the plant's single life running through every layer. His most complete vision of what a world without that false ranking might look like survives in the poem called Begampura, the city without sorrow: no tax, no toll, no second-class movement for anyone, no fear walking ahead of you into any street, every resident moving with the same easy, unhindered step. He closes the poem by putting his own trade's name to it, as though to say that this free country is not a place he has to die to reach; he has already found its address, right here, awl in hand.

Some forty of his hymns were later gathered, word for word, into the Guru Granth Sahib by Guru Arjan, where they are still sung today in gurdwaras beside the compositions of Kabir, Namdev, Trilochan, and the other Bhagats, a leatherworker's private meditations sitting permanently inside the central scripture of an entire faith. Nabhadas, writing his Bhaktamal a generation or two later, gave Raidas a chhappay of his own, praising a vani skilled above nearly anyone else's at cutting through the knot of doubt, a conduct so clean it never once contradicted Shruti or Shastra even though it leaned on none of the marks of formal schooling, and noting, not without a certain satisfaction, that men proud of their birth and their learning had been seen laying the dust of Raidas's feet upon their own heads.

He is remembered to have gone on gathering souls toward God for years afterward, guiding, in the phrase the old commentators liked to use, lakhs upon lakhs of people to turn and face the Divine before he himself, by the grace of Swami Ramananda, passed into the paramdham. The exact years of his birth and death are argued over by scholars to this day, most placing his life somewhere in the second half of the fifteenth century running into the early sixteenth, but no document anyone has produced settles the question outright, and it is probably truer to his own teaching not to pretend otherwise. What is certain is that the temple raised over his birthplace at Seer Govardhanpur, the Sri Guru Ravidass Janam Asthan Mandir, still fills every year on Magh Purnima with devotees who travel from across India and from Ravidassia communities scattered clear around the world, to sing the very lines he once hummed to himself over a stretched hide before the sun came up.

It is worth sitting with that image a little longer than the histories usually allow: a man with an awl in one hand and thread in the other, murmuring the Name into leather that will end up as someone's sandals. By his own telling, it was that same unhurried attention, poured without interruption into ordinary work, that also filled a washtub with the Ganga, drew an idol down off a king's own throne, and steadied a queen against a cup of poison. It is the same needle and the same thread in every case, love pulled tight and knotted so it holds. If a tired reader takes one thing from Raidas's life into the night, let it be this: he insisted, against every voice of his own century that said otherwise, that none of it depends on the family you were born into, the cloth you can afford, or the letters after your name. It depends only on wanting God enough to keep singing while your hands are busy with something else entirely. If the heart is clean, he says, the river will rise wherever you happen to be standing, no farther away than the nearest tub of water.