INSIDE THE GURU'S GATE - Anpere

odily form/shape of the light”. 262 These designations, constructed on regal and religious
images, serve to glorify the spiritual and temporal authority of the human Gurus
and accentuate a significant distinction that is made between the form (rup, sarup)
of the Guru’s human body and the light (jot), which his body enshrined. Like ordinary
humans the physical body of the Sikh Guru was perishable, subjected to birth
and death, and operated as provisional “clothing” to conceal the divine illumination
of the Guru. When a nominee ascended to the guru-post his body was mystically
endowed with a spiritual composition similar to his predecessor. Although the Punjabi
word jot literally means “light” and bears the connotations “spirit” and “soul”,
the word has come to signify two indivisible aspects related to the Sikh Guru’s identity
and the notion of spiritual transmission. Firstly, the human Guru in office was
bestowed the agency of a personal Guru, preordained by God and initially conferred
to Guru Nanak, which provides authority to reveal and interpret gurbani – the divine
words and knowledge flowing from the Guru’s mouth- to the community and the
world. Secondly, the active agency of the word which is situated and speaks through
human spokesmen is the true Guru ‒ the shabad Guru – which emanates from a divine
source and discloses itself to the world. The formal installation of a human Guru
is therefore understood to be a process by which the individual candidate is empowered
with the spirit and agency of the Guru. All the Sikh Gurus are consequently
perceived as intra-spiritual, that is, ten living beings shared the same spirit and continued
the process of illumination as they were chosen and imputed formative agency
of the Guru. The relationships that existed between the human Gurus in the Sikh
tradition thus presume spiritual continuity and corporeal diversity: the same spirit
inhabited all of them, while the bodily manifestations posited transformability as the
spirit was passed on to ten different human shapes. The real metamorphosis of the
Guru at the time of an installation was merely a physical transformation, while the
spiritual components wield homogenization. Since the Guru Granth Sahib inherited
the office of the Guru, the ways by which contemporary Sikhs perceive the relationship
between the human Gurus also have implications for how they conceptualize
and behave towards the scripture.
HISTORY OF THE GURU GRANTH SAHIB
When my interlocutors in Varanasi were requested to identify historical developments
which they personally considered important to the Sikh religion, there were
two events that stood out markedly in their responses: the compilation of the Sikh
scripture by Guru Arjan in 1604 and Guru Gobind Singh’s elevation of the book to the
office of the Guru in 1708. 263 Considering that the Guru Granth Sahib stands in the
centre of contemporary worship and serves as the primary source for Sikh beliefs and
values, the historical preference was not surprising. Seen from another angle, the
262
Gill & Joshi 1999: 364.
263
Considered to be an equally important historical event was the creation of Khalsa in 1699.
126
Published on www.anpere.net in May 2008