INSIDE THE GURU'S GATE - Anpere

(path), music (kirtan) and distribution of consecrated food (prashad), are media
through which divine “coded substances” of the Guru are channelled. Engagement in
these worship forms involves transactions of substances in sound, sight, food, etc.,
between the Guru and devotees which are believed to have material/physical/physiological,
as well as spiritual mental/cognitive effects upon their
recipients. When listening to devotional music, taking darshan of the Guru Granth
Sahib, or drinking nectar-water, Sikhs are incorporating substances that will recompose
their persons to a “religious genus” shared by other devotees. They establish
substantial and moral connectedness to the Guru which is believed to generate biomoral
transformations of persons. 491
Although one needs to be cautious with theories that attempt to derive universal
principles underlying indigenous ideologies at the expense of change and diversity,
the notion of substance is ever-present when local Sikhs talk of the various types
of amrit and consecrated food (prashad). 492 The preparation of amrit presumes that
recitations of gurbani will transform ordinary water (pani) to blessed nectar which
people may use for ingestion or to besprinkle persons, houses or objects with. By
producing gurbani in sound directly over the water or in its close vicinity the words
are believed to materialize as a hidden essence in the water. The recitation is an act of
transmitting words through the vehicle of sound to fluids that will be consecrated
and imbued with substances of gurbani. In more specified terms than the scholarly
discussion on transformative worship substances, locals assert that different types of
amrit will produce different effects on people depending upon a set of factors during
the ritual preparation, such as the identity of the agent preparing the nectar, the space
in which recitations take place, the ritual instruments utilized, and dispositions of
recipients. Moreover, the identity and transformative power ascribed to particular
waters used in Sikh ceremonies are intimately connected with semantic properties of
the recited gurbani hymns or what these hymns have come to represent in the broader
Sikh tradition. In healing contexts people will choose a gurbani verse which bears
semantic links to the purpose for which the amrit is prepared. It is the semanticoreferential
meaning of a text that determines the expected material and spiritual bene-
491
Dusenbery 1992: 395.
492
Scholarly claims about monistic or non-dualistic ideologies in non-western societies have also
been criticized for basing models on abstract theories which have little bearing in the more
complex empirical reality and they start out from the dichotomies (western/non-western reasoning;
dualistic/non-dualistic thought) that they attempt to move away from (see eg. Gell 1998,
Carstens 2004). Based on my own empirical material I am more hesitant of a general application
of the theory of worship substances to all Sikh practices, as well as the separation between cognitive
and sound properties of words in order to prove how they are interconnected in the nondualistic
ideology of language. Words, believed to be of divine origin, may be ascribed a number
of illocutionary and preluctionary functions because of their ontological status. Sound, just
like script, is considered a vehicle to disclose and transmit gurbani and attains sacredness because
of what it contains.
279
Published on www.anpere.net in May 2008