INSIDE THE GURU'S GATE - Anpere

tween continuity and revision ‒ also make people re-interpret and discover new features
of the past that becomes the context and content for what they will remember
and celebrate in the future.
The following chapter consists of three major sections. Based on the scanty
sources available the first part will provide an overview of the history of the Sikhs at
Varanasi and the social composition of the community at the present. The second part
will acquaint the reader with different Sikh institutions and organizations which were
operating in the city at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The last part of the
chapter is more concerned with local historiography and will illustrate the ways by
which contemporary Sikhs construct a meaningful history in writing and through the
organization of relics and visual representations. This history contests the dominant
Hindu narrative of Varanasi to make the agency and power of the Sikh Gurus perpetually
present in the city.
1.1. SOCIAL AND ETHNIC COMPOSITION
Varanasi is a city with more than a million inhabitants from different parts of India
and presents a brocade of religious communities and cultures that daily interact and
intermingle in various social spaces. According to the 2001 Census the Sikhs constitute
a small minority of only 0.25 percent (3115 persons) of the total population in the
urban areas of Varanasi district. 91 Local Sikhs maintain there are between 5000 to
10000 members of the community who reside in the city centre and neighboring
towns and villages. An obvious explanation to the discrepancy between these estimations
and the Census report is the fact that the community embraces not only people
who are officially registered as Sikhs but adherents of other traditions who have faith
in the Guru Granth Sahib and actively participate in the congregational life. The
gurdwaras are all-inclusive spaces, open for all irrespective of social and religious
belonging. 92 The daily worship and especially festivals celebrating the Sikh Gurus
will attract a variety of devotees who would define their religious identity as Hindus,
Muslims, or even state they are both Hindus and Sikhs if being asked. The composition
of community members can therefore not be comprised in one single allencompassing
religious category of “Sikhs” that can be further subdivided according
to the various degrees by which individuals observe the Khalsa discipline (See Chapter
2).
The urban reality with large numbers of inhabitants also offers a more fragmentary
picture with social flux and motions than, for example, the traditional village
setting. People are continually moving in and out of the city, they enter spaces and
activities more or less as they like, and present fragmentary aspects of themselves in
interaction with others who only know them as followers of a discrete religion or of a
91
Census of India 2001.
92
In contrast to some Hindu temples and mosques in the city which, at least officially, only
admit people from within their own fold.
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Published on www.anpere.net in May 2008