N. Muthu Mohan

Introduction

In the year 1995, UNESCO published Report of the World Commission on Culture and Development with the title “Our Creative Diversity”. “ For groups and society, culture is energy, inspiration and empowerment, and the knowledge and acknowledgement of diversity. If cultural diversity is “behind us, around us and before us” as Claude Levi-Strauss put it, we must learn to let it lead, not to the clash of cultures, but to their fruitful coexistence and toward intercultural harmony as envisioned by the President of the Commission, Javier Perez de Cueller. Cultural diversity compels the religionists, culturologists, anthropologists, and philosophers to revisit the past and work out appropriate models of multicultural but integrated living.

The present paper is an attempt to read Guru Granth Sahib, the scripture of the Sikhs, from the point of view of how it takes cognizance of the fact of religious and cultural multiplicity in and around the Indian subcontinent, and to probe into the ways Guru Granth Sahib offers to meet the problem, to construct a co-living of harmony and unity of minds.

It was An Age of Diversity and Discords

The known history of India is the history of diversity, discords, and enduring attempt to unify the minds. We do not make this statement out of exaggeration. The oldest problem in Indian history is the problem between one and many. This problem figures in the Upanishads as the problem between Brahman that is one, and the variety of life that afterwards goes with the name maya. The authors of Upanishads were psychologically afraid of the multiplicity and rushed to formulate an Ekantavada.

Interestingly, Jains were not much threatened by the multiplicity and dared to devise a philosophy of Anekantavada. Apparently, the Jains were defeated in the old historical debate and Ekantavadins felt that they had won the game. The notorious Varna-caste order might be one of the ways of solving (?) the problem of one and many, thus making the ethnic and cultural cleavages almost permanent in Indian society. However, the debate continued through fresh facets of life, particularly, when the Bhakti thoughts originated in various linguistic and regional paradigms. Sanskrit and regional languages became a plane in which the problem of one and many was again disputed.

The names of God and forms of worship too turned out to be the realm in which discords became explicit. Bhakti movements, in their initial stage, had indeed an inclination to do away with the caste differences but the process of feudalization during the medieval period killed that opportunity and made casteism ever rigid. At last came Islam, infusing more in terms of religious and linguistic differentiations.

If this briefly is the course of history of India, the age of the Sikh Gurus and the age of Guru Granth Sahib must be called as the age of diversities and discords in terms of religions, languages, regions, and even cultures. From this point of view, the Guru Granth Sahib has to be located in a wonderful multicultural, multi-linguistic, and multi-religious episteme.

Guru Granth Sahib contains a very deep understanding of the cultural diversity unknown in Indian history to any other thought system. It is also recognition of cultural diversity as a dynamic source of working out alternative ways of living. The Guru undertook four udasis and he met with varied forms of life during his travels. He met the Siddhas in the Himalayas and his idea of unity of spiritual and temporal (meeri-piri) got formulated then. The unity of bhakti and inner purity too emerged out of his meetings with the Nath yogis. Priority to ethical behavior and replacing religious ritualism became an important aspect of the Guru’s thought.

Guru Nanak went to the Ganges and his critique of Brahmanic rituals found a wonderful confirmation there. During his visit to Puri we find his celebration of nature as a real form of worshiping God. Babar Vani illustrates the Guru’s critique of authoritarian rulers, and the episode of Malik Bhago tells us about the Guru’s concern for the poor. Guru Nanak’s travel to the Arabian lands provides a critique of Islamic externalism. And these are only a few to quote. During the Udasis Guru Nanak encountered many languages, cultures, religions, tribes, and landscapes. The Guru also met Siddhas, Sufis, Sants, Vaishnavite and Saivite Bhaktas, Brahmanic pundits and many common people of various backgrounds. Every encounter contains an interesting episode of a life-situation. It is a great panorama of life. The Guru learns and teaches during the Udasis.

The compositional pattern and contents of Guru Granth Sahib somehow reflect the essential moments of the Udasi travels and the religious experiences that emerge out of them. The Guru Granth Sahib is authored not only by the Sikh Gurus, but also by some Hindu Bhagats and Sufi saints. The authorial pattern is profoundly symptomatic. It recognizes the widely varied historical attempts of perceiving the one incomprehensible God. The linguistic plane of Guru Granth Sahib represents the synthesis of Arabio-Persian and Sanskrit language groups, and it registers not only the socio-cultural diversity but also natural variety, seasonal multiplicity, and wonders of lands and colors in God’s creation.

Guru Granth Sahib and Unity of Minds

Our thesis of cultural diversity forming the structure of Guru Granth Sahib does not mean that cultural diversity is found as a raw fact in the Sikh scripture. Guru Granth Sahib goes further. The Sikh religiosity available in Guru Granth Sahib is the ultimate outcome of the transcendence of the cultural diversity registered in Guru Granth Sahib. Thus the structure of Guru Granth Sahib is not mere factuality of diversity and it includes how it goes beyond the multiplicity.

India has the historical experience of dealing with multiplicity. Its very prominent model is ordering them in a hierarchy. Hierarchical ordering is a type of internal colonization. Guru Granth Sahib does not subscribe to this model. The Sikh Gurus worked for dismantling the hierarchical pattern, and the Guru Granth Sahib thinks of alternative ways of dealing with plurality of existence.

