INSIDE THE GURU'S GATE - Anpere

about the humble Bhai Kanhaiya, offering water and medicine to both Sikh soldiers
and their enemies in the battles, continues to inspire and serve as a model for many
Sikhs. Giving medicine and helping the dying is not just a social activity but a religious
action, which has become institutionalized through the gurdwaras.
Most of the families I spoke with approved of surgery and autopsy, with exceptions
for operations requiring hair removal. In reply to the questions on what they
would do when someone in their family fell ill most would in the first place promptly
say “go to a doctor” or “take medicine”. But the use of scientific medicine has certainly
not replaced religious action and healing therapies within the Sikh community,
but complements it. A family may arrange an unbroken recitation in the gurdwara
for a family member in poor health at the same time as he or she is medicated and
undergoing a surgical operation. My informants unfolded a number of religious
measures they either had or would take in case the family meets with suffering. The
following section will firstly exemplify the different ways in which people may explain
the causes of various physical and mental ailments and then illustrate how local
people may seek remedies both in the Sikh religion and the surrounding folk cultures.
ETIOLOGIES AND REMEDIES OF AFFLICTION
The causation and diagnosis of physical and mental illness will, in the first place, be
given medical and pathological explanations that recognize the causes and processes
by which an individual has developed a certain disease or physical condition and
treat it accordingly. But scholarly medicine is considered to have limits as it cannot
always provide satisfying answers as to why one person is afflicted with illness and
another is not, nor explain why some people remain unhealthy in spite of extensive
medical treatments and efforts. It is at these borders of uncertainty religious explanations
come forth and provide complementary etiologies to afflictions that involve
social and cosmological factors far beyond the individual body system.
Because the lived religion is continuously relating to changing social conditions,
local beliefs and conceptions related to physical and mental infirmities and disorders
are multiple and varied within the local life world. Transmitted through a range of
media, normative standards are often blended with cultural and popular beliefs,
which are further colored by individual experiences and motives. It is therefore difficult
to relate all the elements which go into the making of thoughts and behaviours
related to illnesses and sufferings.
There are, however, two interwoven forces that most of my informants regarded
as determinant of the present human conditions: the laws of karma and human
fate predestined by God. All gave references to beliefs in the cycle of birth and
death and perceived the accumulation of karma, the effect of one’s actions, as the
force that upholds bonds to life and determines conditions in the present and coming
births. Alluding to popular beliefs, many asserted the human soul (atma) has to travel
through 8.4 million births (yoni), of which of 4.2 million births are in the water and
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Published on www.anpere.net in May 2008