by Valerie Kaur

Introduction

Latin American philosopher Enrique Dussel provides a philosophy of liberation that aims to empower and decolonize marginalized communities.  His contemporary, Walter Mignolo, conceptualizes the role of border thinkers, intellectuals who move between dominant and marginalized communities in order to generate a process of intellectual, economic, and social liberation.  Using examples from Latin America, Dussel and Mignolo debate the universal possibilities for liberation philosophy, yet there exists little discourse among scholars in other developing regions like South Asia.  Scholars must look at the ideas behind regional liberation movements in order for liberation philosophy to develop into a more complete and useful model.

Latin American and South Asian scholars can understand the development of Sikhism, a Northern Indian religion born in the late 1400s, as a valuable kind of liberation philosophy and an instance of border thinking.  We will examine the founder Guru Nanak Dev Ji’s new language to describe the world: the nature of God, the constitution of salvation, and the consequential vision of the future.  Through this study, Latin American scholars can find a valuable historical example that addresses the universal/particular debate; South Asian scholars can find a beginning point for a South Asian liberation philosophy to mobilize its many fractured minorities.

The Nature of God : Guru Nanak as Border Thinker

Guru Nanak articulated a new interpretation of the nature of God using new language; these teachings opened a space for a kind of border thinking that would develop into a religious system.  First, we must examine the local language that Guru Nanak used to articulate his revelation and teachings.  Guru Nanak spoke and sang his teachings in the local Punjabi language, which contains a lexicon with words from both the Sanskrit and Persian traditions, including various regional dialects used by marginalized classes throughout India. 

Punjab, situated in the Northeastern, became a site where cultures collided through trade or war after the arrival of Islamic merchants and invaders after 1000 AD.  The Punjabi language that emerged was a distinct language, a proto-modern Punjabi, enriched by intercultural tensions and dialogue.  As a hybrid language, Punjabi became a counter-hegemonic language that Guru Nanak used to rupture the grand narratives of the Indian subcontinent at the time—a language for border thinking.

Until 1000 AD, the Vedic tradition, Hinduism, and Sanskrit generated the dominant grand narrative of South Asia.  This grand narrative assimilated differences and asserted a non-differential unity of reality, without reflecting the myriad of cultures and languages throughout the subcontinent.  After 1000 AD, Muslims from the North brought a competing grand narrative, an Islamic exclusivist worldview that aimed to convert non-Muslims. 

Guru Nanak, born in 1469 in Punjab, spoke from this in-between space to criticize both Hinduism and Islam for implementing empty rituals, reliance on priests as middlemen to God, social hierarchies like the caste system, and exclusionary policies.  He began expressing the needs of the poor and outcaste, the marginalized and voiceless, and later experienced a divine revelation that led to a new interpretation of the divine. 

After his revelation, Guru Nanak began describing God as both transcendent and immanent, as noumenon (sacred ground that sustains and nourishes phenomenon) and creative lover, both rational and libidinal.  We pray and link with God or Nam (translated as Name or noumenon) in Repetition, Nam simran, through music.  Repeating God’s Name through song does not mean repeating the Same over and over; rather each sound reveals a new variation and implies that the subject is not closed but constantly open to the Other. 

The gurus asserted that the body was meant to engage in the experience of Nam, thus affirming the reality and sacredness of the material world and challenging dominant beliefs in subject-object dualism.  Repetition is private, meditational, universal, but not universalized.  The Guru Granth Sahib, the Sikh holy book containing religious hymns, exhibits resistance against universalization, namely making God a fixed essence attained through a certain experience.  The gurus signified God with a myriad of names: woman and man, ascetic and consummator, unborn and imageful, transcendent creator and present lover (Singh, 17-18). 

Human beings must experience Nam with vismad, wonder, and uphold the values that Nam has implanted in the world: equality, justice, pluralism, and truth. 

This new worldview challenged Hindu and Islamic social structures.  Hinduism’s Brahma had become a homogenizing symbol upholding a totalizing caste system, Islam’s Allah a unitarian and absolutist conquering symbol.  These theological signs helped support oppressive social and political hegemonic orders.  Sikh signs for the nature of God did not create the kind of universalized paradigm or essentialist language that threatened to dominate or absolve others.  Rather, these new signs for God empowered the subaltern in all the various forms of oppression.  

