Texte

Folio from a series of bhakti saints
By a master of the first generation after Nainsukh of Guler
Pahari, c.1790–1800
Inscribed on verso in Takri: bhagat chamar ravidas
21.5 × 15.9 cm (folio); 16.3 × 11.1cm (painting)
Museum Rietberg, Collection Danielle Porret, 2011.338

It is a humble cobbler’s abode that the painter shows us here, much like the simple village dwellings that he must have been so familiar with in his own Pahari surroundings: an unadorned single-room home with a thatched roof, a fence of rough wooden logs guarding the unpaved courtyard, a plantain tree with a conventional flower dangling from a branch, a niche in the smooth, neatly painted wall. But the man plying his trade as he sits in the courtyard, working on a piece of leather, cutting tool in hand, is no ordinary cobbler: he is Ravidas – also called Raidas sometimes – celebrated until today as one of the great saints which the bhakti age in medieval India was rich in. There were others like him, great devotees and saint-poets – Chhipa, a cloth-printer, for instance; Kabir, a weaver; Namdev, a tailor – who attained great celebrity too, despite the fact that they came from the lower, sometimes untouchable, segments of the society of those times. Winds of change had begun to blow then, mocking at the divisions that caste created and flouting the norms of an inequitable social order. It was the renowned purity of these men – all great devotees – and their noble, sometimes intensely poetic utterances, therefore that won them status and a place in people’s hearts. A brief inscription in Takri on the verso of this folio identifies Ravidas clearly, but does not forget to mention that he was a chamar – lowly leather-worker or cobbler – for it reads: “bhagat chamar ravidas.”

Perhaps the whole series of which this folio is a part was meant to be seen as a tribute. Apart from the fact that it is beautifully drawn and painted, there is something quite moving about the image. Ravidas sits nearly unclothed save for a coarse white wrap draped around his slight frame – a simple cap on his head, mala-rosary round his neck – working but also listening to another person who sits facing him and is reading from a book, while gesturing with one hand. The staff lying by the man’s side together with a small water vessel suggests that he is a visitor, someone who has just arrived perhaps. Who this man might be is left unstated, but there is a likelihood that the painter had the person of Kabir, the great weaver-saintpoet, in mind. The peacock feather stuck in his cap is almost a giveaway, for Kabir-panthis used to wear that routinely, and one knows of stories that speak of the two saints having met at least once, both of them coming from the environs of Benares as they did. One cannot be certain, but the thought of this being a “record” of their meeting is certainly intriguing.

There are details that are thoughtfully brought in: the basket in which other unworked leather pieces are lying; the awl close to Ravidas’s feet; his own shoes that he had taken off before sitting down to work; an ewer of water that he must have needed in the midst of his hard labor. Everything is in place and in character.

That Ravidas was a householder, not a recluse, is brought in by the painter introducing a woman, his wife apparently, who sits in the doorway of their room, concentrating on embroidering a pattern on a piece of leather: for a jutti-shoe, no doubt, that Ravidas will soon be working on. At one end of the bare courtyard grows the sacred tulasi plant and in the niche in the wall is drawn an image, that of a crowned deity: Vishnu perhaps?

The details of Ravidas’s life are somewhat controversial. Some place his year of birth at 1376, others at 1399, still others in the early 15th century. That he was a chamar by birth and caste is established without doubt, but opinions differ about whether he was actually the preceptor of Mira Bai, the Chittor princess, who was a devotee of Krishna and a poet of great merit herself. Again, there are stories about his meetings with Guru Nanak, but the dates do not always match. One thing in this context is certain, however: that a number of Ravidas’s compositions, as many as forty-one, found an honorable place in the great scripture of Sikhism, the Adi Granth. But all this was nearly three hundred years before this painting was made. The painter only imagined Ravidas, but he imagined him well, and with deep feeling. | BG