To my wife, who keeps me all I am,
To my parents, who made me all I am, and
To the One above all, who made, has made,
makes, and will make everything All it is
Hardev Singh, painting. 1950s. Courtesy of the family’s private archive.
*In various introductions, Hardev Singh would often write: ‘I was born in Punjab, and went to Art College in Delhi. Since then, I have been wandering around the globe, picking up pebbles and driftwood…’
It is now more than two years since my father, Hardev Singh, passed away in August 2019. I did not return to Toronto for the session my mother and brother arranged in memoriam, nor for the dispersal of his ashes into a fresh and flowing body of water as per his will. The last time I spoke with him in person was in late 2018, in the freezing, snowy cold of the Canadian winter. It was at this time my father instructed me not to come to his funeral. I never asked him why, just tried to digest, as was my usual process when I was not in the mood for an argument or contradicting him.
Since about 2007, having heard many of his anecdotes and observations about all the people whom he had had the privilege of sharing time with, and all his youthful exploits and adventures, I had been steadily attempting to convince him to write an autobiography. He told me once that he had at some point taken down some notes, and maybe if he felt like it he would, but that it was important for him that it not be just a list of facts about his life. No, he had wanted to somehow set down all the experiences that had made him who he was, the moments that had impacted him the most. The notes are lost, if they ever were—perhaps not so much because they have been destroyed or discarded, but more because my father’s handwriting was only legible to himself. And then, only within the span of a few days; after that time, even he had difficulty in unraveling what he had written. Ever since he died, I have been throwing around the idea of attempting my own execution of his idea, to try to fulfill this one wish he shared with me all those years ago, when I was still an optimistic teenager. And then, when someone I was immediately impressed with upon meeting—the founder of this journal, Nihal Singh—started The Vital Anjan, I somehow felt that it could be the appropriate venue for my homage.
“Born in Punjab, Hardev has lived most of his adult life abroad. After graduating from Delhi College of Art, he worked for the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi for three years 1956-1959. He won a scholarship for higher studies in Italy, where he worked on conservation of Etruscan frescoes in Tarquinia and Cerveteri during 1959-1961. Back in India, he worked at Chandigarh with the Institute of Design, Punjab Government Museum and Art Gallery and Art School 1962-1965. He went to Poland on another fellowship 1966-1968. Lived and worked in Canada since 1968.1 During this period, he worked for Art Galleries, Musea, taught at College and University levels and did consulting work for art and culture institutions. Has had over 60 one man exhibitions in India, Europe and North America. He has numerous publications2 to his credit and has made short art-films.”
Some digressions into notable personages I was lucky enough to meet because of my father and also pieces of their stories that contribute to this purpose will also make an appearance. Further, it is important to understand the perspective from which all this is being written. There are three things, then, to say about the writing before delving into it, that it be not taken as exaggerated misrepresentation. Firstly, the wide-eyed admiration that all young boys have for their fathers, whom they see as literal superheroes, able to move mountains, is a sentiment that has somehow stayed with me, even now, when I am no longer so little. I still feel the joy I felt hearing him speak about some odd thing that happened to him in France in the 50s, the trepidation when being told of the time the axle of his car snapped in half somewhere in the Balkans, and the fright when, having transgressed knowingly or through ignorance, I was sternly scolded. My father—despite his various shortcomings—remains a hero to me. So, if some of the memories I relate are tinged with colour because of this, it is only because it is impossible for it to be another way. Secondly, I have not fact-checked anything written here; it is all transcribed as faithfully as my memory allows. And finally, perhaps as a justification of the last, the items related are probably not those that my father would have chosen, had he had enough time to pen what I had been pestering him about; they are instead moments that have impacted me the most by shedding light on some aspect of him or the world, some small dab of the honey that he would sometimes be in a mood to share with those around. To begin with, then, a tracing of his exploits and adventures, next, a discussion of what I knew him as, of how he was to me, and finally, what I think it all means.
Childhood
A drawing of two birds, Hardev Singh. Courtesy of the family’s private archive.
Hardev Singh was born in the village of Pharala. When I asked where that was, he told me it lay between Phagwara and Banga. I did not know either my grandfather’s nor grandmother’s name until the informative paragraph that my mother wrote for the celebration of his life after his death. I never met either of them. My grandfather died in 1977 and my grandmother in the early nineties. There are four facts that I do know about the men on my family’s side; one—they go deaf, two—they live long, three—they intuitively know when they will die, and four—women in their lives die. I remember listening with fascination as my father told me about his grandfather, who lived until he was 103. He used to stand on his head every morning for ten minutes and then go fetch milk for my great-grandmother, who would set about processing it into all the daily needed sustenance: lassī, ghī, yogurt. On the last day of his life, back on his feet again in the morning, he went to his wife and told her that he wouldn’t be going to get milk today, as he was not feeling very well. She knew what this meant, as this was the first time he had said something of the sort, and so the whole village was called to witness his passing later that day. After he was cremated, there were two bones found, which my father said was normal to find after men’s cremations: the jawbone and the sternum (whereas for women, a piece of hip bone would not burn entirely). The jaw remained in its entirety, and they counted all thirty-two teeth on it. Not adult teeth, mind you; these had been lost sometime earlier. This post-mortem set seemed to be like milk-teeth, smaller and softer than the normal ones. My grandfather, on his deathbed, asked for my father, as he was the eldest son. When told by my uncle that he was still on his way, he said that it was too bad, and told my uncle how his pulse was receding—weaker and weaker—from his wrist to his elbow, to his shoulder, to his neck, until he passed.
Though in my mind it is decided, my father’s birth date is uncertain. His original birth certificate says he was born in June 1935. His later documents say April 1934, but he once told me that when making a family tree with some unnamed cousins in the 70s, when they counted how much older he was than several others in the family, according to how everyone remembered, it came out that he was actually born in April 1932. In my mind, the last date is the one that I hold to be true, though I’m not sure exactly why. I used to ask my father many things about his childhood, which at once seemed so far away from mine, but so close at the same time. He was the firstborn son. After him came five sisters and a baby brother. My mother and some other members of my father’s family, however, have knowledge of only three sisters; what happened to the other two is one of those questions I wished I had asked when there was still time. Mind you, the seven children that my grandmother is said to have born were as my grandfather’s fourth wife. The first three had died in childbirth, and the infant had also died or been stillborn.
“Baisakh” from Baramaha Tukhari: Homage to the Great Verse of Guru Nanak, Hardev Singh. Courtesy of the family’s private archive.
