Ravidas, the leatherworker's son whose hymns sit in the Sikh scripture
Born into a Chamar family of leatherworkers, a caste then treated as untouchable, Ravidas became a poet-saint whom Brahmins reportedly bowed to. Forty-one of his poems were placed in the Guru Granth Sahib, and a princess-poet, Mira Bai, is remembered as his disciple. Yet almost everything else about his life is disputed.
Even his dates swing wildly. Some scholars put his birth in 1433; one tradition has him living from 1377 to 1528, dying in Banaras at 151; Amaresh Datta proposed 1267 to 1335. The most useful clue is Mira Bai, who lived from 1498 to 1547. If she learned from him as an adult, around her marriage in 1516, he must have been teaching in the early sixteenth century.
Tradition places his birth in Sir Gobardhanpur near Varanasi. He left leather work for devotion on the banks of the Ganges, kept company with Sufis and ascetics, and travelled to pilgrimage sites from Gujarat to the Himalayas. He preached against divisions of caste and gender, and his verse turned from worship of gods with form toward the nirguna idea of a divine without attributes. Medieval texts link him to the teacher Ramananda and treat him as a younger contemporary of Kabir, and most scholars think he met Guru Nanak.
His name shifts with geography: Raidas in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, Ruidas in Bengal, Rohidas in Maharashtra and Gujarat. The written record shifts too. Winand Callewaert traced some 30 manuscripts of an early biography by Anantadas; four complete copies date from 1662 to 1687, and the latest inserts new passages about caste, Brahmin persecution and untouchability. Callewaert treats the 1676 copy as the standard text. Later poets also attached his name to their own verses as an act of homage.
Legends credit him with floating a stone on water and making the Ganges run upstream, victories that historians such as Peter Friedlander read as reflecting social struggles of later centuries. Mainstream Sikhs honour him as a bhagat, while the Ravidassia movement regards him as its guru.
Source: Ravidas
