INSIDE THE GURU'S GATE - Anpere

The living katha traditions, upheld by oral exegetes and musicians, strongly emphasize
that Sikhs should read, listen, interpret, and continually dwell on the semantic
dimensions of Guru Granth Sahib to develop understanding and insights of the
Guru’s spiritual guidance. Recitations, singing and readings of gurbani hymns are
always to follow prescribed formal rules because the words rendered are belived to
be of suprahuman origin. Still the endless range of spiritual meanings in the Guru
Granth Sahib are of greatest significance to a Sikh way of life and the ideal Sikh
should always attempt to comprehend the referential content of what he or she is
reciting.
Sikh propagandists in India and the Diaspora occasionally bring up true devotion
and comprehension of the Guru’s teaching in Guru Granth Sahib for public debate.
726 In these discourses semantic understanding of the sacred text is often contrasted
with ritual practices. In Varanasi visiting propagandists from the Punjab
would comment upon the presence of karam kand, or “ritualism” or “rituals” in the
city. In their use of the term it signified the extent of ritual activities in a Hindu pilgrimage
center and the “meaninglessness” of rituals which, both in content and form,
were contradictory to the normative Sikh code of conduct, particularly Hindu customs
which people continued to observe by family or caste tradition. The propagandists
would also direct harsh criticism toward some Sikh practices which in their
view had fallen into error due to ritualization. A recurrent topic was the common
practice to purchase performances of Akhand path that are carried out by specialists in
absence of the sponsor and at such a brisk pace that people are not able to understand
the words recited. A local propagandist asserted the modern increase of religious
activities among the Sikhs has been accompanied with a shift away from direct participation
in worship: “When the pathis perform Akhand path the congregation is busy
gossiping. While the Akhand path is going on in one room of the house, people will
gather in another for watching TV,” he said.
726
In a paper on ritual and identity, Nijhawan (2006a) observes how religious discourses in a
Sikh gurdwara in Frankfurt have shifted from political concerns to matters related to pietism in
the performance of rituals. When Sikh propagandists, working within trans-national networks,
visited the local gurdwara their discourses were organized around the corruption of worship:
Sikh practices have gone astray from the Guru’s teaching to become devoid of inner commitment.
Interestingly enough the granthis, responsible for the daily duties in the gurdwara, met the
propaganda with little interest. The reason for this, Nijhawan suggests, was related to the fact
that the rituals under criticism contributed significantly to the process of establishing a local
community: in a scattered Diaspora the organization of rituals has the force to tie people together
in collective representations and provide the required resources to maintain the community.
According to Nijhawan the discrepancy between the different orientations ‒ Sikh reformists
propagating internal matters and local Sikhs trying to secure resources of identity and representations
‒ has created a cleavage in the Sikh community (Nijhawan 2006a). The Frankfurt case
demonstrates an instance of negotiation between two common emic approaches to ritual, text
and religion: propagandists who stress orthodoxy – correct beliefs in religious doctrines ‒ and
seek to maintain the sense of a coherent teaching and tradition, while local Sikhs meet these
discourses with more pragmatic and reflexive attitudes.
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Published on www.anpere.net in May 2008