There was a mahaṅt in his village when my father was little, who was still alive when I was able to visit Pharala for the first time in 2005. At that time, he only spoke by quoting the Gurū Granth Sahib; one would greet him, and he would answer in one sabad or another. He was known as Bhajan Das, though his name was Harbhajan. He used to walk to Tibet once a year—the round trip would take him a month—where he would procure medicinal herbs with which he would treat all sorts of ailments of the people from all the surrounding villages for the rest of the year. Once, my father came to the conclusion that he wanted to become invisible, and when he asked my grandfather how to do so, he referred him to Bhajan Das. The little boy went to Bhajan Das and told him of his intentions. The answer he received was a list of things he had to collect: a very long list, which would then have to be mixed in the appropriate order and so forth. Though the entire list was not remembered by my father, there were impossible-to-get things, and the later in the list, the more impossible. One entry was to get a cloth stained with the first menses of a girl, another eggs of birds which only nested in the sides of sheer cliffs. Little Hardev’s enthusiasm was quickly lost after finding and gathering a few of the easier items, as he decided that perhaps it was not all that important, this being invisible.
The farming that my grandfather was involved in did not seem to have occupied my tatínek3 very much. I only remember one instance when he explained to me that the fields were irrigated by shallow canals that had been dug, and to water them, he would open a canal and take a walk around a route that he had learnt from experience took him long enough for the section of the field to be correctly inundated. Schooling seemed to be rather amusing; he fondly remembered the morning roll call and nail inspections. At the time, of course, corporal punishment in the classroom was widespread, and there is a fabulously colourful story from which we can garner much about him at that time and also what he was like later on. He was never rapped on the hand—as some children were regularly—because he was always a good and polite pupil. One day, however, there was a substitute, in fact, a rather prestigious one: the principal himself. The class, as with all substitutes, was being loud and naughty, and so the infuriated headmaster made all the children present their hands on their desks to be hit. Hardev was not expecting to be hit, but smugly followed the despot’s command. When he was hit, he was so shocked and pained that he jumped from his seat and grabbed the weapon out of the teacher’s hand, waving it threateningly above his head. Too shy, of course, to land a strike, he threw it down, jumped out the window, and ran all the way home, crying.
Within a day or two, the household was informed of the insubordination, and with the pleading of my grandfather taken into account, the principal agreed to let the frightened boy stay at the school, if he apologized in front of all the students. So an assembly was called the next morning where the abused pupil was to come up and publicly make known that he was ashamed of his actions. The parents, of course, were also expected to be present, to make it all the more official. The pressure, however, proved too much to bear, and although he made it to the front of the assembly, he could not utter an apology for a wrong that he felt had been dealt him, yelled that he wouldn’t apologize, jumped out the window, and ran all the way home, crying. Needless to say, he had to change schools.
The Pharala morning yoga routine—a simplified version of the sun salutation—he remembered until the very end and taught to me. I call it village yoga. There were also beautiful practices that he remembered from his childhood, such as the method whereby he was taught to remain aware of the cardinal directions at all times: when facing the rising sun, the east is at your front, west at your back, north to the left, and south to the right. There is also an episode that he fondly recalled of his introduction to alcohol. Across the narrow street from his house, the family had a small room in the corner, where my grandfather would gather with friends and drink whatever the village had distilled and had in stock at that time. When he was thirteen and starting to wonder about what his father was up to during these evenings, he was called over. My grandfather poured him an entire cup of the alcohol and told him to drink the entire thing in one gulp. Wanting to show off in front of the uncles, he attempted to do so, and was of course completely unable to down more than a sip of the high-proof concoction. He threw the cup away and loudly exclaimed that he would never touch the stuff again. My father always reminisced about how wise his father had been to do this; he had been thinking about stealing some earlier, and this experience thoroughly put him off the idea of drink until he was over thirty. He would also fondly recall the times that at weddings he and some of his naughtier friends would uproot some cannabis plants and mix them into the sāg platters when no one was paying attention and then look on with poorly concealed mirth at how the dancing and whooping would get merrier as the night went on.
Asa, Hardev Singh. Incidentally, this is what village yoga might have looked like. Courtesy of The Anād Foundation and Bhāī Baldeep Singh.
When I first read about Partition in my early teens, I almost immediately asked my father if he remembered something. He would never say much, just that it was a shame, because he had to stop learning music. He had been learning the tablā from a rabābī who had had to leave along with his other Muslim neighbours. He was a great admirer of Indo-Islamic culture, particularly of Mughal miniatures and poetry. He sat down with me one time, just when a friend of his (‘Rai’ we would call this uncle) had on his request delivered a tablā set to our home. He wanted to interest me in the tablā, an idea I staunchly resisted. But I remember this one lesson clearly and vividly: because we only had one pair of tablā, I sat opposite him, that is, my left hand was where his right hand was. First, he demonstrated Tiṅ Tāla and asked me to repeat, breaking it down into sections. After I had assimilated this and was able to repeat the strokes rather fluently, if a little lopsidedly, I asked him to show me what else he knew. He waved me off and played some bhaṅgṛā patterns with the bass strokes falling marvellously after the beat. It was the first time I heard the characteristic beat of bhaṇgṛā, and I have remembered it to the present very precisely. I have never heard it played quite the same way by anyone else. Anyhow, this one lesson left me handicapped in that there are two things that I do with my left hand until today: play (or rather, attempt to play) the tablā and play hockey.
But hearing about his losing some friends and a music teacher was not enough for me; I was a teenager in the throes of fantasy-writing, so I wanted to hear about destruction and burning. Did anything happen in his village? He once gave way to my incessant questions and told me that at the worst time, his father was absent, and sometimes they would see smoke in the village from something burning or from the next village. His uncle would come every evening to his home, take out his sword, and standing on the roof of my father’s home, would bellow out all kinds of threats and dissuading arguments so that no vagabond or ruffian set foot near the house. Then, under the cover of darkness, the uncle would slip out again, to return the protection his presence brought with it to his own household.
