INSIDE THE GURU'S GATE - Anpere

pages is eternal and will never be extinct, but the theory of the Guru’s embodiment
suggests that the scriptural form of the Guru is subjected to bodily change. Like human
souls are believed to transmigrate between different body forms, the Sikh scripture
comes alive during the printing process in order to embody the Word-Guru.
When the scriptural body is worn out and has completed a life-time it is reverentially
disposed in a cremation ceremony. In between these two events the Guru Granth
Sahib assumes an active role to make the Guru’s agency present and mediate a revelation
in the social life of the Sikhs. The ethnographic descriptions below attempt to
illustrate the ways by which Sikhs create the life of the Guru Granth Sahib. Cloaked
in royal symbols and acts the scripture is printed, transported, and installed at the
gurdwara and the house like a worldly sovereign. The Guru Granth Sahib – as the
present body-form of the eternal Guru ‒ has its own life-cycle marked by religious
events.
PRINTING AND DISTRIBUTION
When the printing technology emerged on the Indian scene in the early nineteenth
century adherents of the various religious traditions apparently took up quite different
stances towards the new technique which rendered it possible to planographically
print sacred words and signs on paper in machines ‒ a technical process that eventually
would facilitate for mass-production and public access of religious texts. 381 In the
Punjab Christian missionaries in Ludhiana set up the first printing press in the 1830s
to publish evangelical literature and print the Bible in Punjabi, Hindi, and other vernaculars.
382 Even though missionaries initially monopolized the press and Gurmukhi
typefaces, Sikh intellectuals were receptive to the new method and during the second
part of the nineteenth century enthusiastically took use of the print technology within
religious and secular domains of the society. To all appearances the first printed edition
of the Guru Granth Sahib in Gurmukhi script appeared in 1864 and was a lithographic
reproduction of the Damdama version published by Lala Harsukh Rai at Ko-
381
In a study of Tamil bow songs, Blackburn shows that only palm-leaf manuscripts inscribed
with iron stylus are controlled by priests in temples and used in ritual performances of texts.
Printed versions of the same texts are not attributed any ritual status or efficacy simply because
they are mass-produced and publicly assessable. “Ritual power, then, lies not simply in the
fixity of the text, but also in the cultural control over the production and dissemination of the
text”, he summarizes (Blackburn 1988: xxi). The ritual status of written texts is not a consequence
of modern print technologies but continues to rest on the ecclesiastical control and restricted
access to handwritten texts. The case of Tulsidas’ Ramcharitmanas is quite the opposite,
as Lutgendorf illustrates. The first published edition of the epic appeared in Calcutta in 1810,
and after 1860 different publishing houses printed more than seventy editions. This development
culminated in the establishment of Gita Press, which from the beginning of the twentieth
century became a leading publisher of Ramcharitmanas (Lutgendorf 1991: 61).
382
Oberoi 1995: 220.
205
Published on www.anpere.net in May 2008