INSIDE THE GURU'S GATE - Anpere

of devotees and placed on trolleys to be transported to a watercourse. 418 Similar to the
cremation, the three-hour-long immersion ceremony was framed by stipulated Sikh
worship acts. Before the procession started all participants gathered in the gurdwara
for matha tekna before Guru Granth Sahib and presented a supplication. Singing devotional
songs they slowly proceeded to the bridge of the watercourse. Narinder Singh
was again the main actor who performed an additional Ardas and then poured bag
after bag into a large special constructed pipe placed in the middle of the stream.
When all ashes had been consigned to water Narinder Singh read one more supplication
and all the participants gathered in the gurdwara to listen to his religious discourse
(katha).
When the ritual elements and structure of Agan Bhet samskar are compared to
human Sikh cremations, the resemblance is striking (See Figure 13 and the descriptions
in Chapter 4). The cremation ritual for scriptures appears to have drawn much
of the symbolic fabrics from a typical death ceremony in the human culture and adjusted
these elements to a new ceremony for scriptural bodies. Just as the human
corpse is dressed in new clothes and smeared with clarified butter (ghi) before being
consigned to the fire, the book covers will be wrapped in robes and soaked in butter
before they are offered to the flames. The religious acts which normally frame a human
cremation ‒ such as readings of Ardas, devotional funeral music, and recitations
from the Guru Granth Sahib – have likewise become constitutive elements of the
death ceremony to scriptures. Throughout the Agan Bhet samskar Narinder Singh and
voluntary men and women are presented as key actors with ritual roles that are comparable
to those assigned chief mourners in human cremations. In devotional acts
and songs they behave as if they would mourn the worldly extinction of scriptures
which have fulfilled a life-span.
The scrupulous care-taking of Guru Granth Sahib implicates some important
presumptions about the scripture. The true Guru of the Sikhs is eternal and far beyond
human levels, but divine words were revealed and made manifest through the
utterances and the powerful agency of the worldly Gurus. By tradition the Guru
Granth Sahib enshrines the sacred utterances and inhabits the agency of the Guru in
its present manifested form (sarup) of a scripture made by paper and ink. Like the
soul of a human being transmigrates, the worldly Guru seems to be subjected to a
similar regenerating cycle of births and deaths. In the printing presses at Amritsar the
Guru Granth Sahib takes birth and assumes a stipulated worldly form. Subsequently
the Guru will be incorporated into the religious life of devoted Sikhs as an honoured
guest cloaked in majestic splendour. When a scripture has completed a life-time its
body will be brought to Goindwal Sahib or other cremation centres in the Punjab to
be dissolved in the fire. As some Sikhs would argue, the cremation ritual returns the
divine words, revealed to humanity, to the celestial origin when the aging scripture
no longer can provide an honourable garb. Thus, the temporal body-form of Guru
418
At Goindwal Sahib the ashes will be consigned to the river Beas and in Ludhiana to the
channel Nilow.
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Published on www.anpere.net in May 2008