Ravidās

For four days the reader has been in one house in Banaras, with one man, at one loom. Now turn round in the doorway and look the other way down the lane.

The city is the same city and the years are the same years. The river is where it was, the priests are going down to the water in the dark and coming up again at sunrise, and the parties with the bodies are coming through the lanes at a trot, calling out. Nothing has moved. What changes today is only where you are standing, which is now a long way out from the river, past the last of the tall houses, in a quarter of low mud walls where the air does not smell of marigold and sandalwood.

A man lived out there who worked hides for his living.

His name was Ravidās, and people who knew him also called him Raidās, and both are his name. He was a Chamār: the caste that handled dead animals and the skins of dead animals, which put him outside the whole arrangement of the city, below its lowest step. He bought hides, cured them, cut them and stitched them into shoes, and he said so in his own songs, in public, without one word of apology, all his life.

He and Kabīr knew each other. That is not a guess and it is not a pious arrangement made afterwards. They are named together in the oldest list there is of the men who took Rāmānand as their teacher, and in the old tellings Ravidās is remembered as Kabīr's friend, his fellow disciple and his fellow townsman. Their couplets were written into the same scripture a century later by compilers who set the two men's verses among each other on the same page. And in the temple that stands in Banaras on the site of the great false banquet there hangs a picture of the two of them together.

The banquet is where the reader has seen him already, though he may not have noticed the name go past.

That was the day the brahmins had men dressed as holy men and sent round the city with invitations to a feast in Kabīr's name, and the whole of Banaras came, and Kabīr, who had nothing in the house and no money to buy anything with, understood in one look what had been done to him. He went out the back and away into the forest and let the crowd arrive at an empty door. He did not decide that alone. There was another man in the room, and that man told him to go.

So the thing is worth stopping over for a moment. When Kabīr was as cornered as he was ever cornered in his life, in his own house, with the whole of Banaras coming up the lane to be fed, the person he took counsel with was a tanner from the other side of Banaras.

Set the two of them side by side once, since they will not be side by side again for long. Both worked with their hands, all day, at a trade their city held to be filthy. One worked thread and one worked hide, and the hide was much the worse of the two, because thread is only low and hide is polluting; a brahmin could stand in a weaver's lane holding his breath, and would not walk down the tanners' lane at all. One was a Muslim by household and outside the caste order altogether. One was a Hindu by birth and inside it, at the very bottom, which is a different and in some ways a harder place to stand. Both took the same teacher, an old brahmin who lived at Pañcgaṅgā ghāṭ and had thrown his door open to anybody.

And there the likeness stops, because the two men do not sound anything alike.

Kabīr shouts. Kabīr is rude, quick, funny and out for blood, and when he has finished with a pandit there is very little of the pandit left. Ravidās does none of that. Nothing that survives of him has that edge. He is quiet, level and exact, and he says the hardest things in the book in an even voice, and the effect of it is entirely different: you cannot get angry with him, and you cannot get round him either. Where Kabīr takes your rule and walks it out of the building until it falls over, Ravidās simply states his own position and stands on it, and it turns out to be unanswerable.

He states it in the first line of the song of his that everybody knows. He says: I am a tanner. Everybody knows that about me. Now here is what I think about God.

That is the whole method, and it is why this day exists.

Kabīr can be left where he is. He is in the forest, or on his way back from it, with a hundred years of arguing still in front of him, and he will not be needing any help. Two days from now the three lives come back together on the road to a fort in the west. Until then the loom can stand idle.

Walk out past the houses. The smell changes about a hundred paces before you get there.

It is best to be plain about this at the start, because every other book on the subject is plain about it and then quietly forgets.

Nobody knows when Ravidās was born. Nobody knows when he died. Nobody knows who his father and mother were, or what they were called, or where the house stood. There is no village that can be shown to be his village. There is no year that can be put at either end of him. The men who wrote the oldest accounts did not record these things either, and the most careful of the later writers says so outright: of his precise date, his parentage and his birthplace, nothing is known.

It would be easy to fill the gap in. A year can be had off almost any shelf, and once a year is printed it gets copied, and after two hundred years of copying it looks like knowledge. It is not knowledge. He gets no birth year here and no death year, and the reader should hold on to that absence, because it is itself part of the story: this was a man of no account, in a quarter nobody kept records for, and the people whose business it was to write things down had no reason to write him down until he had already become impossible to ignore.

Two things all the old accounts agree on, and they are worth more than a shelf of dates.

The first is that he was Rāmānand's disciple. The second is that he was Kabīr's contemporary. That is the frame, all of it, and everything else that follows in these two days is story, some of it told within living memory of him and some of it a great deal later, and this book will say which is which when it matters.

Rāmānand has had a day of his own already and needs only a line here. He was a brahmin of Prayāg who came to Banaras and settled at the ghāṭ called Pañcgaṅgā, where his sandals were still kept and shown a hundred years afterwards. His own order put him out over a rule about food: they held that what was set before the image behind a screen was spoiled if any eye but the cook's fell on it, and he said he did not believe it, and they expelled him for saying so. So he founded his own, and the arrangement he made in it is the reason this day has a subject at all. He relaxed the kitchen rules. He had all castes eat and drink together. He put the door wide open. He held that the knowledge of God frees a man from every social bond there is, and he took that literally, and he took disciples on it.

The oldest list of those disciples is a list of twelve names and it reads like a deliberate provocation. Brahmins with the proper names, and two women among them. A king with a fort, Pīpā. Sain, a barber. Dhannā, a farmer. Ravidās, a tanner. Kabīr, a Muslim weaver. Learned men with the proper names, two women, a king, a barber, a peasant, a Chamār and a julāhā, all in one line, all eating in one room, in the holiest city in India, in the fifteenth century.

What survives of Ravidās himself is his own work, and it is not much and it is better than anything else any of these three men has.

About forty of his compositions were gathered up, along with a single couplet, and written into a scripture compiled in the Panjab about a hundred years after his death. The men who did the gathering were hundreds of miles away and had no interest in making him respectable. They were collecting what was being sung, and what was being sung, in the mouths of people who had learned it from people who had learned it, was a tanner from Banaras saying that caste was nothing and that his hands were dirty and that God was in his heart. They took his songs down as they found them. They put a couplet of his in among Kabīr's, and lines of Nāmdev's in among both, which tells you they had heard all three as one company of voices and not as three separate careers.

So the songs are the nearest thing to the man that exists. Not a life written up by an admirer two centuries afterwards, and not a scene improved in the telling. His own compositions, in his own dialect, with his own name signed at the end of them in the way all these singers signed: Rav Dās says.

Everything else about him is what people remembered and passed on. Some of it is very good. But he is a better witness to himself than anybody else is.

A tannery cannot be in a town. It has to be at the edge of one, and always at the same edge, for reasons that have nothing to do with religion and that every city in the world has worked out for itself.

The work needs a great deal of water and it ruins the water it uses. It needs open ground for stretching and drying. It produces, continuously, a smell which no one has ever got used to: the sweetish rot of raw skin, the ammonia of the soaking pits, the sour vegetable smell of the tan liquor, and under all of it the smell of whatever is left of the animal after the skin has come off it. The wind carries it a long way. So the tanners of Banaras lived where the tanners of every other city lived, which is downwind, downstream and outside: out beyond the last of the built lanes, on the low ground, with their pits and their drying frames and their own water, on the far side of a boundary that everybody could see and nobody had to mark.

Around them, in the same outside, were the other trades of the same kind. The sweepers. The people who took away the night soil. The washermen, who handled other people's polluted cloth and were polluted by it. And the men of the burning grounds, whose case shows the whole arrangement at its plainest.

Banaras made its living out of death. Its promise was that anyone who died inside a line drawn round the city was released, whoever he was, and old men and women came from four hundred miles away and took a room and waited years to die on the right side of that line. The corpse went down to the water, was dipped, and was burned on the ghāṭ, and the whole of that transaction was in the hands of a hereditary caste of men whom nobody else in the city would touch. They built the pyre. They arranged the body. They brought the fire, from a hearth which is said never to have been let out. They broke the skull at the right moment so that the life could go, and they raked over what was left and put it in the river. Every soul released in that city went out through their hands, and their hands were untouchable, and they were paid well and despised entirely. A rich family from the Dakhan would hand over the body of its father to a man it would not accept a cup of water from.

That is untouchability, and it is not a theory. It is a working arrangement of streets and wells and doorways, and it can be described the way a drainage system can be described.

Here is how it worked. There were wells you drew from and wells you did not. The public well of a lane was not public. A Chamār did not let down his own pot into it, because the pot would touch the water and the water would go back up the rope into everybody's kitchen; so he stood off and waited, and somebody poured into his vessel from a height without the vessels touching, or he went to his own well, or to the river below the place where the others bathed. There were streets he walked and streets he did not, and in some places an hour of the day when his shadow was long was an hour to keep off the main lane altogether, because the shadow carried. He did not cross a brahmin's threshold. He stood at the door, outside the doorpost, and the business was done across it. If he was given food it was put into his hands or on a leaf on the ground, and the leaf was not brought back inside. He had his own barber, or he had none. He had his own place at the market, and his own quarter for a wedding, and his own burial or burning ground, and his dead did not go down the lanes the others' dead went down.

None of this needed enforcing very often. It was known. Children learned it the way they learn which way the road bends.

And the city that ran on this arrangement believed, with its whole heart, that it was the holiest place on earth. It held that it was not standing on the ground at all but resting on the point of Śiv's trident, that the river had turned north out of respect for it, and that dying there was salvation for anybody at all, for nothing, without merit. It was the most generous promise ever made by any city.

From inside the Chamār quarter it looked like this. You could hear the bells. In the early morning, before the smells of the day came up, you could hear the conches going along the whole curve of the river, and the noise of it came out over the fields to the low ground. You knew the great festivals by the traffic on the road. You knew, because everyone knew, that release was being handed out free of charge a mile from your house to people who had come from the other end of India to collect it. And you knew that the men handing it out would not take water from your hand.

The promise was for everybody and the city was not. Both of those were true at once, every day, and nobody in the quarter needed to have it explained to them.

That is where Ravidās lived and that is what he could see from his door. It is worth having it clear, because in a little while he is going to make a song about a city where none of this is the case, and the reader should know exactly what he was looking at when he made it.

He said what his trade was, so the trade should be set out properly. There is no way to do that and keep it pleasant, and softening it would be a kind of lying.

It starts with a death. A bullock goes down in a field, or an old cow dies in a yard behind somebody's house, and word is sent, and it is sent to the Chamārs because there is nobody else to send it to. Two men come with a cart. Nobody in the household comes out to help them. By the time the carcass reaches the low ground it has been dead some hours, and in the hot months some hours is a long time.

Then the flaying, which is skilled work done quickly. A cut down the belly from throat to tail, cuts down the inside of each leg, and then the skin is worked away with the knife held almost flat, close to the hide, because a slip that goes through from the inside makes a hole, and a hole is a fault in the finished leather and comes off the price. The hide comes away in one piece. The horn and bone go to the men who work horn and bone, the rest of it to the dogs and the kites, and the kites tell you from half a mile off what is going on.

The hide as it comes off is not leather and will not keep. It is meat, and in that heat it has about a day. So it is salted or put straight into water, and then the real work starts, and the real work is mostly scraping.

The hide goes over a smooth beam, flesh side up, and the inner face is scraped clean: the fat, the loose flesh, the membrane, all of it off, with a broad blunt blade pushed down the hide in long strokes, the man leaning his weight over the beam, the scrapings going into a heap beside him that has its own smell. Then the hair, which is done with lime. The hides go into a pit of lime and water, or are painted with a paste of lime and ash, and lie there for days while the lime loosens the roots, and then they come out and go back over the beam the other way up and the hair is pushed off in sheets. What comes out of a lime pit does not smell like anything else. The lime has to be washed out afterwards, thoroughly, in changes of water, and if it is not the leather will crack at the fold in a month and everybody will know whose work it was.

