Sant Ravidas and the Ganga in the Bowl
A cobbler in Kashi skipped the pilgrimage because he had promised a customer a pair of shoes — and a proverb was born that day.
Sant Ravidas lived in Kashi in the fifteenth century. He was a cobbler — he made and mended shoes, and that was his living.
He sang as he worked. Any wandering ascetic who came to him was given shoes without charge.
Once a great bathing festival came round on the Ganga. His neighbours set off and called to him, "Come along, earn some merit."
Ravidas said, "I have promised a customer his shoes today. If I go off to bathe and break that word, my mind will stay here anyway. My body would be in the Ganga and my mind in a shoe. What would such a bath give me?"
Then he smiled, picked up a coin an ascetic had once given him, and handed it to them: "Offer this to Mother Ganga for me. But only give it if she puts out her hand and takes it herself."
They went off laughing.
The story says that when they tried to offer the coin at the ghat, a hand rose from the water and took it — and gave back a gold bangle, with the word that it was for Ravidas.
From that episode comes the line still quoted today:
"Man changa to kathauti mein Ganga." — If the heart is clean, the Ganga is right there in the tub where the leather is soaked.
Ravidas's verses are included in the Guru Granth Sahib. Tradition also counts him as Mirabai's teacher.
Moral: A pilgrimage may be far away, but purity is not. Doing your own work honestly is a bath too.
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