INSIDE THE GURU'S GATE - Anpere

the Hindu scriptures and ritual worship to sacred stones of Vishnu are the means by
which Hindus of Varanasi articulate their religious identity.
The Miharban Janam-sakhi, claimed to be of the early seventeenth century origin,
provides the most elaborate account on Guru Nanak’s deeds in Varanasi. 199 In two
episodes composed totally of six anecdotes, Nanak gives lectures on righteous actions,
spiritual gains, and the Vedas to learned scholars, Brahmins, Vaishnava followers,
and other religious peoples, whose speeches and actions are more exhaustively
described even if all characters are kept nameless throughout the story. Amusingly
Miharban Janam-sakhi pulls out all the stops of idiomatic expressions and greetings to
depict a linguistic typicality of traditional Hindus in the region. Guru Nanak, who
always suits himself to new cultural settings, takes up local colloquial, saluting people
with “Ram, Ram” and excessively addresses them with conventional suffix of
honor. Unlike the Vailaitvali Janam-sakhi the stories in this hagiography do not develop
from noticeable differences between Nanak and the local people. Reversibly,
one anecdote about cooking pandits specifically brings out their shared affiliation to
the Vaishnava religion which induces the most orthodox scholars to invite the Guru
for sanctified food. Alluding to traditional food taboos of the upper-caste Hindu
society the Guru accepts the invitation on the condition that the pandits will prepare
only pure food. The orthodox Hindus accordingly set up a kitchen consistent with
their strict purity regulations, to find that Guru Nanak in the end refuses to eat because
they have not imbued the food with real purity of devotion to God. The final
point of this anecdote is explicated by quoting a hymn in which Nanak provocatively
employs the simile of a woman’s menstruation ‒ a source of great ritual pollution in
the traditional Hindu culture ‒ to illustrate how falsehood dwells in the mouth of
those who call themselves pure merely by external purification. Only those who have
the divine abiding in their minds can be considered the truly pure (sucha). 200
The other anecdotes in Miharban Janam-Sakhi similarly present vivid sceneries of
the imagined cultural ethos in Varanasi. In one story, for instance, Guru Nanak takes
a seat nearby a pilgrimage site (tirath) where a large number of the religious characters
have assembled: pandits to teach from religious books, Vaishnava followers worshiping
the shalagram, and ascetics for austerity practices and meditation. The Guru
realizes that the amount of cheaters (thag) in Varanasi is boundless when all advise
him to study, worship and meditate for the lucrative business of religion at the pilgrimage
center. After Guru Nanak has explained that all desires are satisfied in the
person whose mind is pierced with the words of God the pandits bow at his feet and
become disciples. 201
These brief examples of historical Sikh writings may illustrate how certain
stereotyped aspects of the city and people of Varanasi constitute the motif and
scheme of stories that aim to praise the Guru’s teaching and mission. The courses of
199
Kirpal Singh 1990: 101.
200
GGS: 472.
201
GGS: 634.
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Published on www.anpere.net in May 2008