Then the tanning, which is slow. Bark is what does it: babūl bark, or the pods of the same tree, crushed and steeped to make a brown liquor. The hides go into a pit of weak liquor first and are moved along into stronger pits as the weeks go by, and the liquor works in from both faces towards the middle. It cannot be hurried. A hide brought on too fast is tanned on the outside and raw in the heart of it, and it will rot there. Six weeks is not unusual. When it is done the thing on the frame is no longer a piece of an animal. It will not rot, it will take water and dry out again and still be what it was. That is the whole of the trade: to stop a skin being flesh without letting it stop being supple.

Then out in the sun to dry, staked or pegged on frames, and then the currying, which is working oil in and working the hide soft with the hands and with a tool, and at last it is a material.

Everything in that process wants water. Water for the first soaking, water to wash out the lime, changes of water between the pits, water for the liquor. A tanner's day is carrying. There was a basin in the yard for the soaking, wide and shallow, never clean and not capable of being clean, and the reader should make a note of it, because it comes back at the end of this day and it is the vessel this man is remembered by.

And after all that, the making.

The leather is cut on a board with a curved knife: the sole in one piece, the upper in another, the pieces for the sides. A shoe of that country is stitched, not nailed, with waxed thread of hemp or gut, the holes made ahead with an awl, and the stitching is where the work shows. A well-made shoe will walk a man from Banaras to Ajodhyā and back. A badly made one comes apart at the toe in the first rain and its owner curses the man who sold it to him for years.

The tool he used for the paring is called a rāmpī. It is an iron scraper, a flat blade set in a short handle, and it is the cobbler's own tool, used for thinning down leather and trimming an edge and taking the roughness off a sole. A man's rāmpī wears with him: the iron goes thin at the working edge over the years and the handle takes the shape of the hand. Remember it as well.

One thing more, and it is the thing the old accounts take trouble to say about him. He did not kill. He bought hides. The animals were dead before he had anything to do with them.

Notice who was anxious about that and who was not. The men who wrote about him afterwards press the point, and press it hard, because they were answering people who despised him. He never presses it at all. In his own songs there is not a word of self-defence about the trade. He names it and moves on.

The first thing recorded about him as a person is what he did with his father's property.

As soon as he was old enough to be about on his own he began waiting on holy men. They came through constantly, because Banaras is a place people arrive at, and the ones who had no money went where the poor were, which is how a stream of them came past the low ground. He fed them. He sat with them. He did the small services: water, a place to sleep, a fire, whatever a man who has walked twenty miles needs first. And to do it he took things out of his father's house.

Grain, mostly. Some money. Whatever was in reach and could be carried out without a fuss, and a good deal that could not. The household was not poor. It had ample grain and it had money, and that is worth registering, because the picture people carry of a Chamār family is of nothing in the pot, and the oldest accounts say the opposite: the means were considerable. Somebody in that family had built something up and made it pay.

And his son was giving it away by the basketful to men who owned nothing.

His father was displeased. That is the word the accounts use and it is the right one, because what happened next was not rage. It was a decision, of the kind a practical man makes about a son who cannot be trusted with the stores. He was not thrown into the street and he was not disowned. He was moved to the back of the house and set up separately, and from that day he was given nothing at all.

Not one grain. Not one cowrie. The house had both and he got neither.

He built himself a hut on the ground behind and set up in it the image he worshipped, the Ṭhākur, and that hut is where he lived from then on. Everything in the rest of this day happens there. The stone comes to that hut. The gold coins are found under the things of worship in it. Years later, when there is money enough to build with, the two-storeyed house goes up on that exact patch of ground.

He was married by then.

Nothing is known about her. She has no name in the accounts, no family, no home village, and not one recorded sentence. She was newly married when the two of them went round to the back, which means she had been in the household a matter of months when her husband was cut off from it, and she went with him, and she stayed. That is the whole of the record, and it is not much, but it is not nothing either.

So: two of them, a hut, no income, and a trade in his hands.

He worked it. He made shoes and sold them and that is what the two of them lived on. There is no suggestion anywhere that he went back to his father or that his father came to him. Everybody wears shoes and everybody wears them out, and a man who can cut and stitch a decent shoe can always eat. Not well. A cobbler at the bottom of that market ate, and did not do better than eat.

And then the accounts put down a sentence which has to be read slowly, because it is doing a great deal of work in very few words. They say that he supported himself and his wife by making shoes, and lived very happily.

That is the whole of it. No hardship, no complaint, no bitterness recorded, no resentment towards the father, no attempt to get back in. A young man put out of a house with money in it, given nothing, working at the filthiest trade his civilisation had, in a hut on the ground behind his own family's walls, and the one word the tradition keeps about those years is happily.

It is simply what was remembered about him, and it was remembered because it was unusual enough to remark on. People do not generally record that a poor cobbler was content.

Two things came out of the arrangement, and both mattered.

The first is that he was now his own man. Nothing in that hut belonged to anybody else. If he wanted to spend a day on a holy man instead of on a sole, he lost the day's money and nobody else lost anything, and no one could tell him to stop. Being cut off had cost him a share in a business and bought him the right to do as he liked with his own hours, and for what he turned out to be, that was the better bargain.

The second is that the giving away did not stop. It changed shape. He had nothing of his father's to give any more, so he began giving what he made with his own hands, and what he made with his own hands was shoes.

Whenever he saw a holy man, he gave him a pair of shoes and took nothing for them.

That is one line in the old accounts and it is easy to read straight past. It should not be read past. It is the single most informative fact about him, and if everything else were lost it would still be possible to work out most of the man from that habit alone.

Start with what a pair of shoes was.

It was leather, first, and leather had to be bought, and the money had to come out of a household with nothing in it. It was then time. Cutting a sole true, cutting the upper, punching the holes, waxing the thread, stitching it through from both sides, working the edge down with the rāmpī: that is a day's work at least, and more if it is to be a shoe worth having. And it was the sale. A cobbler lives by counting: so many pairs this month, so much for grain, so much put by for the next hide. Every pair he handed over was a hole in that arithmetic, and the arithmetic was already thin.

Now look at who he was handing them to.

A wandering holy man of that country walked, and walked, and that was the whole of his life. He went from Banaras to Ajodhyā, from Ajodhyā to Mathurā, down to the Narmadā, out west to Dwārkā on the sea, and the distances are not small and there is no other way to do them. He went in Jeṭh, when the road surface is hot enough to raise a blister through a thin sole and the dust on it is like ash. He went in the rains, when the same road is a trough of mud and every thorn and every sharpened stub of cut millet in the fields is under water where you cannot see it. His feet were his entire means of transport and his entire livelihood, because a man who cannot walk cannot beg his food from the next village, and a thorn that goes in deep and turns bad will finish a pilgrimage and can finish the pilgrim.

Some of them refused shoes on principle and went barefoot. Others had no principle about it and simply had nothing, and were walking on what was left of something given them two years before in another province.

To a man like that, a new pair of shoes is not a gift. It is several hundred miles.

So consider what actually happened, over and over, at the door of that hut. A man comes past with his feet in a bad state. He is given water and food, which costs the household its dinner. Then the cobbler looks at his feet, and measures them by eye, and goes and takes down a pair, or sits and makes a pair, and puts them on the ground in front of him, and refuses payment, and the man walks out of the quarter in them. Then the cobbler goes back to his bench with one pair fewer to sell and gets on with the next.

He did it whenever he saw a holy man. Not on festivals. Not when there was a surplus. Whenever.

There is a detail in the older telling which makes it exact. He did not hand the shoes over. He put them down at their feet. That is the right place for shoes and it is also, in that country, the place you put an offering, and the two gestures are the same gesture, and he must have known perfectly well that they were.

This is where the argument of his whole life is, though he never made it as an argument. A Chamār is polluting because of leather. Leather is the dead animal and the dead animal is the worst thing there is, and the man who handles it carries it on him and cannot be admitted. Very well. Here is a holy man, a brahmin perhaps, a renunciant certainly, and he cannot go a mile without leather on his feet, and the leather has to be made by somebody, and the somebody is standing in front of him with a gift in his hands.

Nobody in the quarter would have put it that way. It did not need putting. It was the plain daily shape of the thing: the man they would not take water from was the man they took their shoes from, and the shoes carried them to every holy place in India.

He gave them away for nothing for years, while he was poor, out of a house that had been cut off. That is the whole of his character in one habit, and everything else he did afterwards, the refusals and the arguments and the scene in the king's assembly, is only that habit at a larger size.

In the hut behind his father's house he set up an image and worshipped it, and he had made the image himself, and he had made it out of a hide.

That is the fact. It is not a parable and nobody presented it as one. A man who worked leather every day of his life, who had the material to hand and the hands to work it, made the object of his worship out of the only stuff he had, and set it up in his own house, and did his service to it morning and evening.

That meant something particular in that city and on that street.

The image of God in a Hindu house is the one thing in the house that purity is absolutely about. It is bathed. It is dressed. It is fed before anyone else eats. The person who touches it has bathed first, and no one else goes near it. There are rules about who may enter the room, what may be carried in, what water may be used and where it may be poured away. The screen that got Rāmānand expelled from his order was a screen round exactly this.

And here is a Chamār, in a hut, with an image cut and stitched out of a dead cow's skin.

Word got out, and he was reproached for it. The reproach is the obvious one and would have been made in a tone of real disgust: you have made a god out of carrion.

He answered.

He did not say that purity does not matter. He did not say that his image was a figure and should not be taken literally. He did not apologise for his trade or ask to be excused on the grounds of poverty. He took the thing they were accusing him with and walked it straight back into their own temple.

The drum, he said. The drum they beat in worship, at the evening service, at the festivals, in the procession, the one whose sound is the sound of God being honoured in this city every day of the year. What is stretched over the mouth of it? It is a hide. It was a living animal and it died and somebody skinned it and somebody like me cured the skin and tensioned it over that frame and pegged it, and you take it up in your hands in front of the image and you beat it and you call that worship.

The cow, he said. The cow you hold sacred, the one it is the worst of all sins to kill, the one whose name you swear by. She has a hide on her. It is the same hide. You do not think her impure while she is wearing it.

And then the last of it, which is the one that cannot be answered. God is in the animals that have hides. He is inside them, in the cow and the buffalo and the goat, in the beast alive in the field, and if he is in the animal then he is in the skin of the animal, and the skin does not become something else because the animal has stopped breathing.

Three moves and the argument is over.

It is worth seeing how exactly this matches what Kabīr was doing on the other side of the city with thread. Kabīr argues with a loom because a loom is what he has. You wear one thread round your neck and it makes you twice-born; I have thread all over my house and I make cloth people can wear; which of us is better placed. Ravidās argues with hide because hide is what he has. It is the same move made with different material by two men who knew each other, and it is the reason the compilers put their verses on the same page.

But there is a difference, and it is the difference between the two men all through. Kabīr's version is an attack: he takes their symbol and makes it ridiculous. Ravidās's version is not an attack at all. He is not saying your drum is filthy. He is saying your drum is a hide, and you love it, and you carry it into the presence of God, so tell me again what is wrong with mine.

They had no answer for him. Nothing in any account says what was said back, and the image stayed in the hut, and he went on worshipping it.

The image did not stay a private matter. In a few years it was going to be raised in front of the king, and the charge would be, in so many words, that a shoemaker has no right to make an image of God. They were not wrong that he had done it. He had done it without asking anybody, out of the one material that made the whole thing worse.

The trade went.

