RAI DAS, founder of a Hindu sect called Rai Dasi. It is a sect of Vaishnava Hindus. Rai Das was originally a Chamar, one of the aboriginal tnbes of India, who are labourers, leather Workers, shoemakers, and in Chlattisgarh, largely farmers. His religious vievvs were in accordance with the doctrines of Ramanand, and his followers are known as the Rai-das Panthi, Rai Dasi, and Sad'h Narni. Throughout India there is no more despised race than the Chamar. In the distribution of occu pations, nothing has been left for them but the, IIindu eyes, degrading handicraft of skinning dead cattle, which is so insufficient for their numbers, that the great majority of them are driven to earn their bread from hand to mouth by ill-paid day-labour. In the great isolated plain of Ch'hattisgarh, where the jungle has not even yet been thoroughly mastered by man, hands cannot be spared from agriculture simply to gratify social prejudices, and the Chamars, who make up some twelve per cent. of the population,
are nearly all cultivators.
The creed adopted by them is the Sad'hnami or Rai Dasi, a branch of one of the most celebrated dissenting movements in Indian religious history, namely that of the Ramanandi. No images are allowed ; it is not even lawful to approach the Supreme Being by external forms of worship, except the morning and evening invocation of this holy name (Sad'hnam), but believers are en joined to keep him constantly in their minds, and to show their religion by charity. Even if the creed be weak as a moral support, it is strong as a social bond; and, no longer weighed down by a sense of inferiority, the Sad'hnami hold together, and resist all attempts from other castes to re assert their traditional domination over them. They are good and loyal subjects.—Wilson's 1?eligion of the Hindus, i. p. 113.