INSIDE THE GURU'S GATE - Anpere

the human Gurus, Guru Granth Sahib and ultimately the pious devotees. Considering
this, Sikhs attempt to suppress contextual elements and variations in any rendition
of gurbani to minimize, what socio-linguistics have termed, the “intertextual gap”
between the utterances of the Gurus and the contemporary discursive settings in
which the continued transmission emerges. 752 In private and public gurbani recitations
devotees will silence all other dissenting voices and link their own utterances as directly
as possible to the original gurbani. There are several strategies by which this can
be done when gurbani texts move into performance, 753 but two formal devices to mark
out that the textual material derives from an otherworldly source is, firstly, to present
the sacred words in direct quotations and, secondly, to embed gurbani texts with
linguistic markers and other types of speech that will separate quotations from the
quoting speaker and signal a special frame of interpretation.
God
(Speaker)
Human Gurus
(Listener)
Guru Granth Sahib
(Text/listener)
(Author) Sikhs
Figure 27. (Speaker) (Listeners/
speakers)
752
Briggs & Bauman 1992: 150.
753
Du Bois (1986) lists a summary of characteristic performance features and textual features
that tend to shift the locus of control and authority over ritual speech from the present speaker
to a distant agent and traditional source. Included in the first category is marked voice quality,
fluency of speech, stylized and restricted intonational contours, gestalt knowledge, personal
volition disclaimers which is crediting a traditional source for the words. Textual features involve,
for instance, the use of a ritual register, archaistic elements, euphemism and metaphor,
and semantic-grammatical parallelism. See also the review of Keane (1997a) and the analysis of
Shoaps (2002).
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Published on www.anpere.net in May 2008