It went the way these things go, which is slowly and then not slowly. The holy men came, and he sat with them, and sitting with them takes the morning. Then there were more of them, because word travels among men who walk, and a house where you are fed and given shoes and not hurried is a house that gets into the conversation on the road. Then people from the quarter began coming to hear what was said. Then the days that had a few hours of cobbling in them had one hour, and then some of them had none.

A cobbler who does not cobble has no money at the end of the week. There is no store behind him, no land, nothing to sell but the tools. His circumstances deteriorated, say the old accounts, and they say it flatly, and then they say the other half of it, which is that he bore every outward mark of poverty, and was glad.

Outward marks. It is worth being concrete about what they were, because the phrase covers a lot of ground.

A cloth round the middle and nothing else, and that cloth going thin and then going through, and not being replaced. In the picture of him that hung in Banaras long afterwards he is a very thin old man, naked except for a red cloth at the waist, with a rosary in two folds at his neck and beads on his wrists and arms. Eating once. Eating what there is, which in a bad week is a fistful of parched gram and in a worse week is what somebody brings. No lamp oil. A thatch not renewed on time, so that when the rains come the roof lets through in three places and the mud floor never dries. Debt at the grain dealer's, because everyone at that level of the market lives on credit, and the credit of a man who has stopped working goes first.

And a wife in the middle of it.

The accounts do not dwell on that part. She is there. She was there when they went round to the back of the house and she was there now, in a hut with a wet floor, married to a man who had a trade and had stopped using it, feeding whoever came up the path. What she made of it is not recorded anywhere. Not one sentence of hers survives, and it will not be supplied.

What can be said is that she stayed. Through the years of the hut, through the poverty, through the visitors, through everything that is coming in the next few chapters, she is in the house, and when the house eventually becomes a two-storey house she is in that too.

And he was glad. That is the word, and it is not a pious flourish added afterwards by an admirer; it is in the plainest of the old accounts, in the same sentence as the poverty. He did not endure it. He was not resigned to it. He had the thing he wanted and the rest of it had stopped mattering, and people could see that he was pleased, and it puzzled them enough that they remembered it.

This is where a certain kind of book begins to lift off the ground, and this one will not. There is nothing beautiful about a wet floor. Being hungry is being hungry, and a man who has given away the money for the hide cannot buy the hide, and a household in that state is one fever away from disaster. Whatever he had found, he had not found a way of making poverty comfortable. He had found something he preferred to comfort.

He also stopped having to think about very much. A man with a business has a business to think about. He had a hut, an image in it, a wife, a water pot, a knife, a rāmpī, and his day, and none of it required managing. What that clears out of a head is considerable.

So he sat in a hut with nothing, in the quarter outside the quarter, at the edge of the richest religious city in the world, and sang. And people began to come out from the city to listen, which is how the next part of this starts, because one of the people who came out to that hut came carrying something in his hand.

A holy man came to the hut.

In the accounts that have come down it was God himself, in a sādhu's dress, come to see what the man was made of. That is how it is told and this book tells it the way it is told. To Ravidās, on the day, it was a traveller at the door like the hundred travellers before him.

He was received the way everyone was received. Water first. Then a place out of the sun. Then food, which was bread, and there was not much of it and it was what there was. Then the waiting on him: the feet washed, the mat, the questions asked and answered, the evening spent. Whatever was in that house went to the visitor, because that is what the house was for, and it had been what the house was for since he was a boy carrying his father's grain out of the back door.

The visitor watched all this and then wanted to do something about it.

It is a recognisable impulse and it does the man credit. Here is a devotee of the first order living in a hut with a hole in the roof, giving away bread he needs, and here is the visitor with the means to end all of it in a single afternoon. He had with him a stone. A touchstone, which is to say the philosopher's stone, the thing that turns base metal into gold at a touch, and he gave it to Ravidās and explained its properties and told him to keep it carefully.

Ravidās said no.

He said it without heat and without making a performance of it. He said that his wealth was the name of God; that he had that already; and that he had no use for the stone.

The visitor pressed him. He would. A poor man refusing a fortune out of politeness is the commonest thing in the world, and the second offer is how you find out whether he meant it. So he pressed, and Ravidās went on saying no, and at that point the visitor did the thing that makes this scene what it is.

He asked for the rāmpī.

It was there, because it was always there, on the ground by the bench with the scraps of leather: the iron scraper the man used every working day of his life, the blade worn thin and hollow at the edge from years of paring, the handle polished by one hand. A tool worth almost nothing. If it had been lost he would have had another made, and he would have been sorry, the way a man is sorry about a familiar thing.

The visitor touched the stone to it, and the iron became gold.

Set it down and leave it there. The blade, the same shape, the same wear at the edge, the same handle, lying on the floor of a mud hut in the evening light, yellow. It is the single most persuasive argument anybody made to Ravidās in his whole life and it was made without a word being said.

He looked at it. And he said the same thing he had said before.

He said that his one wealth was the name; that the stone was of no use to him; and that he did not want it in the house. The visitor said he was leaving it anyway. Then Ravidās, who was not going to argue further and was not going to take it either, told him where to put it.

Put it in the thatch, he said. Up there, over the Ṭhākur, in the roof. And know it again when you come back.

That was not a hiding place and it was not safekeeping. Thatch is where things go that nobody has a use for: the broken awl, the piece of string, the thing you will get round to. He was telling the man, in the politest available form, that the stone was rubbish, and that if it had to be in the house then it could go where rubbish goes, and that he was not going to be responsible for it.

The visitor pushed it up into the roof over the image, and went away.

Thirteen months went by.

Count them across a year and a month of that climate, because the thatch is the point of this story. The hot months first, the roof dry as tinder over his head and the dust coming down through it whenever anything moved up there. Then the rains, and the thatch soaking and sagging and dripping in the three places it always dripped, and the hut smelling of wet straw for eight weeks, and the man underneath it lying awake in the dark within arm's reach of enough money to re-roof the house in tile. Then the cold months, the clear ones, when he was up before light and the breath showed. Then the heat again.

In all that time the household did not improve by one item. He made shoes when he made shoes and gave them away when he saw a man who needed them. He ate what there was. The cloth at his waist got no newer. The image in the hut was washed and dressed and served every morning of those thirteen months, and every morning of those thirteen months he stood directly under the stone to do it.

He did not touch it. Nobody in the hut touched it. It stayed exactly where a stranger's hand had pushed it into the straw.

Then the visitor came back, and the first thing he did was look round the place.

Nothing. The same hut. The same thatch, a year further gone. The same man, thin, cheerful, in the same cloth, with the same tools by the bench, the rāmpī among them, iron again or gold and still being used to pare leather; the accounts do not say and it does not matter, because either way he had gone on cutting soles with it. There was no new roof, no new wall, no cow in the yard, no boy hired, no second room. Whatever the visitor had expected to find, it was not this.

He asked after the stone.

Ravidās answered him in three sentences and they are worth having exactly. He said: it will be where you put it. He said: I have not touched it, I have been afraid of it. And he said: do not test me.

That last is the sentence that gives the man away, and it is the reason this story survived when a hundred better-furnished stories about him did not. He was not pretending indifference. He had not spent thirteen months quietly above the matter. He knew quite well what was in the roof, and he knew what it could do, and he had been afraid of it, every day, the way you are afraid of a snake in a place you have to walk past, and the way he had dealt with it was by not putting his hand up there once. And now the man was back and offering it to him again, and Ravidās was asking him, plainly, to stop.

The visitor reached up into the thatch and took it out and went away satisfied.

Afterwards Ravidās made a song about it, and it is a strange song to have come out of that scene, because there is no drama in it at all. It is an inventory. He sets his property against the property he has just turned down, and he lists its advantages the way a man lists the advantages of a good field.

The name is the wealth of God's people.

It goes up every day and it never goes down.

Nothing takes it, by day or by night.

The man who owns it sleeps at home, and sleeps easy.

What does a man with that want with a stone?

Rav Dās says so.

Every line of that is a merchant's line. It increases. It does not depreciate. It cannot be stolen, and he says by day or by night, which is what you say about a thing that is safe from the thief who comes in daylight with a story and the one who comes over the wall at midnight. Its owner sleeps at home, which is a poor man's boast against a rich man's anxiety: the man with gold in the thatch does not sleep well, and the man with gold in the thatch was him, for thirteen months.

And then the last line, which is not a rhetorical question. It is an accountant's question. Given that I hold an asset with those properties, what exactly would the stone add.

Some while after that he began finding money in the hut.

It came at the same point every day. He would go to the image in the morning and clean the seat it stood on and set out the things for the service, and under them, where nothing had been the night before, there were five gold coins. The next morning, five more. And the next.

He did not want them.

Understand what the fright was about, because it is not the ordinary scruple of a holy man who thinks money is dirty. He had grown up in a house with grain and money in it and had seen his father count the stores and decide that a son who gave things away could not be allowed near them. What frightened him now was nearer than that and worse. The coins were coming out of the worship. They were appearing under the vessels of his own service, which meant that the one activity in his life that he had kept clear of all calculation was now producing an income, and would go on producing one, and that every morning from now on he would be going to the image knowing that there was gold under it.

He thought about giving up the service.

That is the sentence in the old telling and it should be read for what it is. He was prepared to stop worshipping rather than be paid for it. He was afraid of the devotion itself, in case it made him rich, and the fear was not foolish. It is much easier to be a poor man who prays than a rich man who prays, and he had just spent thirteen months finding out how much attention a lump of gold in the roof takes up.

He was overruled. A command came to him in a dream and it was short: take what is given to you now. So he stopped refusing.

And then, quite quickly, everything changed shape.

An admirer of his, a man with money, made him a present of a large sum. What he did with it he did in a particular order, and the order is the man.

First a sarā: a rest-house, with rooms, for holy men. Not a lodging he would charge for. A place where the people who had been sitting in his yard for twenty years could be out of the rain. That went up first, before anything of his own.

Then a temple, and the temple was not a modest one. The accounts go into the fittings with obvious pleasure and they are worth repeating as they stand. A canopy over the image. Fringes. Gold lace cords. Lamps on the walls and chandeliers hanging. Flags, banners, festoons. It was got up until people coming along the road stopped where they stood and looked at it, and one of the old tellings says the place looked like the city of devotion itself, which is as near as that writer could get to saying that a hut on the waste ground outside Banaras had turned into something people came out of the city to see.

And then, last, a house for himself, two storeys, on the site of the hut.

The turn should be stated without decoration. The man who would not have a touchstone in the house ended with an upper storey on the ground where the hut had been.

He was overruled and he obeyed, and what he built with the money was a place for holy men to sleep, a temple round the image he had made himself, and a house with a room above the room. The same accounts that record the refusal record the building, and they record both without embarrassment, and they are right not to be embarrassed. A man who has spent thirty years unable to house the people who come to him is not being inconsistent when he houses them.

But something else came with it, and it was not gratitude.

A Chamār with a temple is a different proposition from a Chamār with a hut. As long as he was poor he was a curiosity out on the low ground and the city could leave him alone. Now there were canopies and chandeliers and people from good families walking out past the tanning pits to see a shoemaker's image, and coming back in and talking about it.

In Banaras that was not going to be allowed to stand.

The brahmins of the city went to the king.

Their case should be put in their own terms and at its strongest, because it was not a weak case inside the system that produced it, and a book that makes them stupid has thrown away the whole meaning of what happens next.

It ran like this. The making of an image of God, and the service done to it, is not a private matter and never has been. It is an office. Who may perform it, in what state of purity, with what words, with what preparation, and above all who may not, is laid down; and it is laid down in the texts, and the texts are the authority for everything in that city, and nobody in the assembly was going to dispute that. Now search those texts for the authority by which a shoemaker sets up an image of God and worships it. There is none. There is no line anywhere that permits it. The thing has simply never been provided for, because it was never conceived of.

