Ghasi Das, the native of Bilaspur district founded a socio-religious movement in Chhattisgarh and called it the Satnamis. The founder of Satnamis was probably a Chamar by caste, an untouchable leather worker. He was a servant in the village of Girod of Raipur district. During the 1820s, Ghasi Das and his brother set out on a pilgrimage to the Vaishnava temple of Puri in Orissa. They did not complete this journey and after reaching Sarangarh, they returned joyously shouting `sat naam`, proclaiming the idea of a single `true` god. Ghasi Das deserted his normal life and became a religious austere. He retired to the forest for contemplation and periodically reappeared in the locality making himself available to individuals who sought spiritual inspiration and moral aid. Gradually his reputation grew and he had a group of disciples. Although anyone could come to Ghasi Das yet almost all of his followers were from the Chamar caste.

The religious career of Ghasi Das gradually moved to a new stage when he withdrew to the forest for six months and then returned to preach a new religious doctrine. Ghasi Das asked his followers to discard idol worship and all that it is demanding. He believed that all men were equal, thus stood against the system of caste. Ghasi Das also asked for a restructuring of nutritional practices. Meat along with liquor and anything that was associated to flesh or blood were restricted, tomatoes, lentils, and chillies were also banned. Beyond the issue of diet and basic belief, Ghasi Das taught his disciples to withdraw themselves from using cattle for ploughing after midday or from taking food out to the open fields. The local Brahmins frowned upon the use of cattle for ploughing actions in the afternoons. Ghasi Das brought his untouchable disciples into conformity with upper-caste customs, through the dietary changes he advocated. Until his death in 1850, the Satnamis primarily focused on improving the status of the Chamars through adjustments within the untouchable community.

Balak Das, Ghasi Das`s eldest son, became the successor of the Satnamis. Balak Das was forceful and radical in his attitudes to caste discrimination. He started wearing the sacred thread that was only for the first three varnas. The twice-born Hindus were deeply insulted by what they considered his extreme arrogance. In the 1860s, a group of Rajputs retaliated by murdering Balak Das. This murder sparked an element of social protest and rebellion against the upper castes of the Satnamis. Many refused to pay their land-taxes as the conflict escalated to include riots and further murders. Meanwhile, his son Sahib Das as leader of the Satnamis replaced Balak Das, although real power rested with Agar Das, a brother of the founder Ghasi Das. On the death of Sahib Das the line of succession went over to the two sons of Agar Das, Ajab Das and Agarman Das, who became high priests of the movement. They divided all property and the right to collect a rupee from each of the Satnami households. Leadership then passed down these two lines of descent accordingly.

In addition to this formal dissection of authority, the Satnamis suffered an earlier crack over a ban on tobacco and smoking. Popular among many Chamars and other inhabitants of the Central Provinces was the chunngi (leaf pipe). One section of the Satnamis maintained and propagated that Ghasi had taken away the ban before his death and broke away from the parent group. The new subsect was known as chungias and another subdivision of the Satnamis were the Jahorias, named so from the term jobar (essence), and composed of those Satnamis who took oaths of mendicancy. They ate only pulses and rice, never slept in a bed and wore only uncolored clothes.

Eventually, the Satnamis were linked to the Hindu bhakti saint, Ramananda. It was claimed that Rohi Das, also a Chamar disciple of the great northern saint, was the real inspiration for the Satnamis. Those who accepted this story became his follower and adopted the name Rohidasi, rather than Satnami. Chhattisgarh were an extension of the Ramanandi movements of the North and the area had been influenced by the teachings of Sant Kabir. By the first decade of the twentieth century the Kabirpanthis of this area had almost 685,672 members in their own movement. In the same period the Satnamis had a group of around 477,360 members. Of this number only 2,000 or so were not members of the Chamar caste and within that community almost 52 per cent of the Chamars were Satnamis. Chhattisgarh remained the centre of this movement with 42 per cent of the Satnami residing within it.

The Satnamis became a permanent subdivision of the Hindus of the Central Provinces. Lawrence Babb conducted field research among the Satnamis in 1966-7 and described them as essentially a single-caste movement with its own hierarchical system of priests, its holy centres and a special calendar of ritual events. As an intermediary socio- religious movement the Chhattisgarh, Satnamis followed the well-established path of Ramanandi Hinduism, then for a short period of extreme prejudice tried to strike out against the caste system and society in general, but finally returned to an existence within that very system.

This Satnami movement persisted as an untouchable form of Hinduism with its own priests, its hereditary control and its followers almost exclusively from one untouchable caste, with its area of impact limited to the Chhattisgarh plain. They were an extension of the religious and cultural developments within the Gangetic basin, a dimension that sets these two movements apart from Satya Mahima Dharma or the third intermediary movement.