INSIDE THE GURU'S GATE - Anpere

Guru Nanak’s visit. Discursively the narrative attempts to create self-formation of a
single community with unbroken links to the human Gurus in a pristine past. By
grounding a coherent and singular subjectivity of the Sikhs in a defined spatial and
temporal origin, as a fixed religious genus of an imagined local congregation, the
narrative can also be used to lay claims on identity and legitimacy to be visible and
acknowledged within a cultural and geographical space in the present.
SIKH IMAGES OF VARANASI
The first step to investigate how a counter narrative is constructed in relation to a
dominant discourse would be to address the question: what is being countered and in
which way is the represented world of characters and event sequences drawn up? In
the case at hand, images of the people and the city of Varanasi, exposed in numerous
historical and modern texts, and uncritically recycled in traveler booklets, websites on
the Internet, and even scholarly works, quite often confirm to an idealized image of
the city as an ageless preserver of the Hindu tradition. 187 In the background of these
representations lies a dominant discourse on Varanasi as a mythical and sacred centre
of pilgrimage, a “treasury” of religious knowledge, where ancient Hindu religion and
law is sustained by traditional Sanskrit studies, customs and rituals upheld by the
upper strata of the Hindu caste hierarchy. The Sikhs, as a minority group associated
with the land of Punjab, are typically marginalized to invisibility in texts of this category.
Varanasi is the ancient holy city of the Hindus and not a religious centre of the
Sikhs. When local Hindus operating within the dominant cultural discourse voice
views on Sikhism they frequently present the religion as an integral part of the larger
Hindu social and religious system: the Sikh Gurus belonged to the kshattriyas ‒ the
caste invested the duty to protect the Hindu nation and Brahmins already in the Veda
books and which developed into a religion for the purpose of shielding Hindu beliefs
from the invading and demonized Muslims. The noble patronage of Hindu dharm
was disrupted by the creation of Khalsa when Guru Gobind Singh created a Sikh
187
For an historical example, consult Sherring 1996(1868). A modern example is Diane Eck’s
popular book The City of Light (1993), which makes a compulsory reading for any visitor in the
city, just as it has become a guidebook for travelling guests with spiritual goals. The book describes
the major Hindu places of worship and festivals in the city and is mainly based on the
Hindu texts Kashi Khanda and Kashi ki Itihas, along with excursions and interviews with Brahmins.
Singh & Rana’s (2002) “spiritual and culture guide” to Varanasi is a more recent example
of the gauzy line between scholarly work, guidebook and pilgrimage souvenir. Singh & Rana
mention the Sikhs on one page in the book, even if the information provided is not fully correct
(Singh & Rana 2002: 64). For instance, the authors claim there is a gurdwara at Jaggat Ganj
which refers to the disputed area between Sikhs and local Brahmins still pending in court (See
above this chapter). Two other gurdwaras mentioned in the handbook, one at Shahzade ka math
and another at Augharnath ka Takia, were unknown to local Sikhs, Nirmala, and Udasin saints
when I inquired about these shrines in 2004 and 2005.
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Published on www.anpere.net in May 2008