There are a few other details about the environment at that time that he shared with me and which made such an impression as to stay very current in my memory. One was that he remembered the guards that stood with spears at the entrance gate to the village, though being a sceptic, he believed it was more because it was cooler in the shade of the gate than to protect the village from any potential danger. Another was the sad story of a friend of his, a boy with a large paunch, who one day at school vomited blood and died. Local lore also did not escape the scathing memory of my father: he told me once where the name of his village was said to have come from, that Gurū Har Rai bestowed it on the village during his second visit. The inflected form of ‘Pharala’ becomes ‘pharāleyā,’ which he told me means something like ‘those who do not keep their word’. Before the first visit of Gurū Har Rai, the local residents had adopted the habit of smoking hookah, and the Gurū asked that they stop, to which they readily agreed. But when he came back a second time and saw that the residents had not, in fact, done what they said they would, he denounced their false words. This time, shame and conscience did not allow them to keep up their unfortunate habit, and from that time, the village was smoke-free. There is a small bethel in the village with original frescoes, which at the time of my visit in 2005 were unfortunately not very well taken care of (there was even a hornet’s nest on the domed ceiling.) My father had another uncle (not the one who had shouted from the rooftops) who had served in World War I, deployed somewhere in Europe. Whenever a plane passed over the village, about once a year, no matter what he was doing, this uncle would throw everything in his hands, and jump into the nearest ditch. A while after the plane had passed, my grandfather or someone else close to him would go to the ditch and fetch the uncle, who would come back and rather shakily state that they were searching for him. My grandmother had a habit of hiding the child Hardev in great earthen pots whenever strangers came to town, to keep away the ‘evil eye,’ and she never let little Hardev eat three chappātīs, always adding a small morsel to make sure it was not exactly three. Further on matters of diet, dāl, rōṭī, cooked vegetables, and yogurt were eaten three times a day. Once a year, some fish would be brought, and once a year, some bird was killed in the village and eaten. Food was strikingly important to my father; something he would often hammer into my and my brother’s heads, exclaiming loudly, was that food is sacred.
One particular event that he related to me that seems to be particularly telling of his sceptical bent took place in the Himalayas. He had been staying with a sadhū who was reputed to have access to special ash that could heal any disease at all. This sadhū sat all day long, next to a fire and burnt wood. People would come and at great length and in much detail recount whatever ailment they purported to have. He would listen and then give them a bit of ash, each person getting different instructions as to what to do with it: mix a little with water in the morning, but drink it only after lunch, put a little into your nose before leaving your home in the morning, rub it topically on your chest before sleep, or some other such recipe. The day he was to leave, he asked the sadhū respectfully whether there was something special about the ash: was it magical? The holy man smiled, shook his head and said that most people who came to him were not actually ill, but had convinced themselves that they were, and that his ash would promptly give them a reason to believe they would get better. Furthermore, these cured people would go around telling everyone about the sadhū with the powerful ash in the mountains, and he had a reliable stream of sustenance because of this marketing. On the other hand, those who came and were actually sick obviously would not get better, but wouldn’t dare tell their neighbours that they had believed a silly old man who lived in the mountains and gave them a handful of burnt wood and a strange recipe would cure them. And so, his reputation stayed safe.
In the summers, his family sometimes chanced to be up in the mountains. My father would jump off those slow, winding, British trains and catch them again at the next turn: that’s how slow they were. Also, at night, it was not stars they counted, but the darkness in between the stars, as that was how numerous they were.
The Student Years
As a result of the lack of documentary evidence about my father and his various accomplishments, all the information I have about them comes directly from him. Fortunately, I had the good conscience and curiosity to inquire about how it was that he became important, and it all started with his student years. He did not mention people too much, nor really what he did or studied, just general precepts of what he (I believe) thought should make up the indispensable savoir vivre for every student. So, for example, he told me that in those times, he read literally everything that came into his hand, from books which he sometimes ‘borrowed’ from friends (and then spent a lot of time finding ways to return to them without disclosing that he had, in fact, taken them) to scraps of newspaper he would find wandering the streets of Delhi. This was in the roaring fifties, a time which must have been full of that unbounded optimism that exists in countries immediately after their regaining independence. He did, after all, learn seven languages by my count, including four separate alphabets: they were (in rough chronological order) Punjabi, English, Hindi, Urdu, Italian, French, Polish written in Gurmukhi, Latin, Devanagari, and Shahmukhi, while also having an understanding of Sanskrit, having read some of the ancient epics in the original.
“How did you get so good at drawing,” I asked once when I came to understand just how fine his drawings were. We had hundreds lying around at home, and he could create them in a few short minutes freehand, using practically anything. It was during his time at the Art College in Delhi that he would wake up at five in the morning everyday and imposed the discipline upon himself of filling one hundred sheets of paper with respectable drawings before he allowed himself to have breakfast. He would draw anything; if the weather permitted, whatever he found on the street, or tree-roots, or a piece of rubbish, or a bench that had a dramatic shadow coming off it in the light at dawn. Or when he had to stay in—if the rain was too heavy, fearing it might damage the paper or ink—he would crumple a piece of paper and marvel at the way parts of it would be inundated in darkness, while other folds would be geometrically perfect. It was also at this time that he learned how to tie a turban without the piece of cloth that is normally tucked in the back. He had a colleague, whose name I never learnt, who did not need to finish the turban with this piece of cloth, and my father liked the idea of having an easier time tying it in the morning, so he asked the colleague to teach him, and from that time always wore it that way.
Drawing of two women, Hardev Singh. Courtesy of the family’s private archive.
A competition came, a rather important one: it was announced by the government of India that they were looking for a poster that would stop India’s farmers from burning forests in order to enlarge their farms. My father’s entry was a minimalist charcoal drawing of a burnt tree with writing above reading ‘100 years to grow,’ and below, ‘1 hour to burn’ (or something of the sort; here, I must admit, I cannot recall the precise number of years, though I am sure about the hour.) This entry won the competition, and as a result, he began to receive commissions and requests for exhibitions in all kinds of media. A noteworthy production, which I have not been able to track down and would very much like to, was a public fountain somewhere in the Punjab, which he would often lament was now in serious disregard and disrepair.
On a side note, my father claimed that he remembered absolutely everything until his thirtieth birthday: literally everything—how some man’s facial wrinkles looked at a remote bus stop in the Himalayas, or exactly what colour a particular sun’s light illuminated something in the early morning. Consequently, pangs of conscience from those times also had stayed with him. He explained to me on one occasion how he used to smoke cigarettes for a short time, and perhaps more importantly, how he quit. He was walking at night somewhere in Connaught Place, when suddenly, he had a craving for a smoke and so went straight to a stall he knew would be open at the time. Upon arriving, the clerk apologized and asked for one minute; he had just sold somebody cigarettes and wanted to wash his hands before serving the sardar. Becoming completely ashamed, and vowing never to smoke again, my father bought a trinket of some sort, and dallied away, head hung low. He also recounted to me how, having lost his money somehow (he suspected he had been pick-pocketed on the train) he asked his father to send him one hundred rupees, rather than the ten he actually needed; he shook his head as he recalled this and said that at that time, it was a lot of money. And finally, his first experience smoking marijuana, which took place in Shimla with a group of friends. They passed around a joint, and he tried it, not wanting to stand out. As he was walking back to his accommodations, time seemed to have slowed. For anyone that has been in Shimla, it is important to keep in mind that this had taken place on the very highest level, that is, the one that is basically one long street. Walking, one may practically see the other end of the city, and from this other end, a man was walking in the opposite direction, a stranger. My father was certain that they would collide, and not pass each other, as the width of the street amply allowed for. In fact, after they had passed, he was certain that they would collide. Even after he reached his accommodation, he was sure that the collision was still unavoidable. He wrote down the experience, and went to sleep, even then certain they would run into each other.
