INSIDE THE GURU'S GATE - Anpere

dering gurbani always underscore that what should be the ultimate object of veneration
is not merely scriptural corpus but the words and teaching within the text. By
hearing and learning this teaching people are able to experience the Guru. The Sikhs
would thus say there are religious acts which aim to honor the worldly Guru and
ceremonies in which the Guru Granth Sahib assumes a significant social role. There
are also worship acts which bring out and manifest the eternal Guru ‒ the divine
words and teaching enshrined in the scripture. From an analytical viewpoint I have
argued that many of these religious acts do not merely communicate messages about
individual or collectively shared conceptions of a sacred text, but the ritual enactments
also mould meanings, values, and ideologies of the same.
In this concluding part I will dwell on a few theoretical ideas concerning meanings
of religious worship acts, and especially those acts which involve renditions of
gurbani. The chapter starts from the general theoretical assumption that meanings are
not inherent qualities of ritual acts but created by humans out of contextual elements.
People perform acts in particular situational settings and have recourse to discourses
that will comment upon or explain the meanings of their worship. While some of
these meanings are highly stipulated by the tradition and collectively shared, others
are always open for individual invention. The chapter aims at illustrating a few processes
by which Sikhs contextualize acts and words in performance and make their
worship meaningful in many different ways by resorting to religious discourses, the
sacred texts, the tradition, and the social circumstances surrounding their acts. The
theoretical discussion will also pay special attention to the formal features of religious
performances. When sacred texts move into performance and become linguistic acts,
they assume a number of formal properties which create new interpretative frameworks.
In this case the formalized performances of Guru Granth Sahib and other
gurbani texts emphasize that the words rendered are not human speech but much
grander utterances of otherworldly sources. The performative enactment of these
words, according to agreed conventions, does not only serve to communicate written
words in more aesthetically appealing ways, but is believed to evoke powerful forces
that accomplish spiritual, material and social effects in the human world.
5.1. SEARCHING FOR MEANINGS
The scholarly study of ritual practices has already, from its inception in the nineteenth
century, maintained the interest in meanings and functions of formalized acts.
By studying rituals from different theoretical angles scholars have been particularly
concerned with the reasons why people of different cultures continue to engage
themselves in these activities. How do rituals work? What does religious action accomplish
in the social world? What are the effects and functions of performing ritual
acts? Within the different theoretical “schools” of symbolists, structuralists and functionalists,
a large number of research studies have proposed analytic constructs to the
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Published on www.anpere.net in May 2008