INSIDE THE GURU'S GATE - Anpere

with shared signs of the broader Sikh tradition becomes one strategy to escape the
lack of history. Structured as a counter-narrative the emic history becomes a metanarrative
device to index features of ongoing interactions between the Sikh minority
group and the Hindu majority society and to lay claims on identity and visibility
within the new socio-cultural context.
Figure 8.
SIKH COUNTER-IMAGES OF VARANASI
Action People City
Guru Nanak defeats Hindu scholars The Hindu Pandits become Preserver of the Guru’s
in debate and works a miracle disciples of the Guru teaching
in a garden
Sikh pilgrimage centre
with the Guru’s garden
Guru Tegh Bahadur conjures up Sikhs take bath/drink Sikh pilgrimage centre
river Ganga to touch his feet nectar-water of Ganga with a holy well in
Nichibagh
Guru Gobind Singh sends five The five Sikh scholars Stronghold of religious
disciples to Varanasi establish the Nirmala order knowledge and Sanskrit
studies of the Sikhs.
On another level the story conveys spiritual and moral messages for all. Stories
about what the Gurus accomplished in the past may serve as a tool to make devotees
oriented towards the Guru’s teaching. Writing on moral anecdotes of secular character,
Bauman (1988) suggests that stories “have a certain metaphorical as well as metonymic
meaning, as a kind of extended name or label for the recurrent social problems
and situations they portray”, and, simultaneously “convey an attitude toward such
situations and a strategy for dealing with them”. Quoted speech, which often works
as a final punch line to bring an anecdote to an end, may articulate an ideology of
subversive capacity to evade the social problems conveyed. 219 In the story on Nanak,
the Guru provides such an ideological content by giving a lecture in uttered speech.
In the text gurbani, or the Guru’s speech, is presented as quotations of Guru Granth
Sahib. By projecting the operative effects of the Guru’s power and teaching onto the
disoriented Hindu elite, the narrative illustrates how those who put their trust and
devotion in the Guru can escape the karmic result of bad actions. Revealing a character
transformation of the Hindu pandits opens up the possibility for a future spiritual
219
Bauman 1988: 76 ‒ 77. Bauman quotes Bhaktin: “The speaking person in the novel is always
to one degree or another, an ideologue, and his words are always ideologemes […] It is precisely as
ideologemes that discourse becomes the object of representation in the novel”(Bauman 1988: 77).
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Published on www.anpere.net in May 2008