Bhakta Pipaji: The King Who Became a Tailor

His queen

Rani Sita, also called Sita Sahachari, and she is a figure in her own right.

What she did

When he left, she went with him.

And this needs putting in context because it is unusual in this entire series.

The standard pattern, in the accounts of the saints in these entries:

• Tukaram, Kabir, Namdev and most of the householder sants had wives who stayed, ran the household, and dealt with the consequences of their husbands not earning
• Ramdas walked out of his own wedding
• Akka Mahadevi and Lal Ded left marriages
• Bahinabai was beaten by her husband for having a guru
• Mirabai was persecuted by her husband's family
• Narsinh Mehta's household was destroyed by his choices

Sita is the exception. She went.

What that meant

She gave up being a queen and took up the life of a wandering mendicant, on the road, with no protection and no status, in the fifteenth century, as a woman.

And the accounts do not treat her as an accessory. She is named, she is present in the episodes, and she is counted among the Rajasthani women saints.

The robbery

The best known story involving both of them, and it is worth telling carefully.

On the road, in a forest, they were robbed, and the robbers took everything they had, including their clothes.

Which left them with nothing at all, in a situation that was considerably worse for her than for him.

What the accounts say happened: they went on. In some versions the robbers returned what they had taken; in others they did not, and Pipa and Sita continued.

Why the story is told: because it is the point at which the renunciation stops being a decision and becomes a condition. A man who has given away a fort still has the memory of having had one. A person standing in a forest with no clothes has nothing at all.

And the honest note: the situation the story describes is one of genuine danger, particularly for her, and the tradition tells it as a hardship rather than as an achievement.

The lion

Another episode, and it is characteristic.

On the road they encountered a lion, or a tiger depending on the account.

What Pipa did: offered himself. He told the animal that it was hungry and he was available, and stood still.

What happened: it did not attack, and went away.

Whether it happened: unverifiable. What the story is doing is establishing that the giving up was total and included the body, which is the same claim the well story makes.

Dwarka

He travelled with Ramananda's group on pilgrimage, including to Dwarka.

What the accounts say: at Dwarka he walked into the sea, to find Krishna in the submerged city, and was gone for some days, and came back.

How to hold that: a devotional account, and the historical residue is that he went to Dwarka with the group and something happened there that the tradition remembered.

And the practical note: Dwarka is on the Arabian Sea, the currents are real, and people drown there. The devotional account is not an instruction.

What he did for a living afterwards

He became a tailor.

And this is the fact that distinguishes him from every other royal renunciate in Indian tradition.

The standard pattern for a king who renounces: he becomes a sannyasi, takes to begging, or retires to a hermitage and is supported by the community, or by his successor, or by pilgrims.

Pipa took up a trade and worked at it.

Why

Because of the tradition he had joined.

The sant tradition of north India is emphatic that:

• The practice belongs inside working life
• Manual labour is not beneath anybody
• Living on other people's charity when you are able to work is not renunciation, it is dependency
• The saints of the tradition are named by their trades: Kabir the weaver, Ravidas the leather worker, Sena the barber, Dhanna the farmer, Dadu the cotton carder

And Pipa, joining that company, did the consistent thing.

What tailoring meant socially

Everything, for a Rajput.

The Darzi, the tailor community, was an artisan caste well below a ruling Rajput clan. A Khichi Chauhan ruler of a fort taking up the needle was not adopting a humble occupation in a general way; he was crossing a specific and well understood line.

And the community remembered.

The Pipa Kshatriya Darzi community of Rajasthan, Gujarat and beyond takes him as its founding figure and its presiding saint. The Darzi and related tailoring communities across western India observe Pipa Jayanti and maintain his shrines.

Which is a striking outcome: a Rajput king is the patron saint of a tailoring caste, because he took up their trade.

His verse in the Guru Granth Sahib

One shabad of his is in the Guru Granth Sahib, in Raga Dhanasari, which places him among the small number of non Sikh figures whose compositions were included by Guru Arjan in 1604.