And this man, they said, has done it without fear.

That was the phrase, and it carries the real offence. Not that he had been careless, or ignorant, or led astray by some teacher. That he had done it knowingly and had not been afraid to. He had made the image with his own hands out of a hide. He kept a śālagrām, the black river stone that is the house of God in a proper household, and he kept it in a Chamār's hut. He had built a temple over it. And people were going out there. That was the part that had brought them to the king: people of the city, people who knew better, walking out past the pits to stand in front of a cobbler and put their heads down.

A low man has no right to any of it. That was the end of the argument and they did not think it needed defending. He should be stopped, and he should be made to suffer for what he had already done.

The king sent for him.

A summons like that was not a small thing. The man walking up into the city was a Chamār going to a royal assembly, which is a room he had no business in, to answer a charge brought by the men who were the city's learning, in front of everybody, with the outcome entirely in one man's hands and no appeal from it. Men have been ruined by less. He had no patron, no caste behind him, no family standing, and the charge against him was true in every particular: he had made the image, he did worship it, and he had never once asked anybody's permission.

He came, and he came up through the city to do it, in through the lanes he kept out of, past the houses of the men who had brought the charge.

He answered.

What he said, word for word, is not recorded. What is recorded is the effect of it, and the two things remembered about how he spoke, which are worth more than a transcript. He was dignified. And he was reasonable.

Not defiant. Not pleading. He stood in that assembly and gave an account of what he did and why he did it, in the same even voice he used about everything, and the king listened to him and could find nothing in it to punish. He declared him guiltless on the spot.

That is the first hearing and by itself it settles nothing. A king can say a man is guiltless and the city can go on thinking exactly what it thought before. The brahmins had not been answered; they had been overruled by a man who was not learned, on a matter of the texts, which is not how any of them understood the world to work. They would be back, and when they came back they did not come with an argument.

They came with a proposal to settle it by test, in public, in front of the whole assembly, with an image on a throne.

The day was fixed and the assembly was called, and the room filled early.

The image was brought out and set on a high seat in front of it.

It was not his image. That is the point of the arrangement and it was their choice. It was the image the brahmins themselves worshipped, from their own shrine, served by their own hands, with their own rules kept round it: the one they bathed and dressed and fed and put to sleep, the one that had never been touched by anybody who was not entitled to touch it. It was a small thing, as these images are, small enough to be lifted in two hands, dressed and garlanded for the occasion, and it was carried out and set down on the throne on a cloth, high up, where the whole room could see it.

The terms were agreed in front of everybody.

Whoever could call it to come to him held the right to worship.

In the room were the king, the brahmins of the city in a body, and as many people as could get in. Ravidās was there on the floor at the side with nothing in front of him. He had brought nothing and there was nothing for him to prepare. He had no recitation to do and no formula to repeat, and no part of the learning that was about to fill the room for the next several hours, and when his turn came the whole of what he had to offer would take four seconds.

The brahmins went first. They had the learning and the entitlement and they had brought the image, and the order was not disputed.

What they did is a technical thing and should be described as one, because it was work, and they were very good at it, and nothing about it was insincere. They recited. A man stands, and begins the praise of God in the Vedic manner, in the fixed words, in the fixed order, on the fixed notes, because the sound is not decorative and a syllable out of place is a fault in the offering. He has had this by heart since he was eight. He does not read it and there is nothing in front of him to read. He comes to the end of one passage and takes up the next, and then the mantras, repeated, the same formula going round and round while the fingers move on the beads.

The first man did his portion and stopped.

The image sat on the throne.

Then the second went, and then the next. One at a time, through the morning, each of them doing what he was best at, in front of his own people, with the image in plain view of the whole room. Between one man and the next there was the sound of a large number of people standing in one place and not saying anything.

Then they gave up on going singly and did it together. They stood in a body and recited in a body, which is a considerable noise and a considerable thing to hear, a great many voices on the same syllables at the same pitch, the sound coming back off the walls, filling the whole assembly. They kept it up for hours. The accounts say hours and mean it: the morning went, and the heat came up, and the crowd stood, and men who had recited themselves hoarse dropped out and others took it up, and the reciting went on.

The image stayed an image.

It did not move on the cloth. It did not turn. Nothing happened to it at all, and the afternoon came on, and the reciting ran down of its own accord the way a thing does when everybody in the room has understood the result and nobody wants to be the man who stops.

Then Ravidās spoke. He said: come quickly. Make your name true today, the name that says you are the purifier of the fallen.

The image came down off the throne, crossed the assembly in front of everybody, and clung to his chest.

What happened after that was a great deal of shouting.

There is one more thing remembered about him at Banaras, and it is a single sentence, and it is the thing everybody knows.

The Ganges came to his house in his kathautā, and out of it he gave a jewelled bracelet.

That is the whole of it in the old telling. No frame, no occasion, no quarrel leading up to it, no explanation afterwards. It sits at the end of the account of his life like a line of a song somebody has remembered and could not place, and everything else that is now told about it, the bracelet disputed at court, the brahmin who went to bathe with a coin, all of that came later. The older sources give the bowl and the bracelet and nothing else.

Why that one line lodged when so much else about him did not is a question with an answer, and the answer is in the vessel.

A kathautā is the basin a leather worker has in his yard. It is wide and shallow and heavy, wood or leather or wood lined with leather, and it holds the water the hides go into. Everything in the trade passes through it. The raw hide comes off the cart and goes in to soften. The lime goes in. The hide comes out of the lime and goes back in to be washed, and the wash water goes grey and then white and then something between the two, with hair floating on it in mats and a scum of fat and lime riding on the top and the lot of it smelling from twenty paces. The water in a kathautā is changed and is never clean. The basin itself cannot be got clean; it has been soaking hides for years and it has gone the colour of what it does.

Now put the whole of Banaras round it.

That city's entire trade is water. Everything it has to sell is a promise about water. The steps run for three miles along the bend and the whole population goes down them at dawn to stand in the river, and the water is carried up in brass pots to be poured over images, and it is sold in sealed jars to pilgrims who carry it a thousand miles home, and it is poured into the mouths of the dying. There are rules about it as fine as any rules ever made: which pot, whose hand, what shadow across it, what may be dipped and what may not, what makes it useless and who is entitled to take it. A man of his caste could not put his vessel into a well. He could not have handed a cup of water up to a brahmin. There was no part of that whole apparatus he was admitted to, and the reason given was, in the end, the smell of his yard.

And the river came to his yard.

Not to the temple. Not to the throne. Not up the steps. It came out of the city, past the last houses, onto the low ground, and it came into the one vessel in Banaras nobody would have put a hand into, the tanner's basin with the hair on the water, and he reached down into it and brought up out of it a bracelet set with jewels.

That is the image. Put the filthiest thing in the city next to the holiest thing in the city and let them be the same thing, and everyone who hears it understands instantly, including people who cannot read and have never had a line of scripture explained to them. It is why the line survived. It is an argument nobody has to be walked through.

A proverb grew out of it in that country afterwards and is still said: if the mind is clean, the Ganges is in the basin. It is a good proverb and it says something true. The proverb, though, came afterwards. It is not in the older accounts, and what those accounts give is simpler and harder than a saying about a pure heart. They say the river came to his house. They do not say it was a figure of speech.

There is a story about him that grew up afterwards and is now told more often than anything in this day, and it needs setting out, and then setting beside something else.

In the story, the brahmins challenge him over the sacred thread.

The thread is the licence, the three strands worn over the left shoulder and under the right arm, the mark of the twice-born, which brahmins wear and which no Chamār may wear or has any conceivable claim to. The charge is that he has taken a standing that is not his. And in the story Ravidās answers it by separating the skin of his own body and showing, lying underneath, a sacred thread of gold.

That is not a small claim and it does not stand by itself. It comes attached to a whole account of where he came from, and the account runs like this. He was a brahmin in his last life, and a disciple of Rāmānand then too; and he once took provisions from a merchant who dealt with a Chamār, against his teacher's express instruction; and Rāmānand, sitting down to offer the food, saw that God had not accepted it, and cursed him to be born in a Chamār's house. So he was. And the infant, remembering, refused his mother's milk and would not bear her touch, and reasoned in the cradle that if merely fetching such a merchant's goods had got him born here, what would drinking her milk do. A voice sent Rāmānand to the house. He gave the child the name of God to say, and the child fed.

On that account, the golden thread under the skin is not a wonder. It is evidence. It is there to show what he really was underneath the hide of the life he had been sentenced to.

That is the story, told afterwards, and it is told here because it is told.

Where it sits can be said plainly. It is not in the oldest accounts of him. It grew up later, and it is set at Chitaur, in front of brahmins who are refusing to believe that the queen's teacher can be what he is; and in the older form of it he separates the skin and shows what is under it, and in the later forms he opens his chest with a knife, which is somebody afterwards making the same story louder. It has been told and painted and sung for centuries and a great many people know it who know nothing else about him.

Now set his own words next to it.

He made about forty songs and they are the nearest thing to him that exists, and in them there is no curse, no former life, no brahminhood to be recovered, and nothing under the skin. There is a man who says what he is in the first line and does not spend the rest of the song getting out of it.

He says he is a tanner. He says it to clever men, which is the way the song opens, calling on the learned by name before they can call on him, as though getting the difficulty out of the way before anybody else can raise it. He says everybody knows it about him, and the word he uses means notorious, the word for a man with a bad name in the district. He says that in his heart he thinks on God. And he says that prominent brahmins now come and put their heads on the ground in front of him, and he says it without triumph, as a fact about the world that has turned out to be the case.

Four statements in a row, and he does not join them up or draw anything out of them. He puts them next to each other and leaves them there.

And in the middle of that song, between the trade and the brahmins, he says the thing that settles what he thought about himself, and it is not a claim, and it is not a defence. It is a description of his work.

My trade is leather. I dress it and I cut it.

Every day I carry the dead cattle out of the lanes round Banaras.

He made no book. Like Kabīr he could not have written one, and like Kabīr he did not need to, because what he made was made to be sung, and other people carried it off in their heads and sang it somewhere else, in another quarter and then in another town, until it had gone further from Banaras than he ever did.

About forty of those songs were written down, a hundred years later, hundreds of miles away, by men gathering up whatever they could find of the singers they thought belonged together. One couplet of his went in among Kabīr's, so that the two friends who had talked over the false banquet in a house in Banaras ended up on facing pages. The couplet is this, and it is a merchant's couplet, like the one about the stone:

You are holding the diamond,

and you go off asking after other gods.

There is only one place that road ends.

Rav Dās says it, and it is true.

The man who put together the first great roll of the saints, not long after, wrote four or five lines about him and they are worth having. He said that Raidās's speech was clear, and expert at untying the knots of doubt. He said he could separate milk from water, which is the old way of saying that he could see what a thing actually was. He said that men of the highest standing gave up the pride of their birth and their station and put the dust of his feet on their heads. And he set down a couplet that was going round in his name and is still the plainest test anybody has proposed:

The man everyone gets happiness from is God's servant.

The man anyone gets sorrow from is no servant of God,

and he is not Raidās.

That is where this day ends. Not with a death, because no date and no place for it has come down and this book is not going to supply either. It ends with a tanner's yard on the low ground outside Banaras, a rest-house full of men who have walked a long way, a temple with a canopy over an image made of hide, and an old man in a red cloth with a rosary in two folds at his neck, sitting on the ground, singing.

Two things are still to come and they are the two largest things in his life.

