11.29.2020
Dear Reader,
Gur Fateh and welcome! You made it to the pages of The Vital Anjan. Regardless of whether you arrived here by conscious design or through one of an inscrutable series of clicks and swipes on the interwebs that increasingly seems to characterize the human condition, you are owed a few words of explanation. These glowing characters neatly reproduced on your screen of choice herald the launch of The Vital Anjan – A Digital Journal of GurSikh Ideas, Culture, & Affairs. As the founding editor-in-chief of The Vital Anjan, more precisely, I owe you a few words of explanation.
In November 2017, your correspondent offered some remarks in Los Angeles on the occasion of Guru Gobind Singh’s 350th birthday anniversary:
A mystic, statesman, poet, warrior, singer, son, and father par excellence, Guru Gobind Singh bequeathed a swaggeringly staggering patrimony to the Panth. In the domains of spirituality and statecraft, literature and warfare, aesthetics and ethics, he ensured not only self-sufficiency for his Sikhs, but also that his court’s overflowing bounty would provide for the liberation of all humanity. The uncomfortable question we, his heirs in outward form and innermost aspirations must ask ourselves is how completely we collectively realize his outward form and innermost aspirations. If our innermost aspirations truly are his innermost aspirations, to what degree do our outward accomplishments in the domains of spirituality, statecraft, literature, warfare, aesthetics, and ethics do justice to the swaggeringly staggering civilization he bequeathed to us? And where we fall short of Guru Gobind Singh’s art of living and dying well, what exactly is the overflowing bounty and unique fragrance of the Guru’s court that our failure in self-sufficiency denies humanity?
As we close out the remaining hours of the year marking Guru Nanak’s 550th birth anniversary in November 2020, these questions strike me as all the more urgent. It is after all customary to celebrate multiples of five with special pomp, with still greater pomp reserved for multiples of fifty or one hundred. 2019 is five-and-a-half centuries since the advent of the GurSikh tradition’s originator in 1469. Q.E.D., Guru Nanak’s 550th birthday merits the works. Yet from what I witnessed of the global commemorations—whether by governments, institutions, or local communities—for all their human vibrancy, they struck me with one notable exception as tragically devoid of the “unique fragrance” inseparable from Guru Nanak and his court. Regrettably, this impression—if one can have an impression of an absence of a fragrance—coheres with my overall view of contemporary GurSikh affairs.
It is not so much that we are generally flourishing and somehow botched this year’s festivities as that our celebrations accurately showcased the spiritual aridity of our common life. The ambivalence of our individual and collective valuations, explanatory concepts, and remedies seem a world away from the uncompromising witness of Gurū Nanak. Were Gurū Nanak to walk among us, would we share Mehta Kalu’s incomprehension? Would Bābā Nanak certify we are single-mindedly present in our worship and beyond all suspicion of vain idolatry? And were he to squeeze the fruits of our labor, would he find blood or milk? For all our familiarity with Bābā Nanak’s life chronicled in the hagiographical janamsākhīs, imagine choosing in every moment as he would choose and then consider whether or not his life’s example retains the radical capacity to astonish and to transform.
The upshot is two related propositions are undeniably evident to me. First, there is a crisis in GurSikh affairs. This is not to discount the greater physical safety from coordinated attempts at extermination most Sikhs today enjoy relative to our persecuted ancestors in the annals of GurSikh history. Nor do I mean to detract from the fantastic success individual Sikhs have achieved in different walks of life across the world, often drawing inspiration from their Sikh identity. What I do contend is that a treacherous chasm amounting to a civilizational rupture separates too much of contemporary Sikh experience from the distinctively GurSikh lifeworld of Gurū Nanak’s endowment.
