INSIDE THE GURU'S GATE - Anpere

keeping langar can be traced back to the time of the human Gurus and the food
served therein is considered consecrated, Sikhs will call the community kitchen in the
gurdwara Guru ka langar, or “the communal kitchen of the Guru”, and thus grammatically
indicate that both the custom and the food belongs to the Guru.
Preparing karah prashad
Public distribution of prashad on Guru Nanak’s
anniversary
The above examples illustrate that the Sikh practice of bhog lagana belongs to an
exchange paradigm of action which implies transactions between devotees and the
Guru. On behalf of a family or the community human agents will give food to the
Guru, which sanctifies the offering and returns it as a blessed gift to the giver. Utilizing
Gell’s terminology, Sikh devotees are initially the active agents who cause donating
acts, while the Guru is patient which receives an offering. Simultaneously the
roles are reversed since the Guru is the primary causative agent who blesses the food
and returns it to devotees now acting as patients. Just as transactions of gifts in the
social life of Sikhs have the function of establishing new relations and expressing old
ones, the Guru Granth Sahib and devotees are linked together as subjects in ritual
exchanges of food. 307
Already in the 1920s Mauss presented his theory of “gift exchange” by using
examples from a wide range of societies. Mauss saw the obligation to give, receive
and return gifts as a system which created social bonds between the persons exchanging
gifts. The items exchanged are not seen as simple commodities, but gifts given are
personified as things in the sense that they embody the substance and nature of the
donor. Acts of exchanging gifts were actually acts of exchanging essences and substances
between oneself and someone else. In effect transactions of gifts are inevitably
producing a synthesis between two social alters, otherwise objectively separated, to
express a social relationship. Those who participate in exchanges of gifts become
307
In wedding ceremonies, for instance, the exchange of various types of gifts between the
bride’s and the groom’s families are the ritual means to publicly confirm the announcement of a
wedding and a new ties between two families (See Myrvold 2004a).
149
Published on www.anpere.net in May 2008