The first is a song. Somewhere in those years he made a song about a city, and it is the best-known thing any of these three men ever made. It is a city with no sorrow in it and no second rank and no third; where nobody is taxed on what he carries, and nobody owns anything, and there is no fear of going down in the world, because there is no down; where the man walking through it goes where he likes and nobody stops him at a boundary. He called it Begumpurā, the city without sorrow.

He had spent his whole life outside a wall, in a quarter people held their breath to walk through, at the edge of a city that called itself the centre of the world. He did not ask to be let in. He described somewhere better, and he described it from where he was standing, which was outside.

The second is a woman. Word of him went west and south along the roads the holy men walked, west and south into the hill country of Mewār, and it reached a fort on a hill at Chitaur, and the queen who lived in it. Her name was Jhālī. She came to Banaras, with her husband and her household and her family brahmins, and she went out past the last of the houses, and she sat down on the ground in a tanner's yard, and she asked the man sitting in it to take her as his disciple.

Her brahmins came out with her, and stood in that yard, and what they said afterwards was that it had been as if their bodies were on fire.

---

The tanners of Banaras did not live in the middle of it. Their work needs water and space and takes months, and it smells, and so the yards where the hides were worked stood off at the edge of the built ground, by a tank or a drain, downwind of the houses of people who did not want to think about where their drums and their sandals came from. A man who works there comes home with his hands changed. The lime eats the skin off the backs of the fingers. The tanning liquor stains the nails a colour that does not wash out and that nobody else in the street has. You could tell his trade across a lane without being told.

In the evening, when the light had gone off the water and the smoke was starting up from the cooking fires, men came along that lane on their way back from the river, and some of them stopped, because there was a man there who sang.

He was not a large man and he had no following to speak of, not at the beginning. He sat where he sat and he made songs, and the songs were short and went round and round and were easy to catch on to and hard to get out of your head afterwards. Children learned them without meaning to. Women carrying water learned them. That is how a song lives in a city where almost nobody can read: it goes into people's mouths and stays there and travels on the road with whoever is walking.

Of all the songs he made, one went further than the rest, and it is still going. It is the thing everyone knows about Ravidās, whether or not they know anything else about him. It is a song about a city.

The place without sorrow. That is the name of the town.

There is no ache in it and no tax on goods.

Nobody there is carrying fear.

No falling away, no going wrong, no dread, no coming down in the world.

There is no property in it, and nothing is taken from anybody.

There is no second rank in it and no third.

Everyone in it is of the one kind.

The town is peopled and settled and everybody has heard of it.

Walk where you want. Nobody stops you at a door.

They know the palace, and no one is kept out of it.

Says Ravidās the tanner, who is free now:

whoever lives in that city with me, I call him my friend.

Begumpurā, in his mouth. The word is built the way the names of towns are built, the way Gorakhpur is built and Jaunpur is built, a word and then the word for a place: this is the town of no grief. It is not a figure of speech and he does not offer it as one. It is where he says he lives.

Consider who is singing. A man whose hands are the colour of the tan pit, in the quarter where the city puts the people who handle its dead animals, in the holiest city in the world, in a quarter he had not chosen and could not leave, under a set of arrangements that had decided before he was born what he might touch, what he might eat, whose water he might drink, which lanes he might walk down and how far up any set of steps he might go. He sings that there is a town where none of that exists. Then, instead of saying that he wishes he lived there, or hopes to, or will after he dies, he says it is his city and gives directions.

The last two lines are the whole thing and they should be read slowly. He signs with the trade. He does not sign as a servant of God or a poet or a disciple of anybody. He signs as the tanner, the man who works leather, the man in the quarter, and he puts one word beside it: free. And then, having told a lane full of people about a place with no ranks in it, he turns and makes the offer, which is the only offer he ever makes and the only one he has to give. Come with me. Anyone who lives there with me is a friend of mine.

That is not a large claim about the world. It is a very small claim about a road, and it can be tested by walking.

The men in the lane went home. Some of them had the song in their heads before they got there, because it is that kind of song, and the ones who had it took it out of the quarter with them the next morning, and it has never come back.

Take the song apart item by item and you find that there is almost nothing in it. It is made of subtractions. He builds the place by naming what has been taken out of it, and every single thing he takes out is a thing that was standing in the lane outside his door while he sang.

He begins with sorrow, which is general, and with the tax on goods, which is not general at all.

A tax on goods, in that country, is the toll. It is what a man pays at the gate of a town for the load on his head, and at the river crossing for the bundle in the boat, and at the market for the right to put his mat down and sell out of it. It is paid by the man carrying the load and nobody else. The man in the palanquin does not pay it. A tanner taking a bale of finished hide to a market pays at every gate between the yard and the buyer, to a man with a stick who is in that post because somebody has bought the right to collect. Put that beside the line and the line stops being poetry: there is a town where you can carry your own goods to market and no one takes a cut at the gate.

Then fear, and he speaks of it as a thing that is carried, a weight, a load a man takes up in the morning and puts down at night if he is lucky. Fear was a working condition in that quarter and not a mood. A man of his caste in that city lived with the knowledge that any of a hundred ordinary acts, done carelessly, in the wrong lane, in front of the wrong person, would be answered at once and by whoever happened to be standing there, and that no one would take his side afterwards.

Then the four short ones, which come in a row like blows: no falling away, no going wrong, no dread, no coming down in the world. The last of them is the one that bites, because it is the thing that happens to households: the family that has lost its land, the people who were somebody two generations ago and are nobody now. In a world where your place is fixed at birth there is only one direction the fixed place can move in, and everybody knew somebody it had happened to.

Then property, and the wrong that goes with it. He puts the two in the same breath and does not explain the connection, because his listeners did not need it explained. Almost everything in that city that could be owned had been owned for a long time by the same people, including things that ought not to be ownable at all: a flight of steps down to the river, the right to say the words at a funeral, the right to collect a toll at a gate, the right to be fed at another man's expense for being born where you were born.

Then the ranks, and this is the line the whole song turns on. There is no second and no third. He does not say there is no first. He says that the counting stops, that there is no arrangement of people in an order at all, and that everyone in the place is of a single kind. He is talking about the four orders and the thousand sub-orders under them, the whole immense machine of precedence that told every person in Banaras who might sit where, who might eat with whom, whose shadow was a nuisance and whose was a defilement. In the town he is describing, it is not reformed. It is not softened. It is simply not there, the way a thing is not there in a place it never reached.

Then the walking, and the doors. Anyone may go where he likes and no one stops him at any door. Of all the lines this is the one a man of his trade would have made first, because it is the one he ran into every day of his life. The lanes of Banaras are narrow and they are full of doorways, and a great many of those doorways were not for him. There were streets he could take and streets he could not. There were wells he could draw from and wells where the rope was not his to touch, and at the wells where it was not, he waited until somebody willing poured for him, or he went further. There were the steps down to the river, which the city held to be the reason the city existed, and there were places on those steps where a man like him did not go.

And then the palace, which is the last and the boldest. They know the palace and nobody keeps them out of it. The word carries both things at once: the great house at the top of the town, and the house of God, which in that city meant the inner room of a temple, behind a door, past a man whose whole employment was deciding who came through.

Not one of these is argued for. That is the astonishing thing about the song and it is easy to miss because we are used to arguments. He does not say that the tolls are unjust or that the doors should be opened or that the four orders have no warrant in any book. He never once tells the pandits they are wrong. He describes a place where the entire apparatus is absent and does not appear to be missed, and he gives it a name, and he says he lives there, and he invites people along.

Everything about that song is in what tense it uses.

He does not say that the city is coming. He does not say that it will be built when enough people believe, or that it stood once in an age now finished and may stand again at the end of this one, or that it waits on the far side of death for those who behave. Those are all things a man could have said in that language, easily, in a line of the same length, and none of them is what he said.

He says: this is the name of my town. He says: there is no sorrow in it. He says: they go where they like. He says it in the flat present, the tense you use for the road outside and the weather today, and then he adds the line that settles it, which is that he is living there now.

A man who says he will go somewhere is describing a hope. A man who says he has already gone is describing an address. Everything in the song depends on the difference, and he chose the second one, and the choosing is not an accident, because the man who made this song made hundreds of others and knew exactly what a verb does at the end of a line.

So what he has said, in public, in a lane in Banaras, is that there is a place with no ranks in it and no tolls and no locked doors, that he is a resident, and that the people standing in front of him, who can see his hands and know his quarter and know exactly what he is and where he sleeps, are welcome to come and see.

It ought to be said plainly what that does to the person hearing it, because it is the reason the song lasted. If he had said the city was to come, the answer was ready to hand: it has not come, you are a tanner, get back to the pit. If he had said the city was after death, the answer was readier still, because the men who sold the afterlife in that town had a whole industry in place and knew their business. But he says he is in it. There is no answer to that. You cannot take a man's address away from him by argument. You can only say he is lying, and if you say it you have to look at him while you say it.

And he is not lying in any way that can be caught. He does not claim the tolls have stopped, or that the doors have come open, or that anything in the lane has changed by so much as a stone. The lane is exactly as it was. He is the one who has moved. The fear that had to be carried, he says, he is not carrying. The rank that was assigned to him, he says, he is not in. The counting that goes second, third, fourth, he says, does not reach where he is standing, although he is standing in the same doorway he was standing in yesterday and has not gone anywhere at all.

Nothing in the song explains how this was done. He never explains it anywhere. The songs of his that survive are full of the fact and empty of the method, and when he does gesture at a cause it is always the same one and it is always put in three or four words: the name of God, which he had, and which cost nothing, and which no one had been able to stop him saying.

What he is describing, then, is not a plan and not a promise. It is a report. He is telling the lane where he has got to, in the way a man tells you he has moved house, and he is giving the directions at the end because directions are what you give when you have actually been somewhere.

The word for the town is Begumpurā and it means the town where there is no grief, and he is the only man in Banaras who claims to have an address there, and he says so every evening, and after a while other people begin saying it too, and then it is a song and not a claim, and then it is everywhere.

He signs that song as the tanner who is now free, and both halves of that matter, and the order they come in matters most of all.

Go through his songs and you find he almost never says his name by itself. It comes with something attached, and the something is always low. He is Ravidās the tanner. He is Ravidās the Chamār. He is your slave Ravidās, and the word is the ordinary word for a bought man, the one used of a household servant who has no wages and no going. He is the low one, the one of no account, the one nobody would look at.

It would be easy to read this as a man running himself down, because saints do that and there is a great deal of it in the devotional singing of that country and much of it is formula. His is not formula, and the way to see it is to notice that he never uses a general word. A poet who wants to be humble says he is a sinner, or dust, or nothing at all, and those words are free, and a king can sing them on a feast day and lose nothing. Ravidās does not say dust. He says tanner. He says the name of the caste, the actual word that was used in the street about him and was meant to sting, the word a brahmin would have used to explain why he was not coming into the house.

He picks it up and puts it in the song himself, before anybody else can, in front of the whole lane, and then he does the thing he always does. He puts a yet after it.

I am a tanner by trade, and God is in my chest. I am your slave, and the first brahmins of the city are on the floor in front of me. I am the low one, the one of no account, and I am living in a town where nobody is ranked. The sentence always has two halves and the first half is never softened, never qualified, never explained away, and the second half never denies it. He does not say he is a tanner but really something else. He does not hint at a better birth hidden somewhere under the skin. The whole force of the thing is that both halves are true at once and that the first one is completely true.

That is why the word free, when it comes at the end of the song about the city, does not read as a boast. He is not saying that he has ceased to be a tanner. He has not. He will be a tanner tomorrow and the lime will be on his hands. He is saying that the thing which the word was supposed to do to him is not being done any more, and that he noticed this himself, and that as far as he can tell nobody can start it up again.

