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Indian warrior god breaks down barriers

NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE, RAMDEVRA, INDIA
Tuesday, Sep 09, 2003, Page 16

An image of Ramdev, a Rajput warrior of the 15th century who also worked as a social reformer, in a temple dedicated to him. PHOTO: NY TIMES

After nine days of walking, Pani Bai, widow and laborer, had little patience for questions. She stopped only long enough to say through tears that her arms and legs were aching, but that her daughter was ailing and she had to keep moving.

What was in her mind's eye, and only a few kilometers away, was the temple built over the gravesite of Ramdev, a 15th-century Rajput warrior and social reformer who has become a saint, even a god, to the rural masses of western India. In flip-flops, Pani Bai had walked, step by painful step, almost 483km from her home in southern Rajasthan to pray for her daughter's recovery.

Each summer, two million people make a similar pilgrimage to this town in the Thar Desert, not far from where India conducted its 1998 nuclear tests, to pray to Ramdev, who is revered by Hindus and Muslims alike.

Many pilgrims come on foot in temperatures well over 38℃. They walk four, or nine, or seventeen days, stretching a sheet on the ground to bed down at night. Others come by bike, motorbike, train, tractor and, less often, car.

A bus carrying pilgrims who have completed their pilgrimage by foot or bicycle rides by shoes wich have been discarded as an act of renunciation. PHOTO: NY TIMES

The long strings of pilgrims trekking along roadsides throughout Rajasthan, waving colorful martial flags, is a remarkable display of faith. So is the final devotional act some undertake: casting off their shoes, in a show of renunciation, to walk the last miles barefoot on the searing ground. Their shoes -- camel-skin slippers, rubber thongs -- are strewn along the roadside. In town, shoe vendors who perch here just for the pilgrimage period eagerly wait to shod them anew.

This was Pani Bai's third trek here. Yet her 18-year-old daughter's health, she conceded, has not improved; the tumor in her back still swells. Some have suggested she needs to bring her daughter with her -- an impossible feat, she said. Others say she must come five times in five years, and so she will, hoping that enough blisters of devotion will eventually show results.

"I'm not asking any wealth," she said. "Just my daughter's welfare."

Some say their prayers have been answered. Two women held up sons they said had arrived in the world in answer to prayers to "Baba Ramdev."

Ram Kanya, 35, held up two sons who came after five daughters, and her husband's pilgrimage and prayers to Ramdev. "Both my sons were given to me by Baba," she said. When the first was born, they had made an offering of 101 rupees to Ramdev. They had also brought both sons here to be tonsured for the first time, an important Hindu rite.

One could say making tracks to the shrine of a dead man is the resort of the desperate -- people without money for specialists or infertility doctors or other modern mercantilist methods to make their dreams come true. Or one could say it is a tribute to a man whose legacy -- of fighting for the downtrodden, for social equality -- was so strong, and remains so alluring, that it has endured through almost six centuries.

"What a democratically elected government is trying to do now, he tried to do 600 years ago," said Amba Ram, a local official, of Ramdev's efforts at social uplift.

Ramdev's life is recounted through folk songs and tales, making it as well known to Indians as Santa Claus is to Americans. "The whole country knows," said Yakub Khan, 23, a Muslim who sells stickers of Hindu gods for a living. "Baba fulfills the wishes of everybody."

Though Hindus and Muslims have battled, sometimes murderously, for control of religious sites, the two religions mingle easily here. Hindus believe that Ramdev, who died around 1459, was the incarnation of Lord Krishna, and that his birth to a sonless king was an answer to his father's prayers.

Another legend, though, holds that five Muslim holy men skeptical of Ramdev's miraculous power came from Mecca to see him and left convinced. Thus Muslims, following Sufi tradition, worship him too, under the name Ramdevpir, Ramapir or Ramshahpir.

On busy days, the wait to pay homage inside the temple can be five hours. In the shrine, the tombs of Ramdev's parents, sons and relatives -- family members still live in the area -- are cloaked in Islamic green. Behind glass, there are life-size statues, made from cloth and in one case silver, representing his horse. There is tinsel, the noise of a clanging bell, the shriek of a whistle, songs, and the press of crowds. A man falls to his knees and crawls to the image of Ramdev.

In town, which has the festive and commercial feel of a fair, vendors sell bangles and roasted rice for offering in worship, as well as T-shirts and necklaces with Ramdev's picture. He is depicted as a man of deep, dark eyes and lively facial hair, with a mustache twirling up at both ends. A pair of feet, the crescent moon of Islam and the horse, replicated in miniature for sale in colorful paper and tinsel, are representations of his worship.

The real horses are long gone. Nearby, men and bicycles are being piled on top of buses. This is the sweet coda to sacrifice: After their days of walking or bicycling here, the pilgrims get to ride home.
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