INSIDE THE GURU'S GATE - Anpere

The performers I interviewed had gained interest in the Sikh religion and especially
the musical tradition of kirtan at an early age, learnt the Gurmukhi script at the
local gurdwara, and from there continued to larger Sikh educational centers for formal
courses. Contemporary gurdwaras usually accommodate some kind of educational
establishment attached to the sanctuary, be it in the form of individual tuitions
and training carried out by a dedicated few, a small school, or the more institutionalized
Gurmat Vidhyala, which literally are “Schools of the Guru’s teaching” established
especially for training of young men and women in language, recitation, exegesis,
history, and devotional singing and music. Except for prestigious educational centers
like Amritsar and Damdama Sahib, of which the latter developed into a leading centre
of exegesis and training of Sikh scholars and officiants during the seventeenth
century, 371 there are today various modern Sikh training institutes all over northern
India that have adopted the form and structure of the Western educational systems
imported during colonial times. Many of the pracharaks and granthis who were operating
in rural areas of Varanasi district said they had completed two or three years-long
courses either at Shahid Sikh Missionary College at Amritsar, established by the SGPC,
or other centers such as Sikh Missionary College in Ludhiana and Gurmat Mission College
in Roopar. 372 To set general standards for all who intend to work in the religious
field the admission to missionary courses usually requires that the aspirant has
passed tenth grade of primary school and taken up an Amritdhari identity. If the individual
student successfully completes the course he or she will receive a giani diploma,
a formal certificate verifying that the student has passed examinations. The
graduating student is permissible to expound gurbani and propagate the Sikh religion.
A diploma from any of these institutions normally guarantees employment in a
gurdwara. In several cases a preliminary training conducted by elderly propagandists
on the grassroot level precedes the recruitment and admission to these schools.
In Varanasi district, the pracharak Jaswant Singh Mastak had since the 1960s
travelled around in villages for propaganda of Sikhism to spur young and unemployed
Hindu men to apply for giani courses in the Punjab. After Mastak had completed
a missionary course at Amritsar, the educational body of the Sikh organization
SGPC ‒ Dharam Pracharak Committee ‒ sent him off for propaganda work in different
rural areas in the state of Uttar Pradesh between 1965 and 1972. In villages scattered
around Varanasi Mastak himself provided tuitions in gurbani and the Gurmukhi
script to Hindu villagers converting to the Sikh religion, before they continued to
Punjab to pursue a giani certificate. Up to the beginning of the 1990s the nearby pilgrimage
centre of Patna Sahib (Bihar) ran a Gurmat Vidhyala that offered a two-year
long course for becoming granthis and ragis under direction of Bhai Iqbal Singh from
Damdama Sahib. Two of the reciters in Varanasi, recruited for this course, informed
371
Mann 2005: 12.
372
The educational activities at the old Sikh educational institutions and the modern Sikh Missionary
Colleges, and how these institutions respond to modernization and globalization processes
in the Punjab, would be an interesting study in itself. Today many of the educational
institutes operate on the Internet (See e.g., www.sikhmissionarycollege.org).
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Published on www.anpere.net in May 2008