There is a way of hearing the whole of Ravidās in that one move, and it is worth holding on to before the rest of the day, because everything that happens to him afterwards runs on it. He never asks to be let in. He is not found at any door asking for the door to be opened. He never once, in anything that survives, petitions the brahmins of Banaras for a place at their level, and he never argues that a tanner is as good as they are, which would have conceded that there was a scale and that they were on the top of it. He simply tells them where he has got to, using their word for him, and lets them work out what that means about their scale.

They worked it out. Some of them came, and that story is later in the day, and when it comes it is a comedy first and something else afterwards.

The tone should not be mistaken either. There is no anger in the signature and there is no self-pity in it. Anger would have been easy and would have been earned and there is astonishingly little of it anywhere in his work. What there is instead is a kind of unhurried good humour, the confidence of a man who has something in his hand and knows it is worth more than the thing being withheld from him, and who therefore does not need to shout. He is the least shrill of all these singers. He is also, when you sit with him long enough, the most difficult to answer.

About a hundred years after he stopped singing, more than six hundred miles away in the Panjab, men were putting a book together.

They were gathering the songs of their own teachers, and they went further than that. They went out after the compositions of singers who had nothing to do with the Panjab and had never set foot in it: a Muslim weaver of Banaras, a singer out of the Dakhan, and others besides. And a tanner. Somebody rode or walked the length of the north country writing down or carrying back in his head the songs of a Chamār who had been dead a hundred years, because the men making the book had heard them and thought they belonged in it.

About forty of his compositions went in. They stand under his name in the book as it has been sung ever since. One couplet of his went in somewhere else, set in among the couplets of Kabīr, in the middle of another man's sequence, as though whoever was arranging them had heard the two voices answering each other and did not see the sense in pulling them apart. There are couplets of Nāmdev in there too. Three men from three trades and three parts of the country, and the compilers put them in one stream, because to the ear that was collecting them they were one company.

What are his songs like?

The first thing anyone notices is that they are quieter than Kabīr's. Kabīr comes at you. Kabīr will have you by the arm before the second line and there is usually somebody in the song being made a fool of. Ravidās is not doing that. He rarely has an opponent in the song at all. When the brahmins appear in his verses they are not being mocked; they are being reported, and usually they are reported at the moment when they have come round.

The second thing is the distance. A great many of his songs are about being far off and wanting to be near, and about the difference in size between the one who is speaking and the one spoken to. He is small in his own songs and God is very large, and he says so in ordinary images that anyone in that lane would have used about ordinary things: a lamp and the moth going into it, dust and the water that carries it, the servant who is not asking for his freedom because he has found he prefers the house. He returns again and again to dirt and washing, which is not surprising in a man whose caste was defined by what it was held to make dirty. He turns the whole vocabulary of purity over in his hands, gently, and keeps finding that it does not mean what the people using it think it means.

The third thing is the plainness. He has a hard, flat way of setting one thing against another and leaving the two of them on the table. In one couplet of his that the men in the Panjab set down among Kabīr's, he calls God a diamond a man is already holding, names the alternative without troubling to say what the alternative is, says in four words where that road ends, signs it and stops.

There is no ornament on it anywhere and no argument in it.

And there is one habit of his that runs through everything and is worth marking now, because it has already decided one contest in front of a king. When he calls on God, he very often calls him by one of his titles and then holds him to it. God is called the one who purifies the fallen. God is called the one who pardons sinners. These are not compliments in Ravidās's mouth. They are the terms of an agreement, and he is the fallen man and the sinner, and he stands up in public and says: that is your name, so make it true, now, in front of these people. It is the argument of a man with nothing else to argue with, and it is unanswerable in its way, because the only reply to it would be to give up the title.

The songs were made to be sung by people with their hands busy, and they were, and they still are. That is the part of him that never went through a book at all. A man on a road with a load on his head does not need forty compositions. He needs four lines that go round, and Ravidās made those by the hundred, and handed them out to a street that had been given very little else.

A queen came to his door. So here she is, sitting on the ground in a tanner's yard at the edge of Banaras, asking him to take her.

Far to the west and south of that yard stands the fort of Chitaur, on a long flat hill above the plain of Mewār, with the town built along the top of it inside the walls. The Rāṇā held it, and she was his queen, and her name was Jhālī, and what is said about her before this point in her life is one sentence: her ear had never been touched by the name of God.

Queens came to Banaras in the ordinary way, with the household and the guard and the family brahmins, to see the river and the temples and do what was proper at each of them. It is a long journey and an expensive one and it was made in season, with tents and carts and a great many people, and the point of it was the doing of the right things in the right places in the right order, which was exactly what the brahmins had been brought along to supervise.

Nothing is preserved of how she heard about the singer in the tanners' quarter, or who told her, or what she thought she was going to find. What is preserved is that she went to him. Not sent for him: went. A woman who could have had any man in that city fetched to her lodging to wait on her instead had herself carried out past the last of the houses, down to the yards where the hides are, and got out, and went in.

She stayed. And when she went away again she went away as his disciple.

The brahmins who had come with her from Chitaur were not able to bear it. The phrase used of them is that their bodies felt as though they were on fire. It is a truthful description of something and not a figure of abuse. These were men whose whole standing, whose income, whose authority over the household they travelled with, rested on the arrangement that had a tanner at the bottom of it and them at the top. To watch the queen they served go down into that quarter and put her head at that man's feet was to watch the floor of their world come up through their shoes. They did not have a conversation about it. It went through their bodies first.

They said she had lost her reason. This is what is always said, and it has the advantage of requiring no argument. A woman of that rank who does such a thing is not to be answered, she is to be treated, and the people who love her are to be told.

So they went to the Rāṇā. He had come to Banaras with her and he was in the city. They laid it before him: the queen is at a Chamār's hut, she calls him her guru, she takes his instruction, and if this is permitted to stand then nothing we have told you about anything is worth hearing.

He did what a reasonable ruler does. He sent for the man.

Imagine the room. A Rāṇā of Mewār, on the journey, holding a hearing in somebody's borrowed hall with his own priests ranged on one side of him and his people around him; and coming up the floor towards him a tanner from the quarter outside the city, with his hands the colour they were, summoned by a king to explain why he had taken a queen as a pupil. There is no record that he brought anybody with him.

The charge was put in two parts, and it is a good charge, and it was put by men who knew how to put one. The first part was the supreme importance of caste. Not the usefulness of caste, not the antiquity of it: its supremacy, the claim that this is the frame everything else hangs in, that it is written into the order of the world and not into the customs of men, and that a person who breaks it has not broken a rule but has broken the world. The second part followed from it. A shoemaker had taken a station above the one he was born in. He had not been given it, and he could not be given it, because the station a man is born in is the station he has; so he had taken it; so he was a thief of a particular kind, and the queen was the property he had taken.

They said it in front of him, at length, in a language he had not been permitted to learn.

He answered in one sentence.

What God cares about, he said, is devotion. He does not look at your caste.

That is all of it. There is no second sentence recorded and there does not appear to have been one. He did not dispute the antiquity of the four orders. He did not produce a text, and he had none to produce, since the texts in question were the property of the men on the other side of the room and he had been forbidden to hear them read. He did not defend himself against the charge of taking a station above his birth, which would have been to argue about the stations. He put one sentence into the middle of the hall and left it lying there, and the sentence was about what God attends to, and it was entirely beyond the reach of anybody present to check.

So the brahmins proposed the only test that could settle it. Let us pray, they said. Let both sides pray and let God show which he attends to.

It was a fair offer and they made it in good faith, and they went first.

They read the Vedas for three hours. This should be pictured properly, because it is the most impressive thing in the chapter and nobody in that hall thought it was ridiculous. These were the finest reciters of a state, men who had been put into the memorising at six or seven years old and had spent their lives at it, carrying sound that had been passed mouth to ear for a length of time nobody can measure, with every accent and every pause exact, because the exactness is the whole point and a syllable out of place undoes the work. They recited. Then they went to the spells, and they repeated a great many of them, and each one of those had a use and a history and a promise attached to it.

Three full hours. The light would have moved a long way across that floor in three hours. People would have shifted where they sat and gone out and come back in. The reciters would have taken water and gone on.

And nothing happened. God was not moved to come, and did not come, and at the end of it the hall was exactly as it had been at the beginning, with the same people in it, and the reciters out of breath.

Then it was his turn.

He said one thing first, and he said it upward, not to the Rāṇā. Great king, he said, you are called the pardoner of sinners. Be true to your own name.

There it is again, the one move he makes when it is serious: he takes the title, and he does not ask for a favour, he asks for consistency. He is not petitioning. He is pointing out that a name has been claimed and that a claimed name has to be worth something, and that there is a room full of people watching who will now find out whether it is.

Then he sang two stanzas. The first of them opens like this:

Come, and do not be slow about coming.

Or else call for me, and I will come to you.

And the second:

God of gods, I am asking you for shelter.

Have mercy on me.

You know whose I am.

Two short verses in the language the servants in that hall spoke, sung by a tanner, after three hours of the most perfectly preserved sound in the world.

There is no doctrine in those lines and no claim about caste and no reference to the argument that has been going on all afternoon. He does not mention the brahmins. He does not mention the queen, whose case it is. He does not ask to be found innocent. The two verses between them contain one request, made twice in two directions, which is that the distance between the two of them be closed, by whichever of them is going to move, and he does not mind which. Come here, or have me brought. And then: you know whose I am, so that is settled, so have mercy.

He had been summoned to a hearing and he sang as though he had forgotten there was one.

The Rāṇā was convinced without any difficulty at all. That is the phrase in which it has come down, and its flatness is the best thing about it. There was no long deliberation and no compromise offered and no face saved for anybody. The man who had been brought in to be judged walked out of the hall with the king believing him, and the people who had been in the room believed him too.

Nothing in the account says what the brahmins from Chitaur did with their faces while this was going on. They went home when the queen went home, and they were waiting for him there, and they had thought of something.

Jhālī went back to Mewār and held a festival of thanksgiving, and she asked Ravidās to come to it.

She asked with great humility, which is the detail that is preserved, and the detail is preserved because it is the point. It would have been easy for the invitation to come the other way: a queen, who had been publicly upheld, sending for the man whose upholding it was, so that the court could see him. It did not come that way. She invited him as a pupil invites a teacher, from below, with the proper forms, and he accepted and made the journey west, out of the plain and up onto the hill, and came in through the gate of Chitaur as the queen's guru.

She gave away a very large sum in alms. That is the ordinary shape of such a festival and there is nothing remarkable in it; a thanksgiving in a royal house meant grain and cloth and coin going out of the gate for days, and cooks working through the night, and the whole town eating at the queen's expense.

And then she did the thing that made the day. She invited the chief brahmins of the state to come and meet him.

They came. Of course they came; a summons from the Rāṇā's house is not declined, and besides, they wanted to see. But they knew what they were coming to, because everyone in Chitaur knew by then, and they had made their arrangements in advance with the care of men who have thought a problem all the way through.

They brought their own food. Not cooked food: raw provisions, grain and pulse and ghee, carried in by their own servants, so that nothing that went into their mouths at the queen's festival would have been touched by anybody in the queen's kitchen or bought with money laid out for the honouring of a Chamār. They found their own ground and made their own squares and cooked for themselves, in the palace, at a feast given by their sovereign's wife, in full view.

They would not take the sweets. This is the last small brick in the wall and it is the one that tells you most. Sweets are the safe food. Sweets made in sugar and ghee are the thing that passes between households that will not share a meal, the thing you can accept from almost anyone without anything being conceded, the standard courtesy of a country that has a great many rules about eating. Refusing the sweets is not a precaution. It is a message, and it was meant to be read, and the queen read it.

Then they sat down to eat their own food, which they had carried and cooked themselves, in their rows, two by two, each man with his leaf in front of him and his neighbour beside him.

