A section from the journey

Ravidas and the City Without Sorrow

Ravidas worked leather, a trade his society called low. Yet he became a revered saint, his hymns kept among the Sikhs. He dreamed aloud of Begumpura, a city without sorrow, where no one is counted second or third and all are equal. His life raises an honest question this age must face: did such devotion change the harsh order of birth, or only lift the heart above it?

In the same great city as Kabir, Varanasi, there lived another singer. His name was Ravidas, and his hands worked leather. He mended and made shoes and sandals. It was patient, skilful work.

But here we must speak honestly about the world he lived in, for it is part of his greatness. The society of his day was ordered by birth. Some births were counted high. Others were counted low. And working with leather, with the skins of dead animals, was held to be among the lowest and most polluting of trades. Ravidas was born into a community that others would not so much as touch.

We say this not to wound, but to understand. A teacher tells hard things plainly, with dignity, and never with anger. This was the order of that time. And against it, quietly and bravely, Ravidas raised his song.

For he did not flee his trade. He kept it, and held that honest labour, done with a loving heart, is itself a road to God. A shoe well made could be an offering. And as he worked, he sang to a formless God, much as Kabir did. He too was a , one who had tasted the real.

His most famous song is a dream of a place. He called it , which means the city without sorrow. Picture it as he did. It is a land with no grief and no fear. No one pays a cruel tax. No one is troubled or cast down. And here is the heart of it: in that city, no one is counted second or third. There is no high and no low. Every single soul walks as an equal. Ravidas, the leather-worker, sang a whole world in which his birth would mean nothing at all, and only his heart would count.

So loved was his voice that his hymns were gathered, long after, into the holy scripture of the Sikhs, set beside the words of the gurus. A man whom his own society would not touch became a voice the faithful would sing for centuries. Here is one of his prayers, kept for us in old translation.

“Thou art sandal, and I am the poor castor-oil plant growing near thee; from a mean tree I have become noble. The fragrance of sandal is in me. Forsake me not; this is my prayer.”

Feel what he is saying. On his own, he sings, he is a poor and lowly plant. But standing near God, as a humble shrub stands near fragrant sandalwood, he takes on the fragrance. The nearness of the divine makes the low noble. Birth did not make him noble. Love did.

Now Ravidas brings us to the largest and most honest question of this whole age. The saints sang that all are equal before God. But did that song change the hard world of birth and rank in which people actually lived? On this, thoughtful people genuinely differ. So here your guide does what he always does on contested ground. He steps to the , and sets both views down side by side, calmly, taking no side.

The rishi steps to the Threshold — where accounts differThe saints taught that all are equal before God. Did bhakti also change the social order of caste — how people were ranked and treated in everyday life?

What scholars find

Most scholars draw a careful line between spiritual equality and social equality. Bhakti, they find, offered real spiritual equality: God was open to all, and a tanner or a weaver could be a religious authority without priest or Sanskrit. Many saints came from low or excluded communities, and their songs criticized caste-pride sharply. But these scholars find that the wider social order of birth-based caste, called jati, mostly held firm in daily life. B. R. Ambedkar argued the saints won only spiritual, not social, equality, leaving the real standing of the excluded untouched. Jon Keune finds that where bhakti softened hierarchy, it was often through sharing sacred food together, an incremental change rather than a structural one. Eleanor Zelliot points to saints like Chokhamela, honoured in devotion yet still kept outside the temple in life. The verdict is usually that bhakti made a meaningful but incomplete challenge to the order, and that most saints themselves remained within their castes.

As the tradition holds

Within the tradition, the saints' message is held as a true and living call to equality, not merely a feeling. Ravidas sang plainly of Begumpura, a city where none is second or third and all are equal, and Kabir mocked the very idea that one birth is high and another low. Some communities took this to heart in full: the followers of Kabir and the Ravidassia tradition that reveres Ravidas as their guru genuinely crossed and rejected caste in their own fellowship, welcoming members regardless of birth. In this telling, the saints planted a seed of dignity and equality that the excluded have drawn strength from ever since, and that bore fruit in real human bonds across the lines of birth, even where the wider order was slow to change.

Whatever the answer, hold this. A man counted lowest by the rules of his day sang of a city where no one is low, and the centuries chose to remember him and not the rules. That song is still sung. Some things outlast the order that tried to silence them.

Ravidas dreamed of Begumpura, a city where no one is counted high or low, second or third. If you could shape one corner of the world so that no one there felt small or shut out, what would it look like? Hold that gently for a moment.