Its content, in substance:

The body is the temple. The body is the deity. The body is the pilgrim who comes to worship. In the body are the incense, the lamp and the offerings. In the body I search, and in the body I find.

What is in the cosmos is in this body. Whoever searches, finds.

That last line, in the Punjabi, is jo brahmande soee pinde, jo khojai so paavai, and it is one of the most quoted formulations in the north Indian sant tradition.

What the shabad is doing

It is dismantling the entire external apparatus and putting all of it in one place.

Item by item:

• The temple you would go to: the body
• The deity inside it: the body
• The pilgrim who travels there: the body
• The incense, lamp and offerings you would bring: in the body
• The cosmos the whole thing is supposed to be about: in the body

And the conclusion is a promise: whoever searches, finds. It is not conditional on qualification, caste, or anything else.

Which is exactly what you would expect from a man who had a fort, a goddess, a temple and a full ritual establishment, gave all of it away, and ended up sewing clothes.

One. He took up a trade.

Every other king in Indian devotional literature who renounces becomes a mendicant, is supported by somebody, or retires to a hermitage.

Pipa learned to sew and made his living at it, because the tradition he had joined held that living on charity when you can work is dependency rather than renunciation.

And the trade he took was below him, specifically and in a way everybody around him understood.

Two. His queen went with him.

In a series full of saints whose wives stayed behind and dealt with the consequences, or who left marriages, or who were persecuted by their husbands' families, Sita went.

She gave up being a queen for the road, with no protection, as a woman, in the fifteenth century, and the accounts name her and count her among the saints.

Three. The body is the temple.

His shabad in the Guru Granth Sahib dismantles the whole external apparatus item by item: the temple, the deity, the pilgrim, the incense, the lamp, the offerings, the cosmos, all of it relocated to one place.

And it closes with a promise rather than a condition: whoever searches, finds.

Four. The company he is in.

The traditional list of Ramananda's disciples is a weaver, a leather worker, a barber, a farmer and a king, with no distinction made among them.

That composition is the argument, and it is made by arrangement rather than by statement, which is how the whole sant tradition prefers to make it.

Five. And the thing not to take.

The well. He was told to jump and jumped without asking.

No legitimate teacher requires you to endanger yourself. Any person who instructs a student to do something physically dangerous as a test of devotion is not testing anything; they are creating a hazard, and the fifteenth century framing does not change that.

Police 112, women's helpline 181, Childline 1098, Tele MANAS 14416.

A daily practice from this entry:

• Ram Ram or Sat Naam
• His shabad, read once: the body is the temple, the body is the deity, whoever searches finds. It is short and is in the Guru Granth Sahib in Raga Dhanasari
• If you work with your hands, that is the practice, and the tradition is emphatic about it
• At Gagron fort, if you are in Jhalawar district, where his cave and shrine are

Where to go

• Gagron fort, Jhalawar district, Rajasthan: a UNESCO listed water fort at the confluence of the Ahu and Kali Sindh, with the Pipaji cave and shrine
• Shrines of the Pipa Kshatriya Darzi community across Rajasthan, Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh
• Pipa Jayanti is observed by the tailoring communities of western India

A closing thought

A Rajput ruler of a water fort in Rajasthan, a devotee of the goddess of his own citadel, was told by her to go and find somebody else.

He went to Kashi with a retinue, was refused an audience, waited, was told to jump into a well, and jumped.

Then he handed the fort to a relative and left, and his queen came with him, and somewhere on the road robbers took everything they had including their clothes.

And he spent the rest of his life sewing clothes for a living, which was a trade far below his birth, and the tailoring communities of western India have taken him as their saint ever since.

The one verse of his in the Guru Granth Sahib says that the temple, the deity, the pilgrim, the lamp and the offerings are all in the body, and that whoever looks will find.

Who: Bhakta Pipaji, roughly fifteenth century, Rao Pipa of the Khichi Chauhan clan, ruler of Gagron fort in what is now Jhalawar district, Rajasthan. Gagron is a jal durg, a water fort surrounded on three sides by the Ahu and Kali Sindh rivers, and is one of the six Hill Forts of Rajasthan inscribed by UNESCO in 2013.

