INSIDE THE GURU'S GATE - Anpere

within the tradition the teaching of the human Gurus and their intimate relationships
to the divine were forever manifested in the body of the text, just as the capacities of
the causative Guru is enduringly immanent and reified in the words and teaching of
the book.
When local Sikhs in Varanasi were asked to personally describe what the Guru
Granth Sahib meant to them, several interlocutors chose to tell what the Guru had
done or brought about in their social life – a healthy son, a good business, and so on –
either as a blissful gift to receive subsequent acts of thanksgiving or a reciprocation of
devotional acts already performed. These events were not viewed merely as haphazard
happenings, but casual histories about divine interventions through the agency of
the Guru. As such they were taken as evidence to prove that a good relationship with
the Guru will counteract problems in the everyday life and generate good results for
humans. The basic assumption underlying these accounts was that the spiritual
agency of Guru Granth Sahib is in no sense divorced from materiality, but has capacity
to act in the world and meditate communications between humans and God. Following
the theory of Gell, attribution of the agentive force to Guru Granth Sahib is
not complicated by the fact that it is a book, simply because agency is relational. Guru
Granth Sahib is not a symbol representing the Guru or an icon like the Guru; the Sikh
scripture is the Guru firmly embedded in a network of historical and contemporary
relationships to humans. Possible relationships between the Sikh Guru and disciples
did not come to end because the succession line of human Gurus was discontinued.
At the present the Guru Granth Sahib stands in a web of human relations, surrounded
by pious devotees who in acts of veneration and devotion continue to construct
relationships with the Guru that take on the quality of social relations.
From one viewpoint the social character of relationships to Guru Granth Sahib
can be approached as an example of the common tendency among religious people to
pattern relations and interactions with superior nonhuman beings after social relationships
in the intrahuman world. As Olsson (2006) suggests, religion can be viewed
as a relational concept and religious life becomes a “projection” of human conditions
and relationships ‒ fortified in language uses and bodily movements ‒ onto nonhuman
entities. Things, plants, and living beings become a part of the web of social
relations in which we are entangled. 299 Labels and concepts used for relationships in
religious contexts are analogically modeled after human experiences and socially
defined roles within the world. From this perspective one could argue that modes
which the Sikhs would use to establish relatedness with a superior human preceptor
brim over to contexts in which Sikhs confront and interact with the Guru Granth
Sahib.
From another angle of approach, one can also observe that, as and when people
engage in objects, they personify and attribute the object with social agency. Sikhs
may a priori consider the Guru Granth Sahib a living Guru, as the tradition advocates.
Through the daily ministration and devotional acts directed to the scripture
299
Olsson 2006a: 141 ‒ 150.
144
Published on www.anpere.net in May 2008