And every man of them, looking up, found Ravidās sitting between himself and the man next to him.

He was in every gap in the row. Whichever way a man turned his head, the tanner was on that side of him, sitting down, at the meal, inside the line they had spent the whole afternoon drawing. There was no arguing with it and nowhere to move to, because moving meant sitting down next to somebody else, and he was there as well.

That is how it comes down, and the comedy in it is the real thing. There is no thunder and no voice from the sky. A group of extremely careful men had built a wall out of raw grain and separate cooking squares and refused sweets, and when they finally sat down inside it, he was already in there, several dozen times over, waiting for them to notice.

What was said in that hall is not preserved and it is easy to believe that very little was said. There is a particular silence that comes over a room when a great many people have all understood the same thing at the same moment and none of them wants to be the first to speak.

Many of them got up and went and put their heads on his feet.

Not all. The account says many, and many is the honest word, and it is better than all would have been. Some of those men went home that evening with their own food inside them and their rule intact and their opinion unchanged, and they are not named, and nothing more is known about them. The ones who came over stayed over. He gained a great many disciples in Mewār, and some of them had been in that row.

Afterwards he made a song about it. It is the centre of everything that survives of him, and it should be read before anything is said about it.

Clever men. Men of the town.

Everybody knows what I am. I am a tanner by caste.

And in my chest I am thinking about God.

Take the water of the Ganges and make wine out of it.

It is wine. No holy man will put it to his mouth.

Take that same wine and pour it into the Ganges.

The river is exactly what it was.

The palmyra is an unclean tree and its leaves are unclean with it.

Write the words of God on one of those leaves

and men will put their foreheads on the ground in front of it.

My trade is leather. I dress it and I cut it.

Every day I carry the dead cattle out of the lanes round Banaras.

And the first brahmins of this city come and lie down in front of me,

because Ravidās your slave has gone in under your name.

He opens by naming his audience and he names them courteously and the courtesy has an edge on it. Clever men. Men of the town. These are the people who know things, the ones with the learning and the address and the standing, and he is none of those, and he says so in the next breath and says it in the word they use: a tanner by caste, and everybody knows it, and he is not going to pretend otherwise for the length of a song.

Then he gives them two arguments out of their own subject, which is purity, and he gives them in the form they use, which is the worked example.

The first is the wine. Their rule says the Ganges purifies whatever goes into it. Very well: make wine with Ganges water. Now it is wine, and no holy man will touch it, and their own rule has not saved it. Now take the wine and pour it into the river. The river is unaffected. The river was never at risk. So whatever the purity of the Ganges is, it is not a thing that leaks into whatever it touches, and it is not a thing that can be damaged by what touches it, and both halves of that are ruinous for a man who has spent the morning worrying about who cooked his rice.

The second is the leaf. The palmyra is held impure and its leaves with it. That is the rule. And yet paper is made out of it, and the moment the words of God are written on that paper, the men who hold the tree impure will put their heads on the floor in front of it. He does not draw the conclusion. He does not need to. Everyone listening has just watched a room full of careful men put their heads on the floor in front of a tanner, and the leaf is sitting there in the song doing the arithmetic for them.

And then he turns, and the turn is the reason this song is the centre of him.

He could have stopped with the leaf. The argument is complete at the leaf. A lesser man, having got that far, would have finished with something general about God caring nothing for caste, and it would have been true and it would have been forgettable. Instead he goes back to himself, and he does not go back to himself gently. He does not say he is of humble birth. He gives them the work, in detail, in the most concrete words available: I dress leather, I cut leather, and every day I carry the dead cattle out of the lanes round this city.

That is the job. That is the actual daily employment of a man of his caste in Banaras, and it is the precise thing that made him untouchable to the men he is singing to: the dead animal, the carcass in the lane, the carrying away of it so that the holy city can go on being holy without looking at what it leaves on the ground. He says it out loud. He says it in a song that will be sung in other people's houses. He names it exactly, without one word of apology or one word of complaint, in front of the men who would not eat in the same room as him.

And then, in the same sentence, with no join at all, the brahmins of Banaras are on the floor in front of him.

He puts those two facts side by side and refuses to smooth the space between them. The carcass and the foreheads. He does not say that he has risen above the work, because he has not; he will be at it again next week. He does not say that they were wrong about the work, or that it is honourable, or that all labour is equal. He says the work and he says the foreheads, and then he gives the one reason there is, and the reason is not about him at all: because your slave Ravidās has gone in under your name.

That is the whole of his account of himself. The trade did not change. He did not change castes, because a man cannot. What happened is that he took shelter under a name, and the name turned out to be larger than the arrangement, and the men who ran the arrangement came and lay down on the floor.

There is a second queen in this story and she has to be dealt with carefully, because a great many people have heard of her and very few have heard of Jhālī.

Here is the position, stated plainly, once, and then the day will go on. It is not a pleasant thing to have to do in the middle of a life, but it is better done in the open than by quietly leaving a name out.

The old accounts of Ravidās name one royal disciple and her name is Jhālī, queen of Chitaur, and what they tell about her is what has just been told: the visit to Banaras, the scandalised attendants, the hearing before the Rāṇā, the festival at Chitaur, the brahmins with their own raw provisions. Those accounts do not mention Mīrā at all. Not once, not in passing, not to deny it. She is simply not in the Ravidās material.

Mīrā is elsewhere in the same books, with her own life and her own verses and her own troubles, and she has a verse of her own and a place of her own, and in that place Ravidās is not given as her teacher. She is a great deal more famous than Jhālī. She belongs to Mewār as well, which is where the confusion starts, since Chitaur is the fort of Mewār and both women are queens in it. And she belongs to the century after. The dates do not sit together comfortably. They are not impossible to force, and people have forced them, but they have to be forced.

And the two women are two women. Jhālī is not an early name for Mīrā and Mīrā is not a later name for Jhālī. Nothing is gained by melting them into a single figure who is neither.

Now, having said that, here is what is held.

It is held in Mewār and far beyond it that Mīrā took Ravidās as her guru, and there is a line of her own in which she names him as the one who showed her the way. The people who sing her songs have always understood it so. The claim is old, it is widely believed, and it is not going to be argued out of existence by anybody counting years, nor should it be, because it says something that the people who hold it want said: that a woman of a royal house was taught by a man who worked hides.

A teacher may of course have more than one disciple, and a fort may have more than one queen in the course of two generations, and this book is not in the business of telling anybody what they may believe about a man whose own century cannot be pinned down. What cannot be done is to put the two women in one body, give the composite Mīrā's fame and Jhālī's scenes, and then tell the result as though it were an account of something that happened.

Both things can be left standing next to each other without being reconciled. The accounts of his life carry Jhālī, in detail, with the hall and the three hours and the separate cooking squares. The tradition carries Mīrā. This book tells Jhālī's story because that is the story the accounts tell, and it sets Mīrā's name down here, where it belongs, without pretending to know more than is known.

There is one more thing to say and then it will be left alone. The pull to join them is very strong and it should be resisted on his account and not on any other. A Chamār who taught a famous queen is a better story, in the market sense, than a Chamār who taught a queen nobody has heard of; and the moment the better story is preferred, the man is being valued by the rank of the person listening to him, which is the exact instrument he spent his life refusing to be measured with. Jhālī is enough. A queen of Chitaur came down to the tanning yards and did not leave. That is already more than the arrangement was built to permit.

Mīrā's life is not this book's business in any case. She has her own, and it is long, and it is somebody else's to tell.

The people who came to him are the argument.

A queen of Chitaur came, with everything that made it difficult for her, and stayed. Brahmins of Mewār came, having first refused to eat in the same room as him, and put their foreheads on his feet, and some of them remained his disciples for the rest of their lives. Before either of those, as yesterday's reading told, the king of his own city had heard the pandits out and found nothing in it. These are the loud ones, and they are the ones the accounts keep, because accounts are written by people who are interested in kings.

But they are not the point of him, and it would be a poor reading of his life that made them the point. A saint who is only remarkable because a queen noticed him has been measured by the queen. The measure of Ravidās is the other direction entirely.

The people who came to him in numbers nobody counted were the people the whole arrangement had been constructed to keep out.

What was on offer in that city, and to whom, is the whole of it. The name of God, in Banaras, was available at a price and through a chain of hands. There were men who would say the words for you. There were places you had to be to say them properly, and steps you had to stand on, and times of year, and a sum of money at every stage, and at the top of the whole structure a book that most people were not allowed to hear read aloud. A Chamār in that city could pay for the outside of all this and never once get inside it. He could stand at the back. He could give his money. He could not go up the last few steps, and he knew exactly where the line was, because it was pointed out to him regularly.

Then a man of his own caste, in his own quarter, with his own accent and the same stain on his hands, sits down in a doorway and sings that there is a town where nobody is stopped at any door, and that he lives in it, and that anyone who is a citizen there with him is his friend.

Nothing had to be bought. Nothing had to be learned in a language nobody in the quarter spoke. No one had to be asked for permission, and this is the part that matters most, because permission was the commodity the whole city ran on. He did not go and get a ruling that tanners might sing to God. He sang, and people joined in, and by the time anyone thought to object there were too many of them.

Nothing in the accounts records a single one of their names. Not one. The queen is named, the Rāṇā is named, the king of Banaras is there, the brahmins are there as a body; and the men and women who actually made him what he became, who learned the songs first and carried them out of the quarter and sang them to their children, are a blank in every page that was written about him. They are the reason there is anything to write about, and they are not in it.

They took his name and they have kept it. There are people in the north and the west of that country today, in very large numbers, who are called after him: who say his name in their houses, who keep his songs, who name their gatherings and their halls and their children after a fifteenth-century tanner of Banaras, and who hold him not as a saint they admire from a distance but as the one in their own line, the man of their own people who went first. They have carried him for five hundred years. Nothing else in his story is as large as that fact, and nothing else has done as much work.

What he handed them was not a philosophy. It was a piece of ground to stand on. A man who has been told all his life that he is at the bottom of an order that God himself laid down is not helped by being told the order is unkind. He is helped by a man of his own trade standing up in his own lane and saying, without heat and without apology, that God does not look at it, and that he has checked.

There is one more thing that happened to his songs and it is stranger than any of the miracles.

The book that was compiled in the Panjab was not made to be read the way a history is read. It was made to be sung from, at first light and at nightfall, by congregations, in a fixed order, under the rāgs its compilers assigned. In time that book was treated as the teacher itself. It is set up, it is opened, it is read from aloud, people bow in front of it and sit below it and take their instruction out of it. Whatever else may be said about the arrangement, this is plain: when the book speaks, a tanner of Banaras is one of the voices speaking, and nobody is permitted to skip him.

Sit with that for a moment.

A body of men at the far end of the north, with their own teachers, building the scripture of their own community, went and found the songs of a Chamār and put them in. Not in an appendix. Not in a section for the outsiders. Under the same rāgs as everything else, in the running order, with his name on them, so that a congregation working through a morning's singing comes to him in the ordinary course and sings the words of a man who spent his life cutting hide and hauling dead cattle, with no announcement and no apology and nothing said about his caste except what he says about it himself, which is a great deal.

And what he says about it himself is what went in. They did not tidy him. The song about the wine and the Ganges and the palmyra leaf and the carcasses in the lanes is in there, in his own words, with the trade named. The town with no ranks in it is in there. Whoever chose these could have chosen forty gentle verses about the love of God and there were plenty to choose from. They took the ones with the leather in them.

And there is what it means to be in a book at all, for a man in his position. Everything else he had was held in mouths. A song in a mouth can be altered by the next mouth, and improved, and shortened, and attributed to somebody grander, and it usually is. Written into a scripture under a fixed order with a fixed name, a song stops moving. Whatever else the centuries did to his memory, they could not quietly promote him out of his caste in those forty compositions, because the caste is written into them in his own hand, so to speak, and the book does not permit editing.

