Explained: The Ravidassia identity

The trains are hired by the Jalandhar-based Dera Sachkhand Ballan, a Ravidassia dera. Most of Punjab’s 9,000-odd deras are inclusive, largely egalitarian religious places that lie mostly outside mainstream religion, and are popular among Dalits. As the empty Begampura Express, with a large flex poster of Guru Ravidas on the front of its locomotive, and with its compartments decorated with balloons and pictures of sants from Dera Ballan, pulls into the main platform at Jalandhar, thousands of young and old Ravidassias, both local residents and NRIs, dance inside and outside the station to songs by Dalit singers such as Ginni Mahi and Roop Lal Dhir played at defeaning volumes on a DJ system.

Emergence of identity

Over more than a century of its existence, Dera Sachkhand or Dera Ballan has emerged as a major centre for the articulation of the Ravidassia identity in Punjab. It had an eclectic mooring early on, with a mix of Udasi, Sikh, and Hindu traditions, but the bani of Guru Ravidas has always been at its core. Even during the heyday of Babu Mangu Ram’s Ad-Dharmi movement, the Dera continued to remain largely pluralistic in its temperament and traditions.

By the mid-1980s, however, as the Ad-Dharmi movement lost ground and the dominant social forces remained unrelenting on the entry of the lower castes into the mainstream, the Ravidassia aspiration for an independent identity began to show signs of impatience. The Guru Ravidas Janam Asthan Mandir at Seer Goverdhanpur in Varanasi had been inaugurated in the 1970s — and as the community strengthened itself economically and a diaspora with subaltern beginnings yearned for its roots and shared history, Dera Sachkhand emerged as the centre of their hopes and aspirations.

At the Seer Goverdhanpur temple in Varanasi (Anand Singh)

The arrival of Kanshi Ram and his politics made the Scheduled Castes of Punjab — who are about 32 per cent of the state’s population, with the Ravidassias as the most influential group — aware of the potential of their numerical strength. It was around this time that the Dera appropriated Ambedkar as its political icon in videos and publicity materials.

The Dera’s library today is plastered with posters of Ambedkar, and the shops outside the Dera in Ballan sell Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste along with lockets, T-shirts, and headscarves printed with Jai Bhim and Jai Gurudev slogans, and framed photos of Ambedkar, Dera sants, and Mirabai. There are also headscarves with logos of Apple and Adidas, flags of various European countries, and pictures of Bob Marley, signalling the presence and growing influence of NRI devotees.

The Varanasi pilgrimage

An attack in 2009 during a religious congregation in Vienna, which the current chief of the Dera Sant Niranjan Das survived, but in which one of the sants was killed, became a watershed moment. In Varanasi, on the birth anniversary of Guru Ravidas in 2010, the Dera and its sants declared Ravidassia as a new religion, projecting the city as the global pilgrimage centre of the community.

The journey of pligrims to the Janam Asthan Mandir that had begun on a few coaches of the Howrah Mail in the 1980s, quickly turned into the annual Begampura Express spectacle. Every year during the Jayanti celebrations now, the pilgrimage that starts in Jalandhar with thunderous cries of “Jo bole so nirbhai, sat Guru Ravidas Maharaj ki jai (Be fearless, the disciple of Guru Ravidas)”, brings a deluge of Dalit devotees to Varanasi, the ancient centre of the Hindu religion.

Besides being a signpost of Ravidassia aspiration, the pilgrimage is a mega networking exercise of co-followers. So tents bearing names from Kashmir to Andhra Pradesh and from Maharashtra to Bihar spring up around the Janam Asthan Mandir — the Jayanti celebration might allow a Ravidassia from Wolverhampton in the UK to meet with one from Barabanki, and perhaps remain connected on Facebook thereafter.

In Varanasi during the festival, folk singers from Sagar in Madhya Pradesh might sing Ravidassia songs for huge crowds while a poet from Rae Bareli sells his own book of poems dedicated to Ambedkar, Phule and Ravidas — even as youths from Gaya in Bihar buys CDs of Ginni Mahi.

In Varanasi for a couple of days every year, geographical boundaries disappear as the community comes together.

The Begampura Express has added wings to the aspiration of a pan Indian, even global, Ravidassia consolidation. A young woman who was at the time studying medicine in Italy, had told this author on board the train in 2017: “We are Ravidassias. We want that our Guru be accorded due reverence. Varanasi is our most sacred pilgrimage, where we come every year in search of our roots, our history, our heroes, and for our Guru’s blessings.”

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