Ramdas championed Brahmin supremacy against egalitarian Bhakti saints

Evidence

According to the scholar Veena Naregal (2001, 12), Ramdas’s “religious and political pragmatism were quite at variance with the inspiration of the Bhakti poets”. Dasbodh, composed of 70,000 ovis over twenty sections, offers an interpretation of vedantic philosophy. Ramdas talked of the need for the return of Brahmin supremacy and viewed the crisis in Maratha society as a breakdown in the social order due to ‘Muslim oppression’, Hindu conversions to Islam, and the usurpation of Brahmin spiritual leadership by the non-Brahmin Varkari saints and gurus (Ranade 1983). Ramdas today is a hero for Hindu nationalists, especially the Chitpavan Brahmins of Maharashtra. — Ambedkar, B R, Annihilation of Caste_ The Annotated…, 1029

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies the contrast between Ramdas’s Brahmin-supremacist pragmatism and the egalitarian credo of the Bhakti movement proper.