Guru Nanak communicated all his poetic revelations and sacred teachings in the language of the common people, Punjabi.  God became available to them; women and men from all different socio-economic backgrounds became equal members of the world, motivated to fight for their right to live in a just world. 

Through these teachings, Guru Nanak altered hegemonic signs, opened new mental space, and thus became Mignolo’s border thinker.  Border thinking, explains Mignolo, is “thinking from dichotomous concepts rather than ordering the world in dichotomies” (Mignolo, 45).  While Mignolo primarily examines border thinking from the colonial difference, from “the cracks between modernity and coloniality”, the development of Sikhism provides an example of border thinking before the modern/colonial world system. 

Border thinking implies “thinking from an other place, imagining an other language, arguing from an other logic” and this is precisely what Guru Nanak did (314).  He engaged in DuBois’ “double consciousness” and spoke between two hegemonic narratives from the space of the subaltern.  He articulated a new worldview that empowered the lower castes, the women, the poor and oppressed. 

For most of the twentieth century, Western encyclopedias described Sikhism as a combination of Hinduism and Islam, or as a sect of Hinduism.  Similarities between Sikh theology and the two dominant religions are numerous, such as monotheism and grace as in Islam, and reincarnation and pluralism as in Hinduism.  However, Sikhs have argued against this critique, aiming to establish themselves as a distinct religious community. 

As the Center increasingly recognizes Sikhism as a separate religion, the fifth largest in the world, the concept of border thinking will help explain why Sikhism does not stand with one foot in Hinduism and another in Islam.  Guru Nanak spoke for the marginalized from the space between, the borderland.  This space was created during a moment of crisis, a local rise in oppression, which required a new language to describe the world.  The Sikh gurus used common language and imagery from both traditions, yet these signs created a new kind of thinking that challenged the dominant political and social structures of both systems.  When a third party directly challenges the previous two, it cannot be viewed as a conglomeration or dialectical product but a paradigm shift, and in this case, the birth of a new religion. 

Salvation and Decolonization : Sikhism as Liberation Philosophy

Beginning with Guru Nanak, the Sikh Gurus developed a unique concept of salvation that embodies streams of Dussel’s liberation philosophy.  While Hinduism and Islam in medieval Northern India characterized salvation as an individual process, achieved through prayer and rituals with the help of priests, early Sikhism developed a new notion of emancipation.  The Sikh Gurus described two processes: first, self-transformation through Nam Simran, personal devotion and prayer without the need of outside mediators, and second, world-transformation through community action. 

Human fulfillment now required prayer with the goal of real action in the present world; emancipating the self meant working toward the liberation of others.  Buddhism’s nirvana and Hinduism’s yogi meditation provided stepping-stones to the goal and not ends in themselves.  Rather than working toward salvation or liberation after death as emphasized in Islam and the Abrahamic traditions, the Gurus focused on liberation in this world for marginalized sections of society everywhere.  This spiritual commitment to social justice led Sikhs to use the sword to defend themselves and others against the invading Mughal Empire, imperialist Britain, and the Hindu nationalist government.     

We can now begin to see the Sikh religion as a pre-colonial example of a materialized liberation philosophy.  First, both Dussel and the Sikh Gurus share the same project: decolonization in order to move toward a more just world.  Using a modern/colonial model, Dussel views the oppressed and voiceless Others, mostly in the developing world, as existing on the periphery of the totalizing world system, Europe and the United States at the Center.  The Center has buried subjugated knowledges of peripheral cultures by spreading its science, culture, economics, and worldview through globalization. 

Dussel proposes that the philosophy of liberation can help all different oppressed peoples realize emancipation through a single project, decolonization.  Liberation, “the need to break the chains of dependence and domination,” means empowering the common people through three types of decolonization: political, sexual, and educational.  In other words, liberation must overcome the I-conquer, I-desire, and I-think (Dussel, Ch. 3).

