your bridge home
Saints and Poets
Barred from every temple in the district, he raises a plain white post in an open field and calls it the centre.
Across Chhattisgarh you will see white pillars standing alone in open fields.
A jaitkhamb is a wooden post, painted white, with a white flag on top. It is not a shrine. There is nothing inside it. It stands for truth, and for purity, peace, equality and unity, and it is the emblem of a movement started by a farm labourer.
Ghasidas was born on the 18th of December, 1756, at Giroudpuri, in what is now Baloda Bazar district in Chhattisgarh. He died in 1850.
He was a Chamar. That community worked with leather, was treated as untouchable, and in that region made up a large part of the people who worked the land. Ghasidas worked the land too.
The movement he built is the Satnampanth, and its followers are the Satnamis. Today they number in the millions and are one of the largest communities in the state.
Scholars place the founding between about 1820 and 1830. If that is right, he was already in his sixties when he began. The main modern studies are Ramdas Lamb's Rapt in the Name and Saurabh Dube's Untouchable Pasts.
The rest of this story, read aloud, and a new one every day.