INSIDE THE GURU'S GATE - Anpere

conversations. An equally common term of address among my interlocutors is the
Persian word Baba, which signifies a father, a holy man, or some other senior and
respected persons of male gender, and is followed by the customary suffix of respect
“ji”. Most of the epithets which Sikhs give their scripture in everyday speech are
common terms for human subjects invested with power. Considering that the text
belongs to a succession line of male human Gurus, the terms of respect are grammatically
in masculine gender.
The Sikhs thus adopt the conventional honorific nomenclature used for male
subjects in secular and religious contexts of the surrounding society to name and
cognitively classify the text with a living person of higher position and not as an inanimate
object. 301 The honorific titles associates the Sikh scripture with social categories
of human beings, ”yielding a language that is stereotypically identified with
persona and personhood – a language whose cultural value is shaped in part by the
trope of personification.” 302 Moreover, the epithets of Guru Granth Sahib possess
pragmatic cultural values that implement a distinct social and interactional order. The
honorific titles are what de Castro (2004) has termed “relational pointers”, that is,
nouns that define something in terms of its relation to something else and are “twoplace
predicates”. A sovereign of worldly power will only exist and be addressed by
the term “king” so far as there are other subjects who acknowledge his authority and
whose king he is. Similarly a kinship term such as “Baba” designates a senior position
of the subject only in relation to other subjects. The nouns do not merely represent the
superior position of the Sikh scripture but indicate an internal relationship between a
superior Guru and subordinate subject Sikhs. This relationality becomes even more
palpable in the transaction of foods and other exchanges of gifts.
RELATING BY FOOD
“On the day of sangrand we go to the gurdwara and offer sesame sweets (til patti) to
Guru Granth Sahib ji, we take the prashad [consecrated food] from it and return
home”. The woman who uttered this sentence described a family custom of celebrating
the first day of the solar Vikrami month. In the same breath she voiced a fundamental
idea behind offerings made to the Sikh scripture: people bring ordinary food,
fruits, sweets, and other edible objects to be presented before the text in the gurdwara
and return home with parts of it as prashad ‒ consecrated substances enriched with
power and blessings of the Guru ‒ to consume.
Different types of food offerings to the Guru Granth Sahib occur in the most
diverse ritual settings of the Sikh life and are conducted with various degrees of re-
301
Harvey (2006) observes that in some indigenous languages and patterns of speech objects are
even “grammatically animate rather than grammatically inanimate”, that is, the language does
not grammatically distinguish between people and objects but will use nouns in animated gender
for a number of non-living things which “can be spoken of and to as persons – as they are
spoken with” (Harvey 2006: 33).
302
Agha 1998: 178.
146
Published on www.anpere.net in May 2008