Immediately after college, in the mid-50s, my father was somehow connected with the then newly-founded National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), though I am uncertain as to his official capacity. The priority in those times was to create a collection, as there was nothing of the sort in the country. So, he was involved in the drafting of a letter to be sent all around the world to other museums of modern art, asking for any superfluous works they may have that could be housed in this new institution. It worked, and in a matter of months, works from all over the world began flowing into the ports of India.
Then, in 1955, the Italian embassy announced an open fellowship that was to allow young people interested in learning about preserving frescoes a chance to go to Italy for three months and work with conservators restoring Etruscan finds. Hardev, having somehow become alienated from the NGMA one way or another (a pattern that was to repeat itself quite often in his life; he was too stubborn to work with anyone for too long) found a friend who knew some Italian and thus greedily learnt some names of cities that he very much wanted to see in person: Firenze, Napoli, Roma, Venezia. He was quite the showman, and knew that the diplomats might look kindly upon his knowledge, however limited, of their mother tongue. Lo and behold, it worked, and he was granted the three month fellowship. He stayed for three years.
He started from Bombay on a ship. The trip took two weeks, and it was his first time outside of India. Everyone on the ship except him was seasick. Before he left, his mother made the journey with him to see him off at the port. At that time, she implored him in a way that he always remembered, and more importantly, followed. Of all the things a mother would say to a beloved son at the moment of his departure to unknown lands, far away from her protective embraces, it seems particularly poignant and illustrative of what was important to her. She said to him that she had heard of the various habits that Sikhs adopted in the Western countries, that she did now know what to make of it all, but that she had irrigated his scalp, his hair, with love and milk, and thus she asked him very sincerely never to cut it. And he never did.
He lived, at least at the beginning, in Rome, on the piazza that has a statue of Moses. He never mentioned to me anything about his work as a conservationist, though I assume (and hope) that he was studious and diligent enough to complete what was required of him. It was also here that he first started to miss the food he would so regularly gorge on back home. So, as a solution, he invited himself over to the house of the ambassador at that time, who was also a Sikh, and asked his wife if he could watch as she made rōṭī. And it was from this lady that he learnt to make the square rōṭī that he would make for me when I was growing up: in effect, they were probably something closer to parāṭhās. More interestingly, he told me about how he traveled through the entire peninsula only by train, sleeping on it and getting off at whatever stop he thought fit. He would then take a round of the city, town, or village he had gotten off at, being sure to enter every church, tower, palace, fortification, or castle that he could, before reboarding the next train he could catch. Once every three days, he would find a hotel of some kind where he would wash. On other days, he would content himself by using the aqueduct-powered fountains nearly omnipresent to wash his face and hands. He fondly recalled the first time he visited Pisa. At the time, the tower was still open to be climbed by anyone (now no longer possible because of suicides). He went up, and feeling exhilarated by the view offered (and probably, a little off-key due to the fear of heights that I know he had) proceeded in wailing that ever-heartening war-cry, ‘Bōle sō Nihāl, Sat Srī Akāl.’ His favourite city—I have yet to visit—was Naples.
In 1958, for a reason remaining unknown to me, he decided to drive back to India. He had bought a Citroën; (it would have to be either a 2CV, DS, or ID—my bet is on the 2CV) and proceeded to drive eastwards, starting from Rome. Somewhere in the Balkans—at so remote a place that he was even unsure of what country it was, though the language at the time was completely foreign to him, so it couldn’t have been Romania, and where the terrain was hilly and mountainous—the axle of his Citroën broke into two nearly equal pieces during an ascent. He waited for some hours next to his incapacitated car until a horse drawn carriage came into view. He successfully hailed the driver, who by all appearances was quite drunk, and showed him what had become of the axle. The driver, grabbing his head in disbelief after seeing the damage, signaled to him to take a seat in his carriage. The car was fastened to the carriage, and the horses, unused to the added weight, began their journey with a heavier step than that by which they had arrived. The driver went to his village, where there was a man who could fix the car. After seeing what had happened, he agreed to repair it. Hardev stayed in the mechanic’s home for three days, as he slowly welded the axle together. When the car was repaired, he again started the drive, and the car did not malfunction for another twenty years.
Poland
It was not until 1966 that my father got to visit what he later called his second home. Again, it was through a fellowship that he was able to do so: this time, to study Polish folk art. The allotted time was again three months, and as previously, it turned into three years. Perhaps because of my ‘return,’ so to speak, to Poland in 2009, it was a period of his life into which he offered me more insights than into others. He was given, as was decreed by the Communist government at the time to all artists, an attic in Warsaw as his studio for the duration of his stay, where one wall was completely made of glass. He had a stipend of 1500 złoty a month, no living expenses, and was invited to all the artistic events of the city as a guest, at least for the time of his fellowship. He related to me three of his very first experiences in this completely new and exotic setting. The first was a concert of a contemporary composer, during which he witnessed what, from that moment, he claimed was missing in India before then and until his death. I don’t know who the composer was, but my imagination invokes the names of Lutosławski or Penderecki, both of whom at that time would have been in vogue and at least tolerated by the government otherwise prone to censorship. He had balcony seats, along with students, one of which he had attached himself to because of the latter’s knowledge of English. A man entered the hall, and the audience clapped. My father asked who it was. The first secretary of the Communist Party, the leader of the country. He did not mention any names to me, but it must have been Władysław Gomułka. After some time, another man entered the hall, and the audience gave him a standing ovation. Now, who was this man that the audience had the audacity to admire more than the leader of the country? Some behind-the-scenes dictator? The leader of a more powerful country? A political opponent perhaps? It was, in fact, the composer of the work to be played that night.