The Sikh concept of unity of spirituality and temporality (Meeri-Piri) contains two important aspects in this regard. The first is the celebration of multiplicity as the wonder of the creation of God. In the Sikh scheme of things, the created world is true and holy in all its varieties. In Japuji Sahib and Asa Di Var, the variety of created world is celebrated abundantly. The second aspect of the principle of Meeri-Piri is that the multiplicity of nature and temporal life is stubbornly tied up with the spiritual oneness to which Sikhism stands for. The Sikh spirituality is not a type of religiosity that is aimed at the abstract transcendental. It infuses into the diversity of temporal reality values such as justice, dynamism, self-dignity, resistance to colonization and ego-less-ness. Thus, a concrete and fluid spiritual unity sensitive to the problems of existence is formulated as the fundamental methodological principle of Guru Granth Sahib.

Historically, many monistic and monotheistic philosophies miserably failed in their dealings with cultural multiplicity. But, how does the monotheism of Guru Granth Sahib deal with the diversity? Monotheism of Guru Granth Sahib is not the mere statement of oneness of God. God is one, nameless, formless and human attempts cannot comprehend the attributes of God.

The idea of incomprehensibility of God despite the innumerable attempts of humans is an interesting theme in Guru Granth Sahib. Some are fortunate and some are not, and we do not understand the ways of God why it is so. The infiniteness of attributes of God and the incomprehensibility of God make the monotheism of Guru Granth Sahib a different one. Guru Granth Sahib sees God as abundance, richness, inestimable, unpredictable and immeasurable.

I am reminded here of the concept of God propounded by the German philosopher Leibniz, as the one infinite and his rationalism that gives a lot of space for contingency of monads. A similar position, although not identical, we observe in the monotheism of Guru Granth Sahib. Thus Sikhism is a monotheistic thought but not a colonizing monotheism. It does not dismiss the reality and richness of multiplicity. It does not name the diversity as illusion. It does not call it full of suffering, and neither does it evaluate life as sinful. The wonderful variety of life is a garden, a gift, a game of love, an alive tall green tree that ever blossoms, a dharamsala, an ocean of God where we all play as fishes. It is a wonder and a celebration of wonder. The monotheism of Guru Granth Sahib is indeed different from many of its type. I feel that the sensibility of cultural diversity and its dynamism have left their imprint in the monotheism of Guru Granth Sahib.

Guru Granth Sahib renders immense priority to ethics, and it is one important way of dealing with the fact of multiplicity. Multiplicity, not to turn into chaos, needs an ethical entry. The ethics here again is not the ethics of hierarchy or the ethics of enslaved minds (Nietzsche), but the ethics of freedom, justice, esteem, and dignity. Guru Granth Sahib calls Hindus to become true Hindus and Muslims to become true Muslims. It gives priority to internal purity and truthfulness than rituals and externalities. Different from the mukti-jnanas of old days, it is maanasa-jnana, the knowledge and transformation of minds. Impurity is not in the world and not in the body; it is in your own mind. This is similar to what the post-modernists now call the deconstruction of subjectivity.

It postulates the fundamental equality of every one, male and female. Ik, the oneness of God and reality means also equality of all of God’s creation. Guru Granth Sahib invokes the guts to challenge the sacredness of a text that preaches born inequality among people. Ethics is a highly fluid territory that keeps itself open to fresh and concrete negotiations as and when varied situations arise. The ethical awareness and consciousness of justice while dealing are the most important things here. Ethics is the realm where the spiritual and the temporal confluence. It is the standpoint of Guru Granth Sahib.

Guru Granth Sahib unifies multiplicity in a non-colonizing and non-hierarchical way. The musical-emotive form of Gurbani exemplifies this fact. The musical-poetic articulation of Gurbani is an aesthetic way of comprehending God. The aesthetical is not a purely transcendental way of expression. The aesthetical always involves the temporal.

In the Upanishads, the elongated and undifferentiated base sound of Oum was taken as the model for the nirguna Brahman, where the gunas and differentiated noises were understood as chaos and maya. Gurbani is the exploration of a fluid midway between the undifferentiated Oum and the differentiated noises. Gurbani is music and ragas that bring order of oneness into words and emotions. Words and emotions mean temporal and existential problems. Oum is impotent to address the worldly problems. It may offer psychological appeasement or make you go beyond the world. Oum dismisses multiplicity and diversity. Gurbani and Guru-ragas meet the temporal problems without shifting you to the symbolic realm. Gurbani is the idiom of meeri-piri, the unity of the temporal and the spiritual.

Conclusion

Guru Granth Sahib may be the first scripture in Indian history that contains a deep awareness about cultural diversity of the subcontinent and works out a philosophy of unity of minds on the basis of equality, justice, and ethics. It distinguishes itself by differing from the hierarchical and colonizing ways of dealing with multiplicity. It refuses to order people and things according to their self-assumed status or authority. Guru Granth Sahib is an alternative and just way of bringing unity of minds.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

¹ Sri Guru Granth Sahib Trans by Gurbachan Singh Talib. Published by Punjabi University, Patiala.

² Our Creative Diversity. UNESCO Report of the World Commission on Culture and Development. 1996.


Copyright©2005 N. Muthu Mohan. About the author