INSIDE THE GURU'S GATE - Anpere

Guru, which is always adaptable to changing human conditions. How, then, do people
make formalized verbal and non-verbal action meaningful to their own state of
affairs? By which means do Sikhs personalize standardized worship acts to communicate
their own motives to an invisible divine interlocutor? Considering that Sikhs
clearly mark out that gurbani is of an otherworldly source, what do they do to make
these words meet the ever-changing present? In other words, how do entextualized
words and acts contextualize?
Rappaport (1999) appears to touch upon a similar opposition between the everlasting
and the ever-changing aspects of religious traditions when he distinguishes
between “canonical” and “self-referential” meta-messages that can be evoked and
communicated in ritual action. According to Rappaport, “[t]he self-referential represents
the immediate, the particular and the vital aspects of events; the canonical, in
contrast, represents the general, enduring, or even eternal aspects of universal orders.”
776 Self-referential messages concern the current physical and social states of
individual participants, while the canonical messages are perceived to be already
encoded and do not in themselves represent or express current states of participants.
As Rappaport exemplifies:
That the Shema, the Ultimate Sacred Postulate of the Jews, may not
have changed in 3000 years is one thing, that a particular person recites
it on a particular occasion is another. The Shema remains unchanged,
but those who utter it, and thus place themselves in a certain relationship
to it, continue to change as circumstances change and as generation
succeeds generation. 777
The two categories of messages are dependant upon each other: self-referential messages
achieve acceptability by being associated with the canonical, while canonical
messages need to be accompanied with self-referential messages to make sense and
obtain its force. 778 Even the most formalized act and ritual order will thus provide
spaces for variations in order to make eternal messages endurably relevant to present
conditions.
In Sikh worship, the religious speech event which seems to be the primary
means to make the eternal gurbani relevant to changing contexts and, at the same
time, facilitate interactions with the divine, is the performance of the Sikh prayer
Ardas. As was described in Chapter 3, the Ardas text has itself been exposed to a process
of entextualization. Irrespective of time and location, Sikhs all over the world will
replicate the same text, word by word. While the beginning of the text, eulogizing the
Sikh Gurus, is attributed gurbani status, the latter part is presented as quoted speech
by the collective of Sikhs. The performance of Ardas has assumed certain formal fea-
776
Rappaport 1999: 53.
777
Rappaport 1999: 53.
778
Rappaport 1999: 58.
481
Published on www.anpere.net in May 2008