The second experience was how he learnt Polish. It was impossible, according to him, to get to know anything from the adults around him. Whenever he would say one word in Polish, no matter how badly, immediately everybody around him would exclaim in admiration at someone so foreign speaking their beloved language. In this way, whether through mistakes in pronunciation or otherwise, he never knew exactly what he was saying, that is, until he befriended a small boy, the son of a friend he had made. He got into the habit of taking the boy for a walk every day after school and would speak as much as possible with the child, who did not hesitate in castigating my father immediately after he made the mistakes one is bound to make while learning a new language. He would shake his head or laugh quite loudly and exclaim, ‘What a silly mistake to say that. It’s not poszłam; you’re not a girl, are you uncle? It’s poszedłem.’ And it was in this way, primarily, that my father became fluent in Polish. Anyone who is dropped into a country without knowing how to speak, read, or write the language has plenty of stories of how they first managed. Once, he recounted a telephone conversation he had had with the operator: he needed to be connected to a friend whose number he knew, and so he had to read the number out to the operator. In the number, the numeral 3 appeared, which he had not till then learnt how to say in Polish. So he tried English, then Italian. Nothing. So, he picked up a textbook he had been using, to try to read out the number. Not having learnt the alphabet yet, I challenge any reader not familiar with any Slavic language to get a Pole to understand the following spelling t-r-z-y. So that didn’t work either. Wracking his brains, he decided to try to count to the lady, ‘First there is one, then there is two, and then there is…’ and so the lady promptly said three. It is very endearing to imagine my father, who I only remember beginning approximately thirty years after this telephone conversation, trying his best to manage and navigate in such a place, using such techniques. In any case, this was the way that he picked up the bits and pieces of Polish he would need.
The last experience was concerning food. Later, he would learn that the probability of getting anything like home food in Poland in the 60s was even more difficult than in Italy in the 50s, mostly due to the lack of availability in even the most basic ingredients; (even wheat flour was difficult to procure, so he had to use semolina instead to make his square rōṭī-s.) Perhaps serving as a consolation though, lassī was readily available, or maślanka as it is known in Poland. Before all this, he was practically alone in the capital, in his glass-walled studio, and had to feed himself. So, he went to a store, and not knowing how to communicate that he wanted a few slices of ham, he bought the whole leg. After a few days of guiltily trying to eat it before it went bad, he had to leave Warsaw. Of course, he couldn’t leave the leg inside as it would promptly rot. So, waiting for evening, he opened a window, stuck his head out to make sure no one would see (or was standing underneath) and chucked it out.
Soon, the Indian Embassy inquired if my father would be willing to organize the India stand at the International Fair that was due to take place in Poznań. He agreed to the work and was sent to a certain Eugeniusz Gabryelski—a painter working in the city—who put his attic studio at Hardev’s disposal for his stay, also getting some of his students to help out with executing the stall’s design. The building in which the old attic studio was is on the Old Market Square, on the south side, three buildings to the left of the street on that side. Its facade is green, and there is a small, round window from where you can peek out of the attic. And Gieniu, as he was called by those around, became one of the closest friends Hardev had in Poland. This friendship grew when they both attended the famous and influential Polish plein air together in Osieki4 as artists (a plein air to which Sohan Qadri was invited at Hardev’s behest) where my father met Hania, Gieniu’s wife, whose maiden name was Słowik. There were four Słowik sisters. The sisters took a liking to Hardev, and his sometimes excessive calmness, and they spent much time together in Poznań and Koszalin, the home city of the sisters, where the whole family would eventually move. My father often recounted these happy times, when even though people were still in the post-war grips of poverty,—or perhaps because of this—they would spend their time together on excellent activities, like placing glass bottles into the coal burning tile-ovens that were used for heating in those times, and then pull out the melted, seemingly impossible shapes and marvel at the way shadows and light would play off these demented objects. There was also one other small village worth mentioning in connection with the family near Poznań, where they had a sort of summer house with no modern amenities with about two hectares of land and a well that was used for drinking and washing. Another anecdote connected with Poznań that was recounted to me was one particular affair that caused quite a ruckus in the city. A senior diplomat visited Poznań where my father was, and they were to have dinner together in a restaurant on the corner of Szkolna and the Old Market Square. Upon arriving there, they found a man—a Hungarian my father thought—who was quite drunk and smoking a cigarette. He was amazed to see such exotic people and started making all sorts of exclamations as well as asking questions and generally causing a disturbance. None of this was understood by the two Indians, as neither knew Hungarian, but the diplomat was soon quite upset, seeing the brouhaha as an affront, and promptly slapped the drunkard across the face. Needless to say, his demeanour changed from jovial into shocked and hurt, and the restaurant staff quickly came outside and begged the Indians not to call the feared Militia, as they would no doubt cause more trouble than they would solve.
Drawing of a bird and a woman, Hardev Singh. Courtesy of the family’s private archive.
Eventually, the liking which the Slowik sisters bestowed on Hardev grew into something more, and in 1969 he was married with the youngest, Danuta, who then became Danuta Słowik-Singh. They were married in a civil ceremony in the Poznań’s weighhouse, where these ceremonies are still conducted. The fact that the super Catholic Słowik family (and their husbands of course) joined with one not-so-Catholic I find to be a very beautiful testament to the affection that can be shared between people of seemingly distant and irreconcilable cultures.
Canada
Almost immediately after the marriage (this movement across the world on the heels of marriage is a common theme in his life) my father, with the help of his friend George Rackus, convinced the Ontario Arts Council that art galleries were needed outside major urban centers and that he was the man to get these cultural centers going. The happy couple accepted this development with the enthusiasm common to newly-weds in similar situations and so bought a peach farm in Ontario (between Leamington and Wheatley) to settle in once and for all. Danuta started a PhD in English literature and my father did the work expected of a curator, making the acquaintances of all the protagonists in the Canadian art elite, ranging from Bert Weir of Windsor to Michael McAteer to Glenn Gould.
I was fortunate enough to meet Bert Weir, who in his later years lived in Parry Sound, which is about a three hour drive from Toronto. There were train tracks just next to the church where he lived on which my brother and I would put coins, at the behest of Bert, and pick them up after they had been run over and turned into all kinds of interesting flattened shapes, never two the same. But this was a full thirty years after the late 60s where things must have looked quite different. Bert liked to sail and hated cities as he said that he could feel the oil in his lungs when he so much as neared one.
Being a curator, of course Hardev had to visit, from time to time, other galleries, and this is what I imagine brought him to Toronto at one point or another, and there he met Glenn Gould. My father did not speak too much about the past, or his past for that matter, but even so, I was able to extract three experiences that he shared with Gould that have become the points on his timeline of which I am most jealous. He had been to Gould’s famous downtown studio apartment, where all the magic took place. This must have been sometime in the seventies, when Gould had already given up concerts and was focusing only on recording in Toronto’s Eaton Center Auditorium. There was what my father called a ‘social event,’ which I took to mean a party with other artist friends. He remembered that the apartment was exceptionally neat, with piles of scores on top of the closed legendary Steinway model CD 318, Gould’s personal instrument (now in the National Archives in Ottawa). These first two details surprised me greatly when I first heard them as an already ardent admirer of Gould, because of the popular image of Gould as an unsocial recluse with a messy apartment, strewn with half-full bottles of ketchup and packages of Arrowroot cookies—the two foods on which Gould is said to have sustained himself for most of his life. The second and third situations are both so unique that I have trouble deciding which one I am more jealous of. My father had the unfathomable good luck of hearing a live Gould organ performance of the great Toccata and Fugue in D minor at that, presumably at the All Saints’ Kingsway Anglican Church and on the same organ that Gould had recorded a part of the Art of Fugue on (released 1962). He said, and I quote, “He played it very well.” The piece was his longtime favourite, and the first time he heard it was in France in a church that he happened to enter sometime in the 60s. When asked what Gould was like, he said that Gould was ‘strange.’ That they had been having an engaged and lively conversation on a public bench in Toronto in the summer—with Gould in his coat, gloves, and hat as always—when without warning or a word, and mid-sentence, Gould got up and went off some distance, peering this way and that, looking into a shop, scrubbing his boots on the sidewalk, and then came back, sat down, and continued the conversation as if from the next word. So, the performance and the conversation are still vying for my jealousy, and it is doubtful that either will win.
