The "Anti-aarti" of Nanak
On the occasion of Gurupurab
“What if one became animal or plant through literature, which certainly does not mean literarily? Is it not first through the voice that one becomes animal?”
- From A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari
Can one think of writing as an act of place making? What happens when we pin down the thrashing tail of this animal of experience, this chimeric lived world with literature, with the utterance, with language? The world folds into itself in mysterious shrines in varying stages of decay. History is shocked into presence, and geographies unfurl in the singularity of a line. A sentence makes the schizophrenic jump from a moment in time to another in space. As I write this, somewhere in the radius of a thousand kilometres, a horse is lifting its leg up, swishing its tail in mild irritation. As I write this, invoking the temporal disorientation inherent in a country’s dissonant journey from kal to kal*, in another India, a government pushes its people back into the past with the surgical sophistry of a tyrannical decree: Demonetisation. As I write this, a pair of lovers makes plans to catch the moon’s exeunt, drenched in blood. As I write this, Nanak Walks, and across the country, the bird of faith soars through geographies in the surge of Gurupurab.
I yearn for the certainty of faith that my pious friends have. I have sought this unwavering power elsewhere, and I believe I might have found it without knowing. But it does not have the sustenance and nurturing assurance of religious belief. What draws earthly contours around God’s kingdom? Is it prayer? Ritual? Is it the power of myth - the allegorical shadow that narrative casts in the present?
The Sikh faith proposes a sacred that is rooted in the everyday. While doing a structural analysis of the five symbols in Sikhism, the sociologist J.P.S. Uberoi offers an oppositional reading of the initiation rite with that of the “medieval mendicant orders that preceded Sikhism”. He sees an inversion of a kind of transcendentalism:
“Whereas they had sought to obtain emancipation and deliverance through individual renunciation, as their rites signify, of what amounted to social death, the Sikh community was called to affirm the normal social world as itself the battleground of freedom… The meaning of being unshorn, in particular, is thus constituted by the “negation of the negation”: it signifies the permanent renunciation of renunciation.”
- From Five Symbols of Sikh Identity, J.P.S. Uberoi
The divine is immanent in practice. One cannot turn away from the world, like Siddhartha did. Even the pedagogy (Sikh) of prayer locates its experiential tenets in the bazaar of the lived. The mystic and the eternal is subsumed in everyday gestures of love and community. Lakeeri not fakeeri.
I have always been fascinated by this aspect of Sikhism. A dear friend of mine introduced me to ‘Walking with Nanak’, Haroon Rashid’s rooted tracing of the life of ‘Guru’ Nanak, through the many gurudwaras and places associated with him in Pakistan. Rashid speaks very much in the voice of the wanderer who is walking along the annotated registers of the mystic, conscious of his humanity. He tells the story of “Nanak the son, the poet, the wanderer, the father, the friend”. What emerges is not Nanak the saint, or Nanak the immortal founder of a religion, but “Nanak the man”.
I share today a verse quoted from the same book. Rashid shares this poem from Harish Dhillon’s The First Sikh Spiritual Master: Timeless Wisdom from the Life and Teachings of Guru Nanak. The song is well known in gurbani sangeeth as the guru’s aarti, sung in gurudwaras across the country - which is something of an irony in itself, as you will discern through Nanak’s meaning in composition of this verse. Various versions of the story associated with this exist. I will share with you here a gist of its central idea: Nanak and Mardana sit outside a temple (Jagannath in Puri, apparently) while an aarti goes on. Nanak can be envisioned in the midst of the lights, the clanging bells, and the affective intensity of the sacred spectacle. After the aarti, he is still in a divine stupor, but he seems lost everywhere, prompting the people to ask him why he did not enter the temple to be a part of the prayer, as promised. The first part of this verse, can be construed as his response. I share below only an English translation from the book. You will find the punjabi on youtube easily.
When the world is performing aarti, what is the need for this ritual in the temple? Rashid points out this critique in his assessment of the verse: “Nanak is criticising the act of performing of aartis within Hindu temples. He is trying to say that God doesn’t reside just in temples, mosques or shrines, but in nature… god is everywhere…the entire world is our temple and everything in nature is performing the act of aarti.” Kan kan mein bhagwaan. Do you see how this verse reflects the idea of “renunciation of renunciation”, how it negates the enforced ritual of organised religion, while affirming the sacred inherent in the body and its interaction with other bodies and spaces.
I cannot help but smile as I think of this when I hear this song performed in Gurdwaras, often at the beginning of a new session.
Here’s wishing a joyful and compassionate Gurupurab to all.
*“No people whose word for 'yesterday' is the same as their word for 'tomorrow' can be said to have a firm grip on the time.” (Midnight’s Children, Salman Journey)
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