INSIDE THE GURU'S GATE - Anpere

verses and the fortieth verse of the composition Anand Sahib together with the assembly.
PRAISES FOR ALL
As a mode of rendering devotion to God by singing praises, kirtan is open to all and
not restricted to the domain of professional musicians. The following chapter will
illustrate that various types of improvised devotional singing by the laity are firmly
embedded in the structure of Sikh festivals and ceremonies. For forty days prior to
anniversaries of Guru Nanak, for example, the Sikhs will go out in morning processions
(prabhatferi) singing verses from the Guru Granth Sahib headed by a Sikh standard.
The children are strongly encouraged to perform kirtan alone or accompanied
by adults and have created different kirtan groups in the city. On festivals days the
congregation allow them to display their skill in public.
Local Sikhs generally distinguish between two types of songs in lay performances
of kirtan: dhanya (Sanskrit) or dhan (Punjabi) which are accolades that serve to
glorify the Sikh Gurus and the Sikh scripture to folk tunes; and sangat kirtan, or “congregational
praises” which are gurbani hymns set to music. A popular song in the first
category starts with the line “Dhanya hai, dhanya hai, dhanya hai, Guru Nanak Dev ji
dhanya hai”, which is repeated twice, and then continues to successively name all the
ten Gurus, Guru Granth Sahib, the Khalsa community, and finally the holy congregation
of Sikhs. 522 While singing the last line ‒ eulogizing the Sikh sangat ‒ all participants
turn their heads to the left and right, and by looking at each other salute and
pay respect to the congregation they themselves embody.
Sangat kirtan may consist of freely selected gurbani verses that are sung to various
melodies and tunes. At the time of my fieldwork a group of lay Sikhs met every
Sunday between 6 and 9 at night to perform sangat kirtan in the gurdwara. Men,
women, and children would seat themselves on the floor beside the scriptural throne
and install Amrit Kirtan, a compilation with four thousand selected gurbani verses, on
book stands. They would start the program by chanting the divine name (Vahiguru)
for a couple of minutes into microphones and then take turns in leading the assembly.
The leader would freely choose a separate gurbani verse that he or she read in full
from Amrit Kirtan so participants could recognize the words and rhyming, and then
start singing the same verse to improvised music. Like other renditions of gurbani the
purity of each line and phrase should always be maintained. The instruments used
for these and similar Kirtan sessions by the laity are harmonium, cymbals, small
drums (dholki), and tongs with jingling metal discs (chimta). The singing methods are
various: the leader may first sing a single line as a key refrain or the whole verse line
by line, and then let the entire congregation form the alternate chorus which responds
by repeating the line or verse. The leader can also choose to sing odd lines of the
verse and let the congregation sing even lines, or alternate the singing between male
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I was told that this song was created by Sant Isher Singh at Lhalla Sahib in Ludhiana.
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Published on www.anpere.net in May 2008