Life in Canada was like life in Canada: stable, prosperous, and happy. Two stories from this time come to mind. One was the time my father claimed he had for a short while absolutely forgotten how to speak Punjabi. He was sitting in his office, and a fellow Punjabi whom he had never seen before came to the threshold and started speaking in his mother tongue. Staring in disbelief and not having spoken, read, or thought in Punjabi for a few years, he just couldn’t understand what the fellow was talking about or in what language he was babbling. He stopped the man and asked ‘Are you speaking Punjabi?’ When he was answered in the affirmative, something clicked in his mind and the ability to understand the language came back to him instantaneously.
Another was the peach farm. Of course, the duties of a doctoral student and a gallery curator did not leave much time for tending the peach orchards (there were also three hectares of asparagus, raspberry, and strawberry bushes;) but even so in late July and August, they were inundated with so many peaches that they literally sent boxes of them to friends all over the world. Growing up in Canada and remembering peach season as the time when we naughty children would have competitions founded on the baseless principle of being able to fit an entire peach into one’s mouth and eating it quicker than one’s opponent, I can only begin to imagine what a nuisance it must have been picking the bounty of their fields. Nevertheless, it remains a romantic and beautiful setting for this time of life, and I envy it nearly as much as the Gould episodes.
Unfortunately, this was not to last, and the reason was one mentioned earlier, about women on my father’s side of the family dying. In earlier generations it was perhaps a natural phenomenon; child birth remains a dangerous necessity, though one now much less hazardous than in the past. But in Danuta’s case, it was not so. It was an accident, and a tragic one at that.
After
“Asun” from Baramaha Tukhari: Homage to the Great Verse of Guru Nanak, Hardev Singh. Courtesy of the family’s archive.
The devastating loss of the beloved, whom my cousin’s daughter heard him call ‘an angel,’ took place in 1977. The couple had been married for eight years, and coincidentally, this was the same year my grandfather died, though I do not know which happened first.
The next eight years were spent traveling the world, ‘picking up driftwood,’ as he would say. I do not know much about this period, only that immediately after the tragedy, he visited his close friend, the architect Suraj Dubey and his wife Leslie in Prince Edward Island. The peach farm was sold, the curation was abdicated, and the wandering began—it took him practically everywhere—including Japan and, of course Europe—though again, I do not have the details. He did continue working though, and exhibitions kept him traveling and busy.
This state of unmoving movement came to a close in 1984 at an exhibition—once again in Poland—more particularly, in Toruń. My mother was teaching art history as an adjunct professor at the university; she was and is an extremely well-organized, bookish lady, constantly emphasizing the paramount importance of having a routine.
Every morning, she woke up very early, did a yoga routine, and set to work, which usually meant reading one thing or another. She was an up-and-coming academic, specializing in her beloved Baroque. She often read so much and became so involved that she would forget to eat or drink, and her eyes are until today very poor because of all the hours she spent reading in dim light, even going as far as to read under her covers so as not to be discovered and scolded by her parents when she was a child. She is also quite bashful and does not enjoy the company of people nearly as much as that of Mozart recordings and art books. She is often embarrassed in company and has a bad habit of getting into quarrels with friends.
This particular day, she got a message from the Director of the Gallery that there would be an interesting exhibition of a contemporary artist that she wanted her to attend as a member of faculty. She was generally undisposed and sceptical toward modern art, so she came up with every excuse that she could; her head hurt, she was behind on writing, she didn’t like this kind of art, she wasn’t specialized in it. But to no avail; the Director insisted, and in Communist Poland, you did what your superiors told you to. So, that evening, dragging her feet and not having put any effort into her appearance (like a true academic) she went over to the gallery, all the while coming up with excuses to make certain that she would be able to leave early. Lo and behold, upon arriving, she was immediately introduced to Hardev Singh, the exhibited artist, who as usual was well-mannered, had great stories to tell, and was sharply dressed. More than that, when she reached out her hand to shake his (the woman must first hold out her hand in an introduction in Poland) he clasped it in both of his and muttered some pleasant remark in his accented Polish. My mother promptly turned entirely red, as she does when embarrassed. It was this detail that he remembered, and though I heard the story from my mother and not from him, all he ever told me about these early days was that ‘She saved me.’ And perhaps that is enough.
Another drawing of a bird and a woman, Hardev Singh. Courtesy of the family’s private archive.
My mother at around the same time got the chance of a lifetime; she won a fellowship at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. And so it was clear that she would be immigrating to America, and probably permanently, as returning to a country cut-off from the rest of the world by the Iron Curtain would have been folly. So, after an exacting, three-year-long courtship, much reflection from both sides, the formalities of meeting the family, and the cautions of one uncle who rightly said to my mother that ‘People in America don’t like people with turbans’ were overcome, Hardev had his second civil wedding ceremony. And then they moved to Washington, D.C.
In Washington there was not much to do except to meet some family and old friends and these kinds of socially appropriate things. Attempting to pitch his art to some national modern art galleries turned out to be fruitless, not so much because of outright rejection, but because the terms of when exhibitions could be organized by were not attractive to my father; he did not want to wait five years to be exhibited somewhere, so in his typical brash fashion, he took his work elsewhere. But truth be told, neither my father nor my mother liked America: neither the system, nor the politics, nor the people, and so when the research project was over, they moved back to Toronto. My brother was born in 1987 in Hamilton. And from this time, more for us than for other reasons, Hardev’s life became, one might be tempted to say, domesticated.