There is a second thing, smaller and in some ways even better. One couplet of his was not given a place of its own at all. It was set down inside another man's sequence, among the couplets of Kabīr, where the argument of one runs into the argument of the other, and there are lines of Nāmdev in there on the same footing. A weaver, a tanner and a singer out of the Dakhan, interleaved, because the men arranging them heard a single conversation and did not think it their business to cut it into three.

That is what the north made of these people within a hundred years of their deaths. Not a note in the margin about a remarkable low-caste poet. A place in the middle of the scripture, in the running order, to be sung by everybody.

It is worth being exact about the size of this, because it is easily read as a gesture and it was not one. A scripture is a boundary as much as it is a text. What goes into it is what the community will be answerable to for ever, and the men doing the compiling knew that better than anyone, and they were not under the least obligation to go looking outside their own country for material. They could have written a line of praise about the singers of the east and left it there. Instead they fetched the actual words, and preserved them under the actual names, with the trades attached, and handed the whole lot to their own descendants to sing at dawn.

So a man who could be kept off the top steps of a ghāṭ in his own city is sung every morning by congregations several hundred miles from it, out of a book that is set up on a seat and bowed to. Nobody planned that and nobody could have. It happened because he made songs, and the songs were good, and good songs go where they like and nobody stops them at any door.

They were in the same city at the same time and they were two of the strangest men in it.

One was a Muslim weaver who had been picked out of a lake. The other was a Chamār who dressed hides. Both of them worked with their hands all day in trades that the city regarded as beneath its notice. Both of them said that the name of God was free and that the men charging for it were selling nothing. Both of them were taken as disciples by the same teacher, the old Vaiṣṇava at Pañcgaṅgā who had been put out of his own order over a rule about who might look at food, and who had then thrown his door open to every caste there was. Both of them ended up in the same book afterwards, with their couplets running into each other.

What the accounts actually put them in together is not much, and it should be given exactly and not stretched.

When the brahmins of Banaras played their trick on Kabīr, sending out false invitations in his name so that the whole country arrived at a weaver's house expecting a banquet he could not possibly provide, Kabīr ran. He went off into the forest and left the house to whatever was going to happen to it. And the accounts say he did it with Ravidās's approval. That is the whole entry. It means the two of them talked it over, that the weaver asked the tanner what to do, and that the tanner told him to go. They are called friends, fellow disciples and townsmen, in that order.

And when Rāmānand at last set out west to keep a promise to a king who had given away a throne, he took forty chosen disciples with him on the road to Gagaraungarh, and Kabīr was among the forty and Ravidās was among the forty. They walked the same road. At the end of it a king came out with a palanquin and prostrated himself in front of each man in the party in turn, which means that somewhere in that line, one after another, a king of Gagaraungarh put his head on the ground in front of a Muslim weaver and then in front of a Chamār tanner, and got up and moved on to the next.

That is all the shared scene there is, and the smallness of it should not be tidied up. They were not a pair. There is no record of them working together, no record of a dispute between them, no exchange of verses, nothing that could be called a partnership. Two men of two religions and two trades lived in the same city, went to the same teacher, and are remembered as friends, and one of them asked the other's advice once about running away, and the other told him to go. Whatever else passed between them in all those years was not written down, because nobody was following either of them about with a pen.

But there is one more thing, and it is better than a scene.

Long afterwards, at the temple they raised to Kabīr in Banaras on the ground where the banquet was supposed to have been, the people who kept it would show visitors the pictures on the wall. One was Kabīr with his disciples around him, two of them kneeling and his son fanning him. And one was Kabīr and Ravidās, together, the weaver and the tanner, in a temple, on a wall, for people to look at.

And there was another picture in that city, of Ravidās alone, and it is the only likeness of him anybody troubled to describe.

He is an old man in it and very thin. He has nothing on but a red cloth round his middle. There is a rosary at his neck, hanging in two folds because it is too long for him, and there are beads on his wrists and beads on his arms. Standing in front of him is a lady in the clothes of a royal house, heavy cloth and the whole weight of her jewellery, and she is holding out a platter of food to him with both hands.

Everything is in that picture. The queen is dressed as a queen and has not put it off. The tanner is dressed in a strip of cloth and has nothing and is not pretending to have anything. She is standing and he is sitting. She is offering and he is receiving. The direction of the whole transaction, in a country where the direction of such things was the most carefully regulated matter there was, runs from the palace to the tanning yard, and somebody painted it, and it was hung on a wall in Banaras, and people came and looked at it.

Two folds of a rosary and a platter of food. Whoever made that picture understood the man better than most of the people who have written about him, because he did not paint the miracle. He did not paint the row of brahmins with the tanner between every pair, which is the memorable scene and the one any painter would reach for. He painted a meal being handed over, which is the plainest transaction there is and the one the whole arrangement existed to regulate, and he put the richest person in the picture on the giving end of it and the poorest on the receiving end, and left it at that.

He died, and nobody wrote down when, and nobody wrote down where.

This should be said without any apology and without any attempt to patch it. There is no year. There is no month. There is no town that all the accounts agree on. Some hold that he ended in Banaras, where he had lived his life and worked his trade. Some hold that he was at Chitaur at the end, out west on the queen's hill, a very long way from the tanning yard he began in. Some say only that he was very old. The one account that troubles to say anything at all says that he turned hundreds of thousands of people towards God, and then says, and went.

That is a finished sentence and it is the only death notice he has.

It is worth noticing that nobody supplied the missing parts, and they could have. The men who kept these stories were perfectly capable of settling a date when they wanted one. Kabīr has a day, a month, a year, and an age down to the month and the day, and an argument about all of it. Ravidās has nothing. The same is true at the other end of his life: no birth year, no parents' names that anyone is sure of, no village anybody can fix.

The reason is not mysterious. Nobody was keeping a record of a Chamār's household in fifteenth-century Banaras. There was no register that his birth went into and no one whose business it was to write down when he stopped working. The great dated lives belong to people the record was kept for. He was not one of them, and the gap in the page is itself a piece of the story, and it is better to leave it as a gap than to fill it in with a plausible guess, because filling it in would be doing to him in ink what was done to him in life, which is deciding on his behalf.

What survives instead is three things, and they are not small.

There is a place in Banaras that people go to as the place where he was born. No account gives a birthplace; the accounts are explicit that they do not know it. But people have gone there for some decades now, and they keep going, in very large numbers, on foot and by every other means, and they carry his songs up the road with them and sing them when they arrive. Whatever a document would or would not say about that ground, the ground has been walked on by his people in great numbers and is not likely to stop being. A shrine is not a piece of evidence. It is a place where a great many people have decided to put their feet, which is a different kind of fact and in some ways a heavier one.

There are the people who carry his name, in millions, who have made him the centre of their own account of themselves, and who did not wait for permission to do it, which is entirely in keeping.

And there are the songs, which is what he actually left, and which have done more travelling than the other two put together. They went into a scripture in the Panjab. They went along the pilgrim roads. They went into the mouths of people carrying loads, and out of those mouths into other mouths, and they are being sung this evening in places that did not exist when he made them, by people who could not find Banaras on a map.

A man who had no date and no monument and no lineage and no property put four lines into the air in a tanners' lane, and five hundred years later the four lines are still in the air.

Set the two columns beside each other and the account comes out strangely. On one side, everything the record usually keeps: the year, the place, the parents, the burial, the endowment, the successor. He has none of it. On the other side, the things the record almost never keeps: what a man actually said, in his own words, with his own name on the end of it, in the language his neighbours spoke. He has more of that than most kings do.

Go back to the lane.

It is the same lane it was at the beginning of the day, on the edge of the built ground, out where the water is and the yards are, and it is the same hour: the light off the river, the first smoke going up, men coming back with their feet wet from the steps. Nothing in it has changed. The toll is still collected at the gate. The steps are still owned. There are still doorways along the route that certain people go round rather than through, and everybody in the lane knows which ones and has known since childhood and does not need to be told.

And in the middle of it a man with lime on his hands is singing about a town.

He has no account and he never presented one. He made shoes and he made songs, and one of the songs got out of the quarter and went round the north of India and has not stopped, and the men who wrote the histories could not even find out what year he died.

He never asked to be understood. He asked to be joined in his town. Every single thing that has been told today comes back to that. The queen who came down into the quarter and would not be talked out of it. The hall with the Rāṇā in it and the charge read out in a language the accused had been forbidden to learn. The three hours of faultless recitation, and the two short verses after them. The row of careful men eating their own food off their own leaves, and the tanner sitting in every gap in the row. The carcasses in the lanes round Banaras, and the foreheads on the floor, named in one breath by the man who did both the carrying and the receiving. To all of it he gave the same answer, and the answer was never an argument. It was an address, and an invitation to come and see the place for himself.

People did come, and they are still coming, and the singing has never had to be organised. Wherever his name is kept there is a room at some hour of the evening with a drum in it and a handful of people who know all the words, and when the song about the town comes round the room joins in at the line about the ranks, because that is the line everybody waits for.

The drum is the same drum it always was and the words are his and nobody has had to be given permission to be in the room. He would not have thought any of that remarkable. He said at the end of the song that anyone who was a citizen there with him was his friend, and people have taken him at his word, which is all he asked and rather less than most teachers ask. There is no initiation in it and no fee and no examination at the door. There is a road, and he says he is on it, and the offer is open to whoever is standing there.

He gets the last word, and it is the end of the song he began with, which is where he lives:

There is no second rank in that town and no third.

Everyone in it is of the one kind.

Walk where you want. Nobody stops you at a door.

They know the palace, and no one is kept out of it.

Says Ravidās the tanner, who is free now:

whoever lives in that city with me, I call him my friend.

This book has been in Banaras since its first page and it is time to leave it.

Almost all of it has been lived within a mile or two of the same bend in the same river: the lake on the south-west side where a child was found, the weaving street with the warp running out of the doorways, the steps at Pañcgaṅgā where an old man came down before dawn, the tanning yards out beyond the houses where the wind takes the smell away. Two men who could not be admitted anywhere spent their whole lives in the city that held itself the holiest in the world, and made their arguments in its lanes, and are still being sung.

The seventh day goes somewhere else entirely, and it goes there on foot.

Somewhere in the years covered by these two days, the old teacher at Pañcgaṅgā made a promise to a man he had sent home on probation, and the year came round, and a letter arrived to remind him of it. So he gathered forty of his chosen disciples and set out west, and the weaver went with him and the tanner went with him. They walked several hundred miles out of the river country, up out of the wet green plain and onto the dry plateau, to a fort called Gagaraungarh.

The man they were walking towards was a king. He had a great fort and an army and a revenue, and he had a goddess he had served since he was a boy, with forty maunds of food laid before her every day. He had heard of the old man at Pañcgaṅgā and gone to Banaras to find him and been turned away at the door on the grounds that a house of beggars has no use for kings. He had gone home, given the whole of it away, come back, and been told to throw himself down a well; and he had turned and gone at the well without stopping to think about it, and the disciples had caught him in mid-air.

Now he was waiting outside his own city with a palanquin set down on the ground, to carry a man who owned nothing, and forty prostrations to make, one at a time, to forty pairs of feet, in front of his own people, in the dust outside his own gate.

Two of those pairs of feet belonged to the men this book has been following. The weaver had been fished out of a lake and had never been given a caste at all. The tanner had been given one and had been told all his life exactly what it was worth. A king was about to put his forehead on the ground in front of each of them in turn and then get up and go on to the next man in the line, as though there were nothing in it, because by then, in that company, there was nothing in it.

Tomorrow the book goes with them.

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