Guru Ravidas Jayanti

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• Guru Ravidas Jayanti 2022 will be celebrated on February 16, 2022. This will be the 645th Birth Anniversary of saint Guru Ravidas. 
  • It is celebrated every year on Magh Purnima on the full moon day of Magh month with great enthusiasm and happiness all over India.

Image Courtesy:TOI

Guru Ravidas

• He was born in Varanasi in the state of Uttar Pradesh in India as a member of an untouchable leather-working caste, and his poems and songs often revolve around his low social position.
• His mother’s name was Kalsa Devi Ji and his father’s name was Baba Santokh Dass Ji.
• He was a great Saint, philosopher, poet, social reformer, and follower of God.
• He is considered as a spiritual Guru of Meera Bai who was the queen of Chittoor and daughter of one of the famous kings in Rajasthan named Rao Dudaji.

Contributions and Teachings –

• He made remarkable contributions in the form of devotional songs, verses, spiritual teachings during the Bhakti movement.
• He had envisaged a society that is based on equality and free from any kind of discrimination. 
• He gave it the name ‘Be-gampura’ – the city where there is no place for any kind of grief or fear.
• He was one of the most famous and leading stars of the nirguna sampradaya (sant parampara) and was one of the prominent leaders of the North Indian Bhakti movement.
• There are 41 verses of Guru Ravidass Ji in the Sikh Holy Book, Guru Granth Sahib which was compiled by Guru Arjan Dev Ji, the fifth Guru of the Sikhs.
• India’s constitutional values of social justice, freedom, equality and fraternity are in line with Guru Ravidas’s philosophy of life. 
• The Chief Architect of our Constitution, Dr B.R. Ambedkar embodied the Constitutional principles around the values expressed by Guru Ravidasji.

Source:IE