Unplaceable Events
There are a few events which I have difficulty placing in any particular place on the timeline. For example, I once asked a very well-known Parisian Jungian psycho-analyst when she first met my father. She said it was in Warsaw, when she was standing in line for some daily necessity like bread or toilet paper (as was common during the Communist era) and getting very agitated at having to wait to acquire such a basic commodity. Wringing her hands and stomping her feet, she was practically turning in circles, when she noticed some distance behind her a turbaned man, and if that were not surprising enough, he was standing completely calmly and at ease, with his left arm across his midsection supporting his right elbow, with his right hand covering one of his eyes. Both his eyes were closed, and he looked like he was deeply considering something. She knew then that she had to speak with him, and they did, in fact, become good friends. This must have been sometime in the sixties, and there even exists a black-and-white photograph of the two friends at a beach in what looks like Southern France, where Hardev is painting and the psychologist is looking over the work in progress, smiling. I never heard about this trip to France specifically, but I did hear from him about another, and I have no way of knowing if they were related. My father was driving through rural France. It was the first time he was in the country, and he stopped at a roadside restaurant. It seemed a rather sophisticated place, and his French was not up to speed yet, but he confidently occupied a table. A waiter eventually approached, and my father gestured that he would like what everybody was having. A few moments later, he noticed that the next table over was receiving its food; it was something he had never seen before, raw ground meat served with a raw egg (what is called tatar). He hoped very sincerely that that was not what he had asked for, but to no avail, as he was brought the same. Not wanting to cause a scene, he stared very intently at what he was brought, without touching it of course, made large eyes and pointed at it. The waiter seemed to understand, and very graciously took it away quickly. Alas, there are many such unplaceable anecdotes, too numerous to add to this already lengthy account.
Drawing of a leaning woman, Hardev Singh. Courtesy of the family’s archive.
What He was Like and What He Thought
I think that one person always, at the core of his being, remains a mystery to another, no matter how close the relationship is. There is a depth to perception and being that is just unreachable by one not perceiving or being in just that way. But of course, there are people about whom we know more than others, and I believe I can say that about my father, having spent nineteen of my most vital years in constant contact with him. Before getting into this section, I would like to admit that there is one aspect of life that he never taught me anything about, and I do not know whether it was because he himself did not know much about it, or if he was saving it for a later time: that of the economical—one might say logistical—practicalities of contemporary life. For every other aspect of his that I will mention here, I will furnish an anecdote demonstrating why I believe it—this time not things he told me, but what I observed in his mode of life.
Sikhī
“Hawk of the Guru” from the Hawk of the Guru series, Hardev Singh (2013). Courtesy of The Anad Foundation and Bhāī Baldeep Singh.
Despite harboring some habits irreconcilable with Sikhī (such as his well-known affinity for good potato vodka) he was vehemently a Sikh—perhaps even to the point of patriotism—though it may be more correct to call him a Nanakian. He was absolutely committed to the belief that Gurū Nanak was the most genius man that had ever been, and that the precepts he had expounded and taught are the truths that can, and furthermore, will save the world. He believed, and I think rightly so, that Sikhī was the religion for the future. At the same time, he was a sceptical agnostic, and this scepticism led him to make scathing remarks about anything that he saw to be superstitious or a belief in miracles. This was true in his criticisms of other religions, but became especially scornful whenever he perceived such practices seething into his own beloved Nanakism. So, for example, when he was telling me of the life of Nanak and would get to a place where, in other faiths, a belief in a miracle would be necessitated, he would promptly say things like, ‘No one really knows what happened during the three days Nanak didn’t come back from the river,’ and then add ‘He was probably just wandering in the jungle.’ Further, he believed that Nanak would agree with him, and he would cite then other stories that show how mistaken Gurū Nanak thought these kinds of beliefs were, like when he claimed he was watering his fields in response to the Brahmins offering water to the sun, or when he fell asleep with his feet pointing towards the Ka’bah and asked the muezzin who woke him to show him a place where God was not.
In fact, he believed that anyone who did believe in such hierarchies of material things, places, or miracles could not be a Sikh, because such beliefs were completely foreign to Sikhī and were in fact against it. I think here he is correct, and very precisely so. His criticism of these beliefs, and also at times practices, were not of course aimed at the particular people (though he offended many people, even family members by loudly exclaiming what nonsense it was to sit in a Gurdvrā chanting ‘Vāhigurū, Vāhigurū, Vāhigurū…’ over and over again) but rightly at the assumption behind such activities; and that assumption is contrary to the one I believe is central to Sikhī. Particularly, it is the Abrahamic concept of where authority comes from (that is, a particular event, a foundational event) that is absent from Sikhī (as well as other Eastern religions). The two, as rightly maintained by my father, cannot exist side by side, and because he was a sceptic, he could not believe in these foundational events from which Abrahamic religions claim their spiritual authority. Fundamentally then, he believed that even if Nanak did not exist, his ideas and beliefs would still be unassailable; and the fact that he did exist makes it possible to combine these two ways of deriving authority in a way that is unique to Sikhī. In contrast, one can only imagine what chaos might be caused to a Christian’s worldview if it were ever proved that Christ had not physically existed.
Expounding on this idea of authority, it seems to me that many institutions under the Abrahamic influences, even secular or political ones, lay claim to these same assumptions stemming from the underlying theology. So monarchy might be said to follow this same assumption, where the heir is not one chosen by merit or accomplishment, but by some foundational, authority-granting event, such as being born to the king. Priests are ordained in the same way; all the studies in the world would be worthless if the ceremony of ordination were left out. Consequently, losing the authority granted by the ritual is nearly impossible, the authority often shielding one from the consequences of wrong doing. Material objects are invested also with holy properties, whether they be halāl meat, or the bread eaten during Communion. And again, their holiness is connected to a series of actions or events. This may lead, of course, to various intellectual problems; (the believer may be tempted to doubt some parts of scripture as being literal, while finding themselves unable to do so to others.) But again, the underlying theological assumption, I believe, is more important. Some interpretations of Sikh tradition may categorize the enlightenment of Nanak in the same light, but this in my view is only possible after the epistemology of Abrahamic religion is applied to it. Note that this story, which some would consider foundational, is not included in the holy book. It is not the narrative that must be believed to be a Sikh. Even prior to his experience of enlightenment, Nanak was a selfless friend to all. Unlike in the case of St. Paul, whose personality was transformed outright, Nanak understood something fundamental about his own being and was given the direction to share his understanding with humanity. Again, I think most importantly, Sikhs must ask themselves, what, if anything, would be different if the historical Nanak had not existed, but we nonetheless possessed the words of the Gurū Graṅth Sāhib? Are the truths contained in the holy book sufficiently true that they would manifest themselves irrespective of any particular origin story?
