INSIDE THE GURU'S GATE - Anpere

A JURIDICAL PERSON
Perhaps the most illustrative case in point of the Sikh attribution of personhood to the
Guru Granth Sahib is the official recognition of the text as a “juridical person” with
legal rights to receive donations presented by devotees and possess land properties. 311
In Varanasi Guru Nanak and Guru Tegh Bahadur are officially registered at the Municipal
Corporation as the legal chieftains (malik) of the two main gurdwaras, while
people maintain that the Guru Granth Sahib owns rooms and buildings of other Sikh
sanctuaries. The scripture’s right of ownership is clear: objects once given to a gurdwara,
including the building itself and the land on which it stands, becomes sacred
objects by virtue of being offered to the human Gurus or the Guru Granth Sahib.
In December 1999 the scripture’s legal authority attracted attention in the local
press and public discourses in Varanasi when the Sikhs by force took over an Udasin
temple adjacent to Nichibagh Gurdwara. The disputed temple enshrined an icon of
Sri Chand, the son of Guru Nanak, and had earlier belonged to a local priest of the
Udasin tradition. In 1997 the property was sold to a businessman with plans to construct
a large shopping center on the spot. The Sikh gurdwara committee in Varanasi
opposed the plan, claiming that the deal was illegal since the Udasin temple officially
belonged to the Sikh Guru, that is, the scripture. The case was consequently taken to
court. In 1999, however, a group of Sikhs decided to take the matter into their own
hands when it came to their knowledge that an old handwritten manuscript of the
Guru Granth Sahib had been kept in the temple without due care and attention. One
December morning about a hundred Sikhs rushed into the Udasin temple and pulled
down the wall separating the temple from the Sikh gurdwara. Immediately they
staged an unbroken reading of the scripture (Akhand path) inside the building and put
up the Sikh flag (Nishan Sahib) to mark the Guru’s proprietorship, while local authorities
summoned military police to prevent any outbreak of violence. Although the
Sikh gurdwara eventually lost the case after revived negotiations, the public discourses
that followed the litigations paid attention to the fact that the Sikh scripture
could be a “legal owner” of the Udasin temple and lay the same juridical claims of
ownership to land properties as human subjects. 312 In other words, the Guru Granth
Sahib was legally a “person”.
In March 2000 the legal right of the text gained national approval when the Supreme
Court of India decreed that Guru Granth Sahib is a “juristic person” who can
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That various communities on the Indian subcontinent have incorporated religious sanctuaries
and objects with the legal system of humans is not a new phenomenon. Gregory Schopen, for
instance, observes that from the first century B.C. Buddhists were treating a stupa or a reliquary
as a legal “person” that could possess land properties and monasteries. The collection of relics
contained in a stupa was believed to manifest an enduring presence of the Buddha, which provided
the relics legal rights to own properties in the human world (Schopen 1997: 128 ‒ 134).
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The local Hindi papers verified that the Sikh scripture was indeed registered as the legal
owner of the temple complex (Amar Ujala, 1999-12-15; Gandiv, 1999-12-15).
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Published on www.anpere.net in May 2008