INSIDE THE GURU'S GATE - Anpere

Guru. In a practice-oriented approach to ritualized acts, Bell (1992) has elaborated
how bodily acts and gestures of humans who are moving about within a specially
constructed space actually project and define the cultural-specific qualities that is
ordering that space, and simultaneously re-embody the same cultural values and
schemes. The space created by humans impresses itself on them. Within this space
people may experience sacredness and respond to the environment as if nonhuman
forces, such as God or the religious tradition had shaped it, at the same time as they
deploy and embody the schemes for creating this space through bodily movements. 314
The advantage of this approach, here insolently summarized, is that it moves away
from a rather static view of human activities as mere expression or communication of
latent religious beliefs to instead look upon action as a means to construct meanings
and reproduce religious systems.
The sacred world of a gurdwara is a space continually re-created by local Sikhs.
Through culturally prescribed and learnt gestures and acts conducted within its temporal
and spatial dimensions people both generate and integrate religious experiences
and notions of presence and supreme authority of the Guru Granth Sahib.
When Sikhs thus are re-enacting acts inside the gurdwara they do not merely communicate
messages about their individual or collective perceptions of a scripture, but
in the enactment of these acts mould meanings, values and ideologies. Following the
theory of Gell (1998), the arrangement of spaces and action within the gurdwara can
be approached as “external” and “internal” strategies by which devotees imply and
confer “social agency” to the Guru embodied in the Guru Granth Sahib. 315
THE HOUSE OF THE GURU
In schoolbooks and other readable literature intended for a non-Sikh audience one
quite often comes across statements saying that the gurdwara is the “temple” or
“place of worship” of the Sikhs. These and similar simplified explanations are certainly
correct, in the sense that the word gurdwara designates the primary sanctuary
of Sikhs where religious worship and services take place, but they are far from doing
justice to the more evocative descriptions and significances the Sikhs may attribute to
the term. In a literal sense, gurdwara means the “door”, “threshold”, “abode“, or
“seat” (dwara) of the Guru, that is, a place defined by the presence of Guru Granth
Sahib and not by the physical building surrounding it. In the early Sikh community
the word used to signify the place where disciples of the Sikh Gurus gathered for
devotional singing and recitation in congregational worship was called dharamsala, or
“the house of dharma” and later replaced with gurdwara. 316 The reasons for the shift
314
Bell 1992.
315
Gell 1998.
316
At the turn of the seventeenth century, Bhai Gurdas wrote: “The true Guru Nanak Dev inspired
people to remember the true name of the Lord whose form is truth. Founding dharamsala,
the place of dharma, at Kartarpur, it was inhabited by the holy congregation as the abode of
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Published on www.anpere.net in May 2008