INSIDE THE GURU'S GATE - Anpere

Gurus. Other Nirmala establishments which do not have similar stories to report
have consequently been excluded from the narrative. In the case of Kabir and Ravidas,
short descriptions of the places related to the two saint-poets have been integrated
in the local history based on the inclusion of their religious poetry in the Guru
Granth Sahib. 207 The local history employs the narrative device of privileging certain
stories while underplaying others in order to create a coherent and memorable text.
Only buildings and characters that can demonstrate historical links to the Sikh Gurus
or the Guru Granth Sahib are reported, as well as shrines which the present gurdwara
committee administers. In this way the narrative patterns a spatial organization of
historical edifices that differentiate particular centers of sacrality and authority.
The emic history is typically agent-centered with an internal structure that involves
three basic components of agent (the doer of action), action (what took place),
and patient (the persons or things that were affected by the action). 208 The human Sikh
Gurus are the chief agents staged at the centre of the stories with supernatural power
to control actions and to whom all historical events are related and tied together. The
more the individual Guru acts within the story the more well-defined is his identity
and agentive capacity. The Gurus respond to the contexts which they encounter but
they act and create a causal history on divinely inspired and deterministic premises.
Only they are the real doers of history which no other comes close to competing with
207
The construction of the Ravidas temple, situated in the area between Benares Hindu University
and river Ganga, exemplifies how lower caste groups revived the Ravidas tradition in the
twentieth century by blending social activism and religion. The initiator of the temple construction
in Varanasi was Sarwan Das, a Punjabi saint of the chamar caste from Ballan, a village
seven miles north of Jalandhar. In the 1960s Sarwan Das went to Varanasi to search for the right
birth place and found a nim tree in Govardhanpur which was seen as token of the authentic
birthplace. He purchased the land and constituted a charitable trust with the head office at
Ballan. With financial support from Adi Dharmis and Ravidas followers abroad, especially
from England, the Shri Guru Ravidas Janam Sthan Mandir was completed in 1972 (Juergensmeyer
1982: 84 ‒ 85, 260 ‒ 261; Jassi & Suman 2000: 5.). Four years later the then president of India, K.R
Narayanan, inaugurated the Shri Guru Ravidas Gate, a huge gate at Lanka Crossing which
marks the road turning towards the temple. In the southern area of Varanasi, the government
has recently laid out Ravidas Park, a recreation area close by the river Ganga. The temple, the
gate, and the park have given the Ravidas community a representation in the city and strengthened
their identity, caste solidarity and demand for social justice. This became manifest during
the 634 th birth anniversary of Ravidas in February 2001 when thousands of Ravidas pilgrims
from Punjab, England, Canada and the USA poured into the city of Varanasi. They had booked
two airplanes only for the pilgrims, and for many of them it was their first visit to India. Wearing
western clothes, carrying digital cameras and speaking fluent English they presented a
different face of the stereotyped chamar in the streets of Varanasi. The Sikh community arranged
local transportation for about 2000 pilgrims and gave board and lodging to about 250 of
them. Scriptures were also leant for the performance of seven unbroken readings of Guru
Granth Sahib (Akhand path).
208
The concept of “agent-centric” and “agent-centricity” is derived from Urban’s analysis of
myths, in which he discusses the components of action, agent and patient in the internal structure
of narratives (Urban 1981: 324).
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Published on www.anpere.net in May 2008