His turn: he was a devotee of Durga, the goddess of the fort, and the tradition says she sent him to Ramananda at Kashi. Ramananda refused to see him, he waited, was told to jump into a well, and jumped without asking why, after which he was accepted. He then handed the fort and the rule to a relative and left.

A necessary note: the well is not a model. No legitimate teacher requires you to endanger yourself, and anybody instructing a student to do something physically dangerous as a test of devotion is creating a hazard, not testing anything.

Sita: his queen, also called Sita Sahachari, who went with him. In a series full of saints whose wives stayed behind, or who left marriages, or who were persecuted by their husbands' families, she is the exception, and she is named in the episodes and counted among the Rajasthani women saints. On the road they were robbed of everything including their clothes and went on.

The trade: he became a tailor and made his living at it, which is what distinguishes him from every other royal renunciate in Indian tradition. The sant tradition holds that living on charity when you can work is dependency rather than renunciation, and its saints are named by their trades: Kabir the weaver, Ravidas the leather worker, Sena the barber, Dhanna the farmer. For a Rajput ruler, taking up the needle crossed a specific and well understood caste line, and the Pipa Kshatriya Darzi communities of western India take him as their founding saint.

His verse: one shabad in the Guru Granth Sahib, in Raga Dhanasari, which says that the body is the temple, the body is the deity, the body is the pilgrim, and the incense, lamp and offerings are in the body; what is in the cosmos is in this body; and whoever searches, finds.

Since Pipa is defined by the list he belongs to, the list is worth having.

Ramananda

Fourteenth to fifteenth century, at Kashi, and the figure the north Indian sant tradition traces itself to.

His own position: a Vaishnava, in the Ramanuja line by tradition, who broke with it over the question of who could be admitted and who could eat with whom.

The famous formulation attributed to him: jaat paat puchhe nahin koi, hari ko bhajai so hari ka hoi. Nobody asks about caste; whoever worships Hari belongs to Hari.

His disciples, in the traditional list

• Kabir, a weaver of a Muslim family, the central figure of the whole tradition
• Ravidas, a leather worker, whose verses are in the Guru Granth Sahib and whose community is very large
• Sena, a barber, court barber to the Raja of Bandhavgarh, also in the Guru Granth Sahib
• Dhanna, a farmer of Rajasthan, also in the Guru Granth Sahib
• Pipa, a king
• Bhavananda, Sukhananda, Naraharyananda, Anantananda, Sursurananda, Padmavati and Surasari, the last two being women

What the list is doing

It is an argument made by composition.

There is no way to look at that list and conclude that access to the divine depends on birth, occupation, religion or sex, and the tradition assembled it precisely so that there would not be.

And it is worth noting the two women, Padmavati and Surasari, who appear in the standard lists and about whom very little is known.

The historical caveat

A guide should be honest.

Whether all of these people were literally disciples of a single teacher is disputed, and the dates do not all work. Kabir's dates, Ravidas's dates and Ramananda's dates cannot all be reconciled on the traditional chronology.

What is not disputed: the tradition placed them together, deliberately, and has done for five hundred years, and the arrangement is the statement.

The Ramanandi order

What followed: the Ramanandi sampradaya, which is now one of the largest monastic orders in India, centred on Ayodhya and with a very large presence across north India.

And a note on how the tradition split: the nirguna sants, including Kabir, Ravidas and Dadu, went one way, toward the formless and away from institutions; the saguna Ramanandis went another, toward Rama worship and a monastic order.

Pipa is claimed by both, which is characteristic, and his one shabad in the Guru Granth Sahib places him firmly in the nirguna company while his Rajasthani shrines are in the saguna world.

Where to read the others

• Kabir, Ravidas, Sena, Dhanna and Pipa all have compositions in the Guru Granth Sahib, which is the single most reliable early source for all of them, and which is freely available with translation
• The Dadupanthi manuscripts of Rajasthan are the other major early source, described in the Dadu Dayal entry
• The Bijak is the Kabirpanth's own recension