INSIDE THE GURU'S GATE - Anpere

order to keep the route pure in honor of the Guru. At the railway station people carried
the scriptures on their heads into the compartments and placed ten to fifteen
volumes on each seat. As the train was to leave at 4.30 the next morning, people performed
devotional music (kirtan) at the railway station throughout the night. During
the eighteen-hour long train journey to Punjab the selected group of pious devotees
took turns in guarding the volumes and singing devotional hymns. At each station
the train halted, the doors of the coaches were opened to let local Sikhs pay homage
and hand over additional old volumes. At Varanasi the gurdwara committee had
arranged a bus to bring 75 scriptures from the gurdwara to the railway station in a
parade with devotional music and brass bands. Temporarily, devotees engendered a
sacred space and converted an ordinary train journey between Bihar and Punjab to a
solemnized funeral procession of Guru Granth Sahib. When the train reached Amritsar
the next morning, the SGPC sent buses and trucks to the railway stations to continue
the procession to Goindwal Sahib.
As other interlocutors in Varanasi informed, special buses are regularly coming
from Sikh communities in Amritsar, Delhi, Jabbalpur (Madhya Pradesh) and other
locations which are responsible for transportations of new and old scriptures in different
parts of northern India. A central function of these conveyances is to replace old
and damaged editions of the Guru Granth Sahib that will be consigned for ritual disposal
with new printed volumes. The collection and distribution of new and old texts
either by bus or train have become an institutionalized system of regenerating the
body-form of Guru Granth Sahib in local communities. These services are considered
to be a kind of seva, selfless and merit-bestowing deeds to the Guru and Sikh congregations,
and should therefore be free of charge, even though it is customary to offer
monetary donations of three and four figured numbers. 405
The different modes of transporting Guru Granth Sahib can be viewed as
strategies by which Sikhs personify and attribute the scripture agency of a Guru; they
display the text as a “person” of superior status which requires honorable ministration.
Whenever Guru Granth Sahib is taken out for transportations the text will be
surrounded by pious devotees who in acts of veneration make it a “social other”
invested agency of a personal Guru.
INVITING THE GURU HOME
The Guru Granth Sahib leads a transitional life, in the sense that the scripture is made
for a purpose and intended for a reception that is active. In case a family has enough
space at their house they are likely to install the Guru Granth Sahib in a room solely
dedicated for the text. Eleven of the informants who participated in my semistructured
interviews had created domestic gurdwaras which they had furnished
according to stipulated norms and individual liking. Whereas some would keep a
405
In Varanasi the normal amount of a donation for a new scripture was between 400 and 500
rupees, even if people give considerably more if they have the financial means to do so.
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Published on www.anpere.net in May 2008