Second, there exist glimmers of a movement to revitalize GurSikh affairs. The noteworthy exception to the generally lackluster festivities I alluded to earlier are the contributions of a singular factor, a harbinger of a veritable renaissance in GurSikh affairs. At age fourteen, I came under the tutelage of thirteenth-generation polymath Gurbāṇī Saṅgīt exponent and revivalist Bhai Baldeep Singh. He initiated me into a parallel stream of oral learning virtually unknown to contemporary GurSikh and South Asian praxis—one unvitiated by Mughal imperialist, British colonialist, Indian nationalist, Sikh revisionist, or global consumerist forces—originating in the revelatory song of Gurū Nanak and passed on generation-by-generation through the GurKhalsā to the present. Embodying the oral histories and intangible harvests of twenty-seven grand maestros—both renowned and neglected since the Partition of 1947—Bhāī Baldeep Singh assimilated their knowledge into a panoramic vantage and performative bravura unmatched in our era.
Among the neglected doyens of intangible GurSikh heritage Bhāī Baldeep Singh identified and learned from was master luthier Giānī Harbhajan Singh Mistri (1920-2005). Under his instruction, Bhaī Baldeep Singh handcrafted the all-but-extinct string instruments prevalent in kīrtan of the Gurūs’ times, including the rabāb, saraṅdā, and tāus. The extraordinary Ustād Bhāī Arjan Singh Tarangar (1900-1995) was a treasury of exegetical insights and numbers among the most spectacular percussionists of the twentieth century. Renowned at Amritsar’s Darbār Sāhib and in the royal courts of the subcontinent, Ustād Bhāī Arjan Singh was an exponent of South Asia’s oldest living school of classical percussion. The Amritsarī-Bāj of joṛī and pakhāwaj flourished through the centuries since the time of Gurū Nanak and was safeguarded in the darbār of Mahārājā Ranjit Singh. Yet absent Bhāī Baldeep Singh’s intensive study with a maestro nearly seven decades his senior, this phenomenal silsilā of Punjab’s classical percussion would be no more. The legendary kīrtaniā and freedom-fighter Bābā Jawala Singh (1872-1952) was descended from Bhāī Sadharan, a direct disciple of Gurū Nanak tasked with overseeing his Dharamsāl at Kartarpur. His illustrious sons, Bhāī Gurcharan Singh (1915-2017) and Bhāī Avtar Singh (1925-2006), were Bhāī Baldeep Singh’s grand-uncles. They imparted to Bhāī Baldeep Singh original śabadrītas of Gurú Nanak and his fellow recipients of Gurbāṇī. Let this remarkable fact receive here—even if not yet in the Panth’s allocation of mana, tana, and dhana—the treatment its momentousness commands.
Imagine how impoverished our condition would be if it came to pass that we possessed the Gurū’s words only in translation, say in Tamil. Of course we could still profit from the Gurū’s instruction in this mediated form, but possessing only a translation—no matter how mellifluous—we could not ascertain the degree to which the ideas expressible in Tamil succeeded in conveying the Gurū’s intended meaning. Anyone who doubts that musical genres—no less than languages—reflect and construct profoundly disparate modes of being need only consider the differences between bhaṅgṛā and Bach. Where languages can establish at least a modicum of commensurability through common referents, the saying and said are far less separable in music on account of its largely non-representational nature. Especially since each śabad was revealed in a particular musical form, every act of musical translation necessarily reduces the fidelity of a constituent element of its being. It likely also distorts—or at least adds noise to—the transmission of the semantic content to the extent this is even conceptually distinguishable from its musical expression in the Gurū’s mukhvāk.
Bābā Nanak himself sang. When visited with Bāṇī, he instructed Bhāī Mardana to grasp the rabāb and follow his inspired utterance. The śabadrītas are melodic marvels, whose melding of rāgā, tāla, and vākalaṅkāras are as inextricable from and as much revelation as the holy word of the śabad they carry and whose state of chitt or consciousness they summon us to become. It is difficult to overstate the spiritual, theological, musicological, aesthetic, interpretive, and phenomenological richness of the śabadrītas. As niraṅkārī expressions of the ineffable, their wondrous origin and destination are different in kind from darbārī and bazārī songs. Original śabadrītas of the first, third, fourth, fifth, ninth, and tenth Gurūs still exist. The Gurbāṇī Saṅgīt Paramparā’s memory even includes originals of Sheikh Farid and Bhagat Kabir.
