INSIDE THE GURU'S GATE - Anpere

a maximum score of hundred points, of which fifty points was the highest mark for
the historical exam and the remaining fifty points for the recitation test. Students who
wrote the answers of the written exam in Gurmukhi script would also get an extra ten
points in bonus. To attract and encourage children to participate in the competitions
community members donated cash prizes and trophies to the first three winners, as
well as smaller gifts to all contestants. On the festival day the children were invited to
demonstrate their knowledge and skill on stage in the gurdwara. These pedagogical
activities successfully attempt to inspire the youth to take interest in the Sikh teaching,
history, and the Guru Granth Sahib.
1.3. COUNTER-NARRATIVE AS COLLECTIVE MEMORY
For Sikhs in Varanasi it is not necessarily ancient mythologies about the great wonders
of Shiva or the purifying powers of river Ganga that are held memorable and
sanctify the city. As a minority group situated within the boundaries of a Hindu centre,
the Sikhs have generated their own collective emic historiography, transmitted
orally and published in printed texts. The written history sets the standard for what
should be remembered of the past by the collective group of Sikhs. It is the recounting
and commemoration of events in a shared past which are considered prior to
personal experiences of individuals and work as a manifestation of a collective memory.
As opposed to opinions that people are resistant to change or compliantly influenced
by the social and cultural context which they are part of, the local history of the
Sikhs is neither self-contained as a bounded object separable from the socio-cultural
context in which it operates, nor dictated by this environment. On the contrary, it
seems to have emerged in negotiations between local Sikhs in interactions with the
wider context. As a collective representation of the past the local history manifests
itself as a “counter-narrative” created in a dialogic relation to the dominating discourse
or “master narrative” of Varanasi as the centre of Hindu pilgrimage and the
stronghold of Brahmin orthodoxy and religious learning. 184 A counter-narrative is a
senior community members, who acted as judges. The participants were divided into three age
groups and expected to recite different compositions: children up to the age of six were tested in
recitation of Mulmantra, the first hymns of the Guru Granth Sahib, and would be awarded extra
points if they remembered additional hymns. Boys and girls between the age of six and ten were
tested in the hymn Chaupai Sahib, while the teenagers up to the age of twenty recited the whole
JapJi Sahib and Rahiras Sahib. Each child would sit separately before an adult Sikh and read the
compositions from memory. The instructors evaluated the children’s recitation proficiency on
the criteria of correctness and devotion. For each mispronunciation or fault they deduced one
point and only those who enunciated the text without faults and with a “feeling for gurbani”
would be given the highest marks. All the children who scored more than forty points reached
the finals and a second testing round.
184
From a historian’s perspective, Megill (1995) distinguishes between ”master narrative” and
“grand narrative”, of which the former is a more limited story about particular segments of
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Published on www.anpere.net in May 2008