INSIDE THE GURU'S GATE - Anpere

After taking amrit and by doing regular path people will start to experience
gurbani. Their attitudes and behaviour change. Before they were
only chattering with other people, but after coming in this line their
behaviour totally change. They became very humble and polite. Before
they were not donating to others but after this they start to donate. If
someone suffers from a disease or difficulty they will overcome this
trouble when they do path of nitnem with regularity. So yes, we do see
changes.
Several of my Amritdhari friends admitted it was indeed hard to observe the routine
discipline, at least in the beginning, and expressed fear of not being able to fulfill the
obligation. Non-Amritdhari Sikhs, with no intention of undergoing the Khalsa ceremony,
alleged it was too much effort to get up before dawn to recite the panj banian
every day. The modern life with late working hours and television made them keep
late hours. Instead, they would occasionally commit themselves to perform all the
compositions of nitnem for an assigned time period, such 11 or 40 days, or pick out a
composition they liked for daily readings. 438
In this context it is interesting to observe that no less than eighty-seven percent
of male and female respondents of all ages ‒ Amritdhari and others ‒ in the semistructured
interviews claimed they knew specific gurbani hymns or verses by heart,
while the remaining part said they had not committed complete texts to memory but
tried to follow recitations with help of prayerbooks (gutkas). When informants in the
first category were asked to enumerate the hymns they had committed to memory
the majority named the seven hymns included in the nitnem (See Figure 14). Seventyseven
percent stated they had memorized parts or the complete text of JapJi Sahib and
a slightly fewer number, seventy-one percent, knew Rahiras Sahib by heart, whereas
about half of the respondents were able to recite the remaining texts of nitnem, entirely
or in parts, from memory. A few remarked that the composition Jap Sahib, ascribed
to Guru Gobind Singh, was particularly hard to read and remember because of
its langauge. There is no obligation to memorize the daily prayers, but from a practical
viewpoint it is recommendable since people are able to perform the nitnem everywhere
‒ on journeys, social visits, or parties ‒ if hymns are learnt by heart. Many will
take use of gutkas or recite with other devotees in the congregation for the fear of
forgetting or leaving out single words. 439 Although the larger part of the respondents
who had committed the daily hymns to memory were Amritdhari Sikhs, the field data
implies that devotees who do not contemplate a Khalsa identity still memorize gur-
438
A businesswoman and Amritdhari Sikh in her fifties instructed her friends to at least recite
JapJi Sahib before noon and do Rahiras Sahib at dusk in order to surmount all kinds of troubles in
social life. In addition, she added, “It [the recitation] will keep you fast and alert”.
439
A seventy-year-old Amritdhari man who had memorized all the seven compositions save for
Jap Sahib said: “For correct path I use a gutka. I keep a gutka of Rahiras Sahib with me. When I am
not coming to the house at night I can still do the path of Rahiras Sahib wherever I am.”
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Published on www.anpere.net in May 2008