INSIDE THE GURU'S GATE - Anpere

often epitomize key persons and moments in Sikh history, like the two martyrdoms
of Guru Arjan and Guru Tegh Bahadur, the creation of Khalsa in 1699, photographs
of the battered Akal Takht after Operations Bluestar in 1984, and idealized pictures of
the shining Harimandir Sahib in post-1984 times, just to mention a few examples.
Individual spectators will certainly respond differently to the visual representations,
depending on their own positioning of the self in relation to the collective past. But
the way in which these artifacts are selected and arranged in permanent settings of
the gurdwaras (or if temporarily employed in festival processions) reflects ontological
choices that simultaneously instruct on what in the past is considered to be of vital
importance and worthy of remembrance. The pictures selected are normative fragments,
adduced to be testimonies of historical persons and instanced events, which in
the public exhibition of a “museum” or a gallery are pieced together to imagery anthologies,
or archives of visual memory, by which people may recollect and reconstruct
narratives of a shared past.
Framed pictures of the Sikh Gurus, heroic disciples, and important pilgrimage
sites are dispersedly decorating the walls within the gurdwara complexes in Varanasi.
Given the history of the local gurdwaras the dominant images are standardized
portrait paintings or framed bazaar posters of Guru Nanak, Guru Tegh Bahadur and
Guru Gobind Singh. The iconographic characteristic of all these representations is the
clichéd human features of the Gurus, although exalted by a radiant halo lightening
around their heads to display the manifestation of spiritual power. What works as
visual cues to their identities and also sets the various depictions apart are the details
of postures, dresses and attributes they hold in their hands. Whether standing or
seated cross-legged, Guru Nanak is portrayed as a white-bearded meditating man.
He wears a saffron-coloured shirt, covered with a cloak, and a spherical turban
adorned with a rosary on the top. His right hand is always raised in a protecting
gesture with ik omkar, the first syllable in Guru Granth Sahib, imprinted in the palm.
As the Guru who suffered martyrdom, Tegh Bahadur is dressed in simple white
clothes and a turban with rosary. Seated in a meditating posture on a white sheet and
cushion, he is rapt in contemplation, with his hands folded and eyes closed. In contrast
to the two visual interpretations that display piety, Guru Gobind Singh is a
younger dark-bearded man, adorned with various jewels and arms – bows, discuss,
shield, sword, spear, quiver of arrows ‒ like an active warrior ready for the battle.
Wearing a royal blue dress and cone-shaped turban he either stands or is seated on a
horse with a white hawk in his left hand. The portraits are shared visions of the Gurus
that represent the complementary ideologies of the pious saint and the active
soldier, personified in Guru Nanak and Guru Gobind Singh, and the historical transformation
of Sikhism from a pacifist community to the militarized Khalsa. 240
In Varanasi, the symbolic content of devotion and social activism that these images
carry often determines the locations at which the portraits are situated and the
contexts in which they are used. Pictures of the contemplating Guru Nanak or Guru
240
See Kaur Singh 2004: 54.
105
Published on www.anpere.net in May 2008