This, of course, is in no way meant to undermine the historicity of Sikhī. The unique way in which Sikhī derives authority by combining eternal, practicable truths, discernible in all spiritual traditions with historically-manifested, learnable mystical experience is worthy of note. The history, practices, characters, narratives, and culture in it are unique, and because its central events occurred not all that long ago, we can study the lives of the Gurūs and their followers with a precision and historicity not possible in many other faiths. And in fact, this is an advantage, one that must not be neglected by the Sikhs. What other religion can claim to still have today such an unmediated and palpable connection to its founders? Or even such early manuscripts of its holy book? It is clear that since the Sikhs lost their effectual independence as a nation—when Mahārājā Ranjit Singh’s empire fell to the British—there have been near-constant attacks from without the community as well as from within to purge these very precious jewels still uniquely in possession of particular Sikhs.
Like I said, my father was often quite disdainful of superstitions and the people that held them, but he was never closed-minded. And that is another aspect of him that I find essentially Sikh. There are two memories I can relate that I think attest to this. One took place when he visited me in New York during my tenure at the New York Conservatory of Music between 2012 and 2013. Apart from visiting family, he wanted to visit an art gallery and to try to get them to put on a show. It was owned by old friends of his, who knew his art: the Sundaram Tagore Art Gallery. He had a preliminary meeting, but the second meeting somehow was canceled at the last minute and nothing came of it. After the time when the meeting should have taken place, we went for dinner. I was unaware that the meeting did not occur and so enthusiastically asked him how it went. He told me that something had come up, and the owners had not been able to meet. When I asked why, he looked at me questioningly and asked, ‘What day is it today?’ I answered that it is Tuesday. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘that’s why. In my whole life, anything I have ever planned to be on a Tuesday did not go through.’ I laughed it off of course; how could my sceptical father believe in this? The cursed Tuesday? But he was quite serious.
The second memory is related to astrology. My father was a firm disbeliever in astrology, and dismissed it as nonsense. His brother—my uncle Mahadev—however, persuaded him sometime during Hardev’s visit to Delhi in the 2000s to visit a famous astrologer. My uncle was a great salesman and overcame the obvious reluctance of his brother by making all kinds of claims of the greatness of the astrologer, noting that he served all the top politicians of India! After much persuasion, he agreed and was taken to the astrologer. My father recounted the experience to me in this way: first, the astrologer asked for the day, year, and time of birth. He then spent the next twenty minutes in silence, writing in chalk on a small, portable blackboard and erasing and writing and erasing. After this, he proceeded to tell my father his entire life story, with details such as the year and direction of his moves around the world, his marriages, children, and so on. A true sceptic, my father then believed that the man had googled him or was conspiring with my uncle. He was, after all, a public figure in India. But then, at the very end while leaving, he was stopped by the astrologer at the door’s threshold, and was told that his wife, my mother, had a problem in her right shoulder, and that if he took this stone (handing him a stone) and encased it in a silver ring so she could wear it on a particular finger (I have forgotten which one) it would solve the problem within a year. Now this small, unknowable detail flabbergasted my father. How could the man know this? He took the stone, had it made into a ring, and presented it to my mother upon returning. My mother, also a sceptic, did not wear it a single day. So, as a family, we did not check the accuracy of the astrologer’s predictions, but it shook my father’s scepticism.
These two instances were not the only ones, but I think that these and all the others could easily be mistaken for superstitions. Wrongly so; I think they are more to be understood as an openness to the understanding that there may be things that one cannot explain by science and logic: that even I, in my scepticism, to be a true sceptic, have to be sceptical of my own scepticism and positive understanding of the natural world.
Quite in line with a typical adolescent’s trajectory—around the time I was eleven, my father was driving me to school or some other activity. Thoughtfully, I asked if there was a God, to which I got the puzzling answer that it was possible, but that no one can know what God is like. I inquired further about the reasoning whereby he arrived at this understanding. “Well, what are we made of?” I answered—a little proud I must say of my scientific knowledge—we are made up of all kinds of particles, molecules, and atoms. “Where did they come from?” And I propounded all that my good science teachers had told me about stardust, the different provenances of the elements, various chemistries, and so forth. “Where did that come from?” As one can imagine, after a few rounds of his short question and my long answers, I did not know what to answer any longer. “So you see, there must be something,” he concluded after I could only shoot him confused and slightly hostile glances—my teenage self feeling that I had been made a fool of. And in this short phrase, I believe we come to the best summary one can get of my father’s staunch agnosticism.
The above is an example of the manner in which I was taught things from a very young age—things that remain until today beyond my understanding. The knowledge he imparted in this way is outside of the logical, rationalist kind found in the West, though it sometimes resembles it; it is equally distant from blind faith. Looking back at this, I have an inkling that it must have been an amalgamation of some sort of authentic and indigenous thought along with additions from my father’s own reasoning process and experience. The theorems presented to and eventually accepted by me were not cognitive constructs; nor were they strictly spiritual experiences. They were, at their most effective, a delicately-balanced manifestation of both.
I can truthfully say that my father explicitly taught me more about other religions than he did about Sikhī. My entire childhood—at the age at which one must be told stories before going to bed—was coloured by daily fragments from the Ramayana. Every day, he would conjure up a different part of the epic from his memory and tell it in his own highly-animated, impeccably-timed manner. And of course—as the circumstances dictated—emphasis would be placed on one trait or another. Humility seemed to be of paramount importance; and the way he told the tale of Hanuman twirling his tail to overcome the height of the throne of some king has remained for me to this day the way I understand it. Though my father verbally taught me a lot about other traditions, his conduct at times was such it provided a powerful example of a Sikh’s mode of life. An instance comes to mind when we spent a year at the Punjabi University. At some point, we were invited by some of my parents’ colleagues to an evening at the Gymkhana Club. At the entrance, my father was informed that there was a dress code and that the typical kurtā that he always wore would not be accepted. He smiled and did not comment; it was obvious that they would let him in because of the company he was keeping. So, a shawl was arranged with which he was to cover his kurtā, I suppose to avoid offending any Loyalists still present at such gatherings. He took the shawl in his hand and, without unfolding, hung it over his forearm while saying quietly in a Punjabi even I understood that he warranted the doormen would not have told Gandhi to cover up and walked in without looking back at the by now gawking sentinels. Aside from physically dragging him out, at this point it seemed they had run out of options, and wisely let it pass. This personal dignity and uncompromising individuality are other pieces of my father’s psyche that I attribute to his Sikhī.
It is important to understand neither my brother nor I were raised to be Sikhs in the strict sense of the word. Though I had started wearing a kaṛā before I can remember, no other outward symbol of Sikhī was ever suggested to me. But when I was twelve years old, a deep hunger for theological answers made its presence known within me, and I began to read voraciously. I read things that were far beyond my comprehension at the time (in fact, they still may be) ranging from Betrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy to all the far-reaching treatises on all the major world religions that I could get my hands on. Luