INSIDE THE GURU'S GATE - Anpere

ships. The Guru Granth Sahib transforms from a mere “book” to a superior subject,
who can be the target of real ministration, hear prayers, receive offerings, possess
land, and be a causative agent in the human world. Religious acts of and towards the
Sikh scripture can be seen as strategies by which worshippers effectively create presence
and agency of a majestic Guru, which/who continues to act and interact with
disciples. For most believing devotees, the careful ministration of the Guru Granth
Sahib and other acts of veneration are perceived to be different forms of gurseva – the
humble and selfless “service to the Guru” from a sincere devotional heart. To Sikhs,
the scripture is perpetually the manifestation of the worldly Guru with authority and
capacities to reveal divine knowledge and guidance to humanity. The Guru should
hence be served and honored in the very best possible way.
THE ETERNAL WORDS
Ultimately it is the words and teaching within Guru Granth Sahib which is the true
Guru that illuminates the path of salvation. The daily liturgies performed in the
gurdwara consist of a set of formalized acts which strongly emphasize the interior
identity of the Guru Granth Sahib. The solemnized opening/revealing and closing/concealing
ceremonies of the sacred book are acts of controlling a continued revelation
of the true agency of the Guru that forever abides in the scripture. The Sikh
model of revelation appears to involve a diachronic scheme, similar to that which
Agha (1999) has termed a “speech chain structure”, that is, “a historical series of
speech events linked together by the permutation of individuals across speech act
roles.” 751 Through activities of speaking, hearing, writing, and the like, different
agents are linked together in chains of speech. Unlike ordinary speech events, the
Sikh model implies a hierarchical evaluation of the different speech chains involved:
the original speech events that took place between God and the human Gurus belonged
to a higher order. The Gurus were both listeners of these words and authors
of compositions that were later incorporated in the Sikh scripture. After the scripture’s
status transformed to Guru Granth Sahib, the sacred text became a personified
speaker of divine words. Through each step in the chain of speech events, the originally
divine words descended to humans in history and are made perpetually manifest
in present worship context (See Figure 27).
Most Sikhs will thus argue that gurbani words are not created from ordinary
human discourses, but reproductions of utterances which stand far above and beyond
the influence of contemporary temporal and spatial parameters. Historically,
gurbani was revealed and “entexualized” by the human Gurus. Sikh disciples of today
share the collective responsibility to bring these sacred words out in performance
to make the agency of the Word-Guru enduringly manifest in the world. Thus, whenever
Sikhs are reciting or singing gurbani, they are both speakers and hearers of considerably
grander speeches that linked together an aspect of God – the Word – with
751
The quotation and idea of a speech chain structure of a higher order is derived from Perrino’s
study on Qur’anic healing practices in Senegal. Perrino 2002: 249.
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Published on www.anpere.net in May 2008