INSIDE THE GURU'S GATE - Anpere

cal savour of the divine that is beyond descriptions. These significations ascribed to
the word amrit are given quite literal interpretations when the Gurus’ verses are
transferred to contexts of ritual practices.
Drinking gurbani verses is a wide spread practice in the whole Sikh community
today. In contemporary Sikh discourses the term amrit generally refers to the particular
sweetened nectar-water that is distributed to neophytes during the Khalsa ceremony
(Khande di pahul). Given the centrality of Khalsa norms within the Sikh community,
this conventional meaning of amrit has been exposed to various scholarly
historical and symbolic interpretations. 485 As I mentioned in the previous chapter
those who ingested the nectar in this ceremony become “bearers of amrit” (Amritdhari)
and are conceived as “completed” Sikhs. At the local level, however, the
word amrit will imply taxonomies of additional consecrated waters that are divided
into subcategories depending upon the ways by which the water-nectar has been
prepared and for which purposes. There are blessed waters prepared from recitations
of selected gurbani stanzas (shabad amrit), recitations of the whole Guru Granth Sahib
(bhog amrit), or just the name of God ‒ Vahiguru (gurmantra amrit). Waters that have
welled out of sacred locations and are associated with the wonders of the human
Gurus in the past are likewise labelled amrit. Even tap water from reservoirs is occasionally
treated as purifying nectar if it has been properly prepared with gurbani.
There is also one particular amrit for the purpose of protection (rakhsa amrit) and another
to be used as medication (amrit dava) or as a drinkable amulet for varying curative
purposes. In the latter cases, gurbani verses are used in amrit because the purpose
for which amrit is prepared is understood as being mentioned in the verse itself. The
content or theme of a sacred hymn text transforms to an agentive force with power to
bring about specific desirable goals in the social world. Yet what all these emic categories
of amrit have in common is that they all are held to be consecrated waters,
imbued with positive substances and transformative powers of the Guru, which carry
divine protection and blessings. Drinking the fluids is believed to have bio-moral
effects on recipients and purify their immediate surroundings.
SUBSTANCE THEORY
In classical anthropology different indigenous ideologies of substances have been
interpreted in light of transactions of gifts and the culture-specific constructions of
social persons. According to the ethno-sociology developed by Marriot (1976), people
in South Asian contexts have a monistic rather than a dualistic thinking and do not
separate between the bio-physical world and socio-cultural world in the same ways
as a Western conceptual dualism. Moral and nature, sacred and profane, or spirit and
matter are not necessarily contradictory terms. Instead South Asian ideologies are
485
Kaur Singh suggests that the mythical Puratan Janam-sakhi reference of Guru Nanak’s reception
of ambrosia in a divine abode became a part of the collective memory of Sikhs, which Guru
Gobind Singh recreated in the Khalsa ceremony (Kaur Singh 2004).
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Published on www.anpere.net in May 2008