Misleadingly, prominent institutions—including a university in Punjab training aspirants to Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee employment and a sleek, entrepreneurial venture in the European yoga scene—promote modern amalgamations as the authentic music of the Gurūs under the banner of “Gurmat Sangeet.” Such appropriations substitute a modern, fundamentalist orthopraxy for the sovereign memory of the emic tradition originating with Gurū Nanak, insisting each śabad may be sung only in the rāga “prescribed” in Srī Gurū Granth Sāhib. Employing newly concocted rāga forms and a musical system derived from a nationalist process of standardizing khayāl as practiced in royal darbārs, the musical idiom, instrumentation, sensibility, and pedagogy of the neo-classicizing “Gurmat Sangeet” bears no meaningful continuity with the historical Gurbāṇī Saṅgīt of the Gurūs.
Through the śabadrītas, the transcendent is made perceptibly immanent. Singing them, we regulate our breath and form words as the Gurūs did upon receiving Bāṅī. Hearing them, our consciousness is granted a darśan of the eternally fresh revelation. Savoring their rasa, our minds are renewed and emancipated from the lure of lesser rasas. The exacting pedagogical process whereby the aspiring kīrtaniā learns to render a śabadrīta is an exacting mirror in which the limitless appears as the self’s limitations subside. Without the śabadrītas, Gurū Nanak’s mystical path of spiritual perfection can seem hopelessly elusive, thus giving rise to reductionist exhortations patently incapable of producing the exalted beings described in Bāṇī. In the ensuing disillusionment, materialism, scientism, identitarianism, and “social justice” ideology all-too-often subtly displace the what, how, and why of the Gurū’s distinctive path of existence.
It is now possible and necessary to explain this journal’s name. Borrowed from the revelatory song of Gurū Nanak and other authors of Gurbāṇī, the “Anjan” in The Vital Anjan is an Indic word for a salve applied to the eyes. Mystics of early modern South Asia employed it as a metaphor for the healing wisdom that enables one to perceive reality. While the crisis in GurSikh affairs is all the more pernicious for its being insufficiently recognized and perplexingly raveled in the axiological distempers of a precarious world, The Vital Anjan rejects fatalism since the healing wisdom of the Gurūs is perennial. Rather inconveniently, our understanding of the very anjan capable of remedying all malaises is partially obscured by the pathologies our ignorance of it abets. To recover our understanding of this anjan is to revitalize GurSikh discourse, praxis, and affairs, yet to recover this anjan, we must confront the multi-faceted crisis of the West.
Classical liberalism’s irenic ceasefire, ending centuries of armed theological disputation, helped usher in an era of scientific research, technological progress, and economic development. Since the Allied victory in World War II—and especially since the dissolution of the Soviet Union—the political economy and culture of the United States has profoundly shaped the way people in countries with notable Sikh populations live. Yet the experience of two world wars chastened the West’s belief in unstoppable progress, while malign heirs of the historical consciousness from which the nineteenth century proclaimed the ‘death of God’ haunt elite and mass culture.
For our GurSikhī to guide and renew us in all facets of our being, we cannot neglect its relation to our intellectual life. Many of the dominant currents in academia—positivism, historicism, relativism, post-modernism, and Marxism—are hostile to claims of transcendence. Yet Gurū Nanak binds our destiny to the “ādi sachu jugādi sachu || hae bhī sachu nānak hōsī bhī sachu ||.” It would seem we are called to stand athwart those bien-pensant modes of thought and action that scoff at the notion of eternal or “self-evident” truths. As disease is most visible against a backdrop of health, comprehending the American crisis demands engagement with the accomplishments of the American tradition—and Western civilization more generally—at their best.
