Smita Mishra and Shafey Danish
Religion, which has become a dividing line today, a barrier separating people, thoughts and lives, drawing deep chasms within souls, creating rifts and valleys perhaps once originated as a unifying concept. It must have been made to bring together people sharing similar ideologies and beliefs. But generations adjusted and modified it to suit their own ends.
Vedas, Avesta, Bible, Quran were all written to impart education to man in philosophies incomprehensible. The inexplicable vicissitudes of life found answer in them. But they all gradually got calcified within the walls of religion. In our own country, at a time when Islam was making inroads into the land and the religion of the masses was undergoing reform along with dissention, Sikhism emerged as a breakaway faith.
It will not be an exaggeration to describe it as a beautiful by product of Bhakti Movement. The best and the purest aspects of the Bhakti ideologies and the essence of the basic tenets of Islam were incorporated into the Granth Sahib, the religious texts of Sikhs.
Adi Granth which has entered 300th year of its writing is not just a source or guide of prayer but perhaps the only book that is considered the living embodiment of the ten holy saints of Sikhism. The 3rd century year of the writing of Guru Granth Sahib is being celebrated across the country, centred from Nanded, located in a state called Maharastra.
The place is in the throes of regional violence after the MNS started a hate campaign against North Indians. It is therefore a good time to remind us, starting from Nanded, that this country is the birth place of a religion that draws its strands from all the major religions, including Hinduism and Islam.
True to the syncretic culture of the Bhakti movement which gave it birth, the Guru Granth Sahib, is a composition which draws from all faiths richly.
The Granth originally started as a pothi, a compilation of the teachings of the first guru, Guru Nanak, during his own lifetime. He passed it down to his disciple Guru Angad.
Guru Angad added to it 63 composition of his own and passed it down to the 3rd Guru, Guru Amar Das. Following the tradition, Guru Amar Das added 974 of his own compositions to manuscript. But he also made a notable departure from tradition, he included sayings of various other followers too, as well as an explanation as to why the bhakt banis, as they were called, were included. He explained that the Bhaktas had been under the influence of Guru Nanak.
These pothis came to be known as goindwal pothis. The various manuscripts and sayings were finally collated in the form of one book during the time of the fifth Guru, Guru Arjan Dev. This text was called the Adi Granth.
This final prepared text was written down by Bhai Gurdas, under the fifth Guru’s dictation. It was only during the time of the 10th Guru, when the guruship was ended, that the book was elevated to the position of the eternal Guru and given the nomenclature of Guru Granth Sahib.
The Guru Granth Sahib includes the composition of the first five Sikh Gurus. The Adi Granth also contains the works of fifteen bhakts and seventeen Bhatts ("bards", or traditional composers).
The book took five years to complete, after which it was installed at the Golden temple in Amritsar.
The teachings of the book are universal. They preach the oneness of God, the power of devotion(Bhakti) and the uselessness of ritualistic austerities.
Thus a couplet attributed to Kabir says: “When I realize that there is One, and only One Lord, why then should the people be upset?”
And further: What does it matter whether someone goes naked, or wears a deer skin, if he does not remember the Lord within( his soul)?
The book is truly iconoclastic. It goes about attacking the prevalent notions of caste and the sacredness associated with it: One who contemplates God, is said to be a Brahmin among us.
In one place, in couplets by Guru Nanak himself, the temporal nature of life is preached: O mind, why have you gone crazy? Don`t you know that your life is decreasing, day and night? Your life is made worthless with greed.
The Granth Sahib lays a great deal of emphasis on remembrance of the Lord. It says that chanting the Lord’s name (Naam) could lead to the consciousness of His being.
Thus Guru Nanak says: The nine treasures and the miraculous spiritual powers come by contemplating the Immaculate Naam, the Name of the Lord.
True to the Bhakti spirit, the book postulates that there is no difference between the devotee (bhakta) and the Lord. Devotion removes the barriers between them.
Says Ravidas: You are me, and I am You - what is the difference between us?
Further he says that the devotee’s sinfulness is counterpoised by the forgiveness of the Lord: If I did not commit any sins, O Infinite Lord, how would You have acquired the name, `Redeemer of sinners`? How could forgiveness be when there was nothing to forgive?
As to the differences between people: O Ravi Daas, one who understands that the Lord is equally in all, is very rare. Indeed.
Guru Tegh Bhadur preaches detachment through these words: One who knows that pain and pleasure are both the same, and honor and dishonor as well, who remains detached from joy and sorrow, realizes the true essence in the world.
Adi Granth which so mellifluously combines the spirit of both Hinduism and Islam and has so magnanimously accommodated the hymns of the saints of both traditions has proved in the three hundred years of its existence that religion is not a narrow sectarian force which binds people to morbid chains but a faith that acts as a bridge between the individual soul and the divine being.