Addressing Dussel’s three spheres, the Sikh Gurus focused on the liberation of silenced members of society, especially lower castes, women, and religious minorities, their knowledge and experiences.  The Gurus pointed to human ego as the source for political, sexual, and educational chains.  In the political sphere, the Gurus emphasized equal rights and dignity of all human beings, condemning forms of political and social domination over others. 

In the sexual sphere, the Gurus praised the disciplined life and the intrinsic equality and value of women.  In the intellectual sphere, the Gurus broke the subject-object distinction through describing the unified beauty of the world and cosmos and the fundamental ignorance of human beings in comprehending the totality of Being.  Human beings must always look and live in the world with a sense of vismad, wonder, and continually learn, sikh (the name for disciples of the new religion).  This individual liberation, overcoming the ego and “conquering thyself,” led to social liberation. 

The responsibility to live in the world, battling the ego within and without, shaped the ideal of the Sikh Saint-Soldier, or Gurmukh.  The Gurmukh intervened in history in order to move the world toward liberation and justice for all people.  The Gurus wanted all Sikhs to aspire to become Gurmukhs, in other words, border thinkers.  “Border thinking from the perspective of subalternity is a machine for intellectual decolonization,” writes Mignolo (Mignolo, 45).  Even before the modern/colonial system, Sikhism originated as border thinking and made its liberation project decolonization, or de-othering the Other (Singh, 44).  Sikhs have the conceptual foundation to continue this liberation project in the present modern/colonial system, especially when South Asia marginalized many people within its borders and South Asia itself has become marginalized in relation to the global system.

If Sikhism is indeed a kind of living liberation philosophy, why aren’t Sikhs seen actively helping marginalized communities throughout the world or at least throughout India?  One can argue that Sikhism is a failed liberation philosophy, because it has not even managed to liberate itself!  Turmoil and violence wrapped Punjab in the 1980s and the Punjabi people still struggle for human rights.  Moreover, the inequality of women, divisiveness between socio-economic classes, and religious intolerance exists within Sikh communities.  How can we view Sikhism as a valuable case study for a working liberation philosophy if discrepancies abound? 

There will always be differences between an ideal philosophy and real practice, but taking this into account, the problems within Sikh communities are due to other reasons.  Sikh liberation philosophy has not exercised its liberating potential because the religious community has spent nearly all its young history defending itself from hegemonic invaders, attacks, and abuses.  Sikh history abounds with stories of war, violence, and martyrdom, bringing us to an opposing claim: Sikhism has survived thus far precisely because its conceptual machinery has motivated its people to fight to preserve faith and culture.  In addition to external pressures, Sikhs have lived within dominant cultures and invariably absorbed the assumptions and practices of the status quo.  This history does not undermine the value in considering the origin of the faith as an instance of border thinking driven by liberation philosophy.  We may still examine the possible roles for Sikh thought today and in the future.

Vision of the Future : Transmodernity and Diversality

In viewing salvation as decolonization and social liberation, the Sikh Gurus envisioned a peaceful and just world as the end goal.  Their vision of the future has relevance for one crucial dilemma in Latin American liberation philosophy.  First, we must understand that the Gurus implied a linear view of world history, where human beings evolved from the Manmukh, the animal-human, to the Gurmukh, the Nam or reality-centered human.  This movement forward through history, driven by Being or Nam, involved uplifting different faces of the oppressed in all political, sexual, and erotic, and therefore spiritual, spheres. 

This idea does not suggest that human beings have exhibited a constant progression through history; they have not exhibited more enlightened qualities through time.  It means that human history is constantly pointing toward the vision of a just world.  Rather than searching for human fulfillment in the afterlife like other religious worldviews, Sikhs affirm this vision of the future as a real goal we must work towards here and now.

Gurmukhs must engage in this liberation project, not by speaking and fighting for the subaltern, but allowing them to speak and helping them fighting against oppressive structures.  This is key.  The founding Sikh tenet of pluralism means that the world contains diverse peoples and paths toward liberation.  Sikhs do not address Others to affirm the superiority of their worldview with the goal of conversion or domination.  On the contrary, Sikhs face Others to express intercultural solidarity in struggles against injustice in their myriad forms. 

