INSIDE THE GURU'S GATE - Anpere

music and religion sometimes made them oppose the future plans drawn up by their
parents, which involved college and university studies or occupations in line with
family traditions. For a Sikh man in his mid-twenties the pressure from his family to
earn a livelihood made him accept the offer to become a member of ragi jatha moving
to Varanasi, even if he at the time worked with computers and had no intentions of
becoming a performer. A younger musician who already in his early teens wished to
be a ragi confirmed that his family indeed approved of and encouraged his decision,
while they emphasized the importance of formal education, even in a religious profession.
The young man gained admission to the Shahid Sikh Missionary College in
Amritsar where, after he completed a degree, was incorporated into a ragi jatha dispatched
to Varanasi. Unemployment and the need to support oneself and the family
seem to be one of the many reasons why many performers develop their initial interest
in the performing arts into full-time occupations. When a pracharak in Varanasi
district commented on the motives that rural people may have to sign up to missionary
courses that will grant a career in any of the religious professions, he simply said:
“People who want to go into this field need education up to tenth grade. Those boys
who come to me have completed school, but they are unemployed. They need something
to do.”
TRADITIONAL AND MODERN SCHOOLING
Although the ways and procedures for pursuing a career in any of the Sikh performer
categories (granthi, kathakar, pracharak and ragi) appears to be numerous, there are
primarily two interdependent means that stand out in the interviews with local performers
in Varanasi: to attend courses at any of the Sikh educational institutions in
the Punjab or elsewhere and by attaching oneself as an apprentice to some successful
performer and knowledgeable teacher in gurbani and the various performance arts.
Scholars have suggested that the development of modern education and schooling in
South Asia has led to a deskilling of traditional systems of apprenticeship in which
individuals claim to have been taught by teachers. With the movement towards modernity
the transmission of knowledge, which previously was a collective process
carried out in the context of personal relationships, has been relocated to institutions
in which knowledge acquisition is an individual and impersonal process disembedded
from the total environment of performances. 370 Although the twentieth
century saw the emergence of modern Sikh educational institutions and the transformation
of historical centers of learning, these adjustments have not necessary outmanoeuvered
traditional forms of schooling on the individual level. The typical pattern
among aspiring Sikh performers is to combine formal studies at an educational
institution with practical training under the supervision of senior colleagues who
provide the pupil access to networks of senior performers and the basis for work and
reputation.
370
Simpson 1997: 51.
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Published on www.anpere.net in May 2008