Studying the persecution my Sikh ancestors endured heightened my reverence for the religious liberty secured by my American forebears under the Constitution’s system of limited self-government. For more than a century’s existence in the United States, what is the quality of GurSikh engagement with the American tradition? What have we managed to communicate to our fellow Americans? A prominent PR-campaign with a 2017 budget of 1.3 million USD (nearly 1 billion INR) and an ex-Hillary Clinton campaign strategist on its payroll delivered the revelation “We like Game of Thrones” to untold Americans television viewers. In other words, they unironically ripped-off Hassan Minhaj’s “Sikhs: They’re Just Like Us” campaign from The Daily Show. But where the comedy segment effectively displayed the Sikh American community’s refusal to respond to anti-Muslim attacks with the true yet inadequate objection ‘we’re not Muslims’ as exemplifying shared Sikh and American values, the ads baldly asserted “Sikh values are American values.” If Sikh values simply are American values, what impels Sikhs to maintain a distinctive identity? Without positing anything approaching a one-to-one correspondence, there do exist significant and even mutually-illuminating commonalities in the credal aspirations of the GurSikh and American traditions that this journal will explore.
The Framers of the American Republic stressed the necessity of a virtuous citizenry for the sustenance of free institutions, yet the state of our institutions is no credit to our virtue. The promise and danger of free elections and free markets is that they give us what we prioritize; the more wisely we choose, the more our public life will flourish. The geopolitical ramifications of China’s rise make it domestically evident in political polarization and diminishing social capital that the neoliberal ‘end of history’ may well be ending. We are hurtling towards an arms race in building artificial intelligence, social networks, and virtual realities better able to predict, modify, and substitute for human action. States and corporations are essentially programming more mayā into the mayā of the world as a recrudescence in radical ideological conflict strains liberalism’s ceasefire. In short, American affairs are fraught, and should this project help recover the vital anjan of Gurū Nanak, it would help rekindle what Lincoln called the “last best hope of earth.”
The Vital Anjan then aspires to broker civilizational encounters—udāsīs, if you will—surmounting the vibrant contingencies of time, space, language, and culture. History is different for Virgil’s learning Homer, Augustine’s reading of the Neo-Platonists and Stoics, not to forget Aquinas’s study of Aristotle, ‘the Philosopher.’ Is it not immeasurably richer because Petrarch discovered Cicero, because Madison read Montesquieu, because Lincoln remembered Shakespeare, because Nietzsche knew Emerson? The value of Gurū Nanak’s encounter with Sheikh Farid and Bhagat Kabir is inestimable. What revolutions of the human spirit lie dormant in civilizational syntheses whose time is ripe? The West has yet to encounter the revelatory witness of Bābā Nanak, and such dialectical engagement will do wonders to restore the fantastic sweep of the GurSikh imaginary.
To this end, The Vital Anjan will publish original work (long form essays, social commentary, narrative non-fiction, investigative reports, interviews, translations, short stories, and poems) as well as criticism (book, film, visual art, music, podcast, and exhibition reviews.) Inspired by Gurū Nanak’s udāsīs, this journal encourages comparative engagement with other traditions, and following the editorial precedent of Gurū Arjan Dev and Gurū Gobind Singh, welcomes voices beyond the GurSikh tradition where they further our shared quest for truth. Submissions in doctrinal elucidation, historiographical analysis, and methodological reflection on civilizational renewal are particularly welcome.
It is either the case that there is not—or is—a crisis in GurSikh affairs. In the case there is not, a strategic project aiming to advance a GurSikh renaissance is unnecessary. But in the case others exist who believe GurSikh affairs have looked pretty bleak since the fall of the Sikh Empire in 1849, I hope the pages of The Vital Anjan will crackle with lively inquiry and debate among such true seekers committed to building a brighter GurSikh future.
Onwards,
Editor-in-Chief