INSIDE THE GURU'S GATE - Anpere

speech: because of the ontologically divine nature, the words are effective in themselves
and always adaptable to changing human conditions. The Gurus’ words are so
powerful that “even in the deepest jungle their utterances will protect humans from
the wildest animals and the most evil spirits,” as a Sikh man said. A correct and devotional
engagement in gurbani can bring about an endless variety of effects.
Local Sikhs will derive the meanings to many of their worship acts from discourses
on the semantic inner of Guru Granth Sahib and hymns accredited gurbani
status. The sacred texts are considered to unfold a seamless world of meanings that
set models for religious acts and instruct people on the purposes for which these acts
are to be undertaken. Whenever the sacred hymns contextualize in performance, they
bring with them a store of meanings which can be appropriated by devotees. Interpretations
of themes, metaphors, parables, and other semantic components of the
hymns are believed to directly relate to expected effects of reciting these sacred verses
(and thereby determine the prior purposes and motives people should have for doing
this). Propositional meanings extracted from gurbani words are treated as metapragmatic
directives of the Guru who/which describes the results that can be accomplished
by religious action. In religious worship, the utterance of these words become
performative acts which are believed to affect circumstances beyond their textual
confines, not merely by shaping discourses, but to influence people and create something
in the world. The efficacy thus lies within gurbani words and to access the powerful
forces therein humans must activate the words in worship.
The primary device to interlink semantic elements of gurbani texts with expected
effects of performing the texts seems to go through a sort of parallelism, between
images in the Gurus’ language and contemporary human experiences and
situations in wider social fields. When an infertile woman, for example, is advised by
the granthi or some other knowledgeable person to daily recite a particular gurbani
hymn to be blessed with a son, she might read Guru Arjan’s words of how a son is
conceived and delivered from blessings granted by a divine agent. 770 Recitations of
these verses establish a semantic link between the Guru’s figurative description and
the desired effects which incite the woman to recite the hymn in the first place. Other
hymns prescribed for fertility will enclose images of a foetus transformed into a baby
in the mother’s womb or describe the joyful event of being blessed with a child. From
a textual viewpoint, the metaphors in gurbani often symbolize intimate human-divine
relationships and divine blessings granted from true devotion. The linguistic images
emerge as expressive symbols that should move the reader to new semantic contexts
and to key principles of the Gurus’ teaching. When these images move into performance
to be recited, they seem to generate indexical relationships to the perlocutionary
effect anticipated from a recitation, in the sense that the social effect of reciting the
text is part of the signifier within the text. 771 There is no direct link between the metaphor
of childbirth and a real physical pregnancy, but we can still draw an analogy
770
GGS: 396. See quotation in Chapter 4 part 1.
771
See Rappaport’s discussion on indexical relationships in rituals (Rappaport 1999: 57).
478
Published on www.anpere.net in May 2008