In other words, the Other is not a monotopic entity; there are multiple Others who carry seeds for diverse paths toward liberation, and Gurmukhs have the responsibility to aid these various liberating projects.  This approach shows that the universal and essentialist language that the Sikh Gurus used to describe God, liberation, and the future are not like other systems that threaten to totalize one particular worldview.  This language provides Sikhs with the conceptual machinery to help others find their own paths toward different worldviews as long as they don’t threaten the peaceful coexistence of others

The Sikh vision of the future can help philosophers address the danger in Dussel’s liberation philosophy—that it might fall into its own trap.  Dussel describes four main periods in the development of liberation movements: first the period of liberation, followed by organization of the state, then stabilization, and finally splendor and decadence, when “the domination of the oppressed becomes repression” (Dussel, 78). 

Because essentialist language and universal paradigms drive these liberation movements, the oppressed gain power and oftentimes become oppressors.  The United States’ damaging foreign policy and the treatment of Palestinians by Jews of Israel provide examples of this process.  The question now arises: how does Dussel’s liberation philosophy or any movement at all avoid becoming a dominant system, fashioning new peripheries?  The Sikh vision of the future embodies Dussel’s idea of Transmodernity, a utopian future beyond modernity, as well as Mignolo’s idea of Diversality, the coexistence of many Others. 

Sikh theology offers an example of a system with a universal paradigm that can liberate without assuming domination.  The very checks to domination are embedded in the foundation of the religion, namely the tenets of equality, pluralism, and overcoming ego.  If liberation is pursued according to Sikh philosophy, the work of liberation will take many forms, the subaltern will be empowered to speak, and the future includes all the diverse faces of human life living together in peace.

How likely is such a future?  Given the terrible ongoing history of violence and oppression in the world, how can we hope for this utopia?  Moreover, aren’t Sikhs as capable of dominating and oppressing Others as any people?  These critiques are valid and important considerations for the visions of both the Sikh Gurus and Latin American liberation philosophers. 

First, we do not know for certain that human beings will realize a future of peace.  However, the alternative to hoping and working toward this goal is paralysis, which defeats all work toward coexistence.  Sikhism is a religion and therefore embodies faith, a notion not so easily defended in philosophical discourse.  However, the idea of philosophy and theology as practice make it so that engaging in action is more important than dismissing great ideals.  Since liberation philosophy is still a young discipline, it has time to grow and develop as an empowering concept that can inspire just action. 

Likewise, Sikhism has time and space to grow as a liberation philosophy and border thinking as the Sikh people gain more freedom to practice their faith.  Sikhs are just as capable as another people to abuse power and dominate others.  However, as long as new border thinkers constantly point to founding principles and maintain the same vision, perhaps they can reduce the possibilities for the oppressed-becoming-oppressor. 

Conclusion: Sikhism for Latin America and South Asia

For Latin American scholars, understanding the foundation of Sikhism can help philosophers conceptualize a historical materialization of liberation philosophy as well as construct a common future vision.  Sikhism’s vision of the future exhibits one possible way to avoid becoming a totalizing system, decolonization that arrives at diversality in transmodernity. 

South Asian scholars can look to the origin and development of Sikhism on their home soil as a starting point for a South Asian liberation philosophy that addresses the particular conditions and needs of South Asia.  Marginalized communities in India can use these ideals to come together and oppose India’s present oppressive grand narrative of Hindutva.  Dalit Christians, Kashmiri Muslims, and Punjab Sikhs have all endured the same kind of oppression by the central government.  These groups have the potential to engage on one particular path of liberation against a common Center without compromising the integrity of each group. 

After the founding of the religion, Sikhism itself became a subjugated knowledge during colonial times, that is, a historical content buried and disguised in a functionalism of formal systemtization (Foucault, 81).  Under British and now Hindu social structures, the Sikh religion has lost its fiery liberating impulse and power.  In looking back to the origin of the religion and examining its ideas, we can reclaim the liberation project of Sikhism both in global discourse, such as in Latin America, and in the local discourses of Punjab and South Asia.  The task falls upon border thinkers to give voice to Sikhism and help realize the potential of liberation philosophies.   
 

Bibliography :

 Enrique Dussel.  The Philosophy of Liberation.  

Copyright ©2002 Valerie Kaur Brar.   About The Author