INSIDE THE GURU'S GATE - Anpere

With the shift of authority, the same ethos and modes of practices that presumably
existed in the human culture surrounding the personal Gurus were valid for
the contexts in which the Sikhs interacted with the Guru Granth Sahib. The exterior
life of the book was to be characterized by an anthropomorphic habitus, that is, the
scripture was imposed by a set of culturally defined and stipulated habits ascribed to
the domestic and courtly life of the human Gurus. In a new historical setting with a
non-human Guru, these habits were to be furnished and actualized through diverse
practices executed by the Sikhs. Just as the scribe Bhai Gurdas informs us that Guru
Nanak sat on a cot (manji) and uttered hymns at Kartarpur, the Sikhs should place the
Guru Granth Sahib on a bed covered with robes whenever it was sung or recited
from. 283 Like the historical Gurus presumably rose before dawn to mediate and receive
followers at court, contemporary Sikhs impose a similar habit to the scripture
by installing it on a throne for devotional gatherings in the early morning hours.
When I inquired a local granthi in Varanasi about the custom of wrapping the scripture
in layers of robes, the anthropomorphic analogy lied near at hand:
This is the dress of Guru Granth Sahib ji. Just like we dress up in different
clothes, Guru Granth Sahib ji has underwear and outer garments.
The [human] Gurus never asked for these things. They said we
do not have to offer them clothes because they never feel cold. But still
we do it [to the Guru Granth Sahib] for respect.
Parallels to social customs and routines of the human Gurus are often drawn when
Sikhs are explaining ritual conducts and symbols in contemporary worship. As the
granthi accentuated in this conversation, the Sikh Gurus did not require dresses because
of physical needs, but as individuals in a human culture they wore clothes and
accepted offerings presented by their followers in acts of veneration. Similarly, the
Guru in the guise of a scripture cannot experience bodily sensations, but still Sikh
disciples will wrap the book in robes to protect the scriptural body and express devotion.
A set of selected social and cultural habits which aimed to confirm the supreme
status and identity of the human Gurus perpetuated into the future life of and around
the Guru Granth Sahib, albeit reshaped to more invariant ritualized events in order to
meet a situation that explicitly necessitated the presence and performance of human
disciple-agents. If the human Gurus were agents causing their own action in the everyday
life ‒ waking up, dressing, going to sleep, and so on ‒ and in words and deeds
stipulated a solemnized treatment of the scripture, Sikh followers are now the agentive
force of all activities carried out in the surrounding of Guru Granth Sahib. In
other words, the anthropomorphic habits imposed on the scripture only exist so far as
there are human agents who possess dispositions necessary to act out these habits in
practice.
283
The reference is found in Var 1:38 of Bhai Gurdas (Jodh Singh 1998: 68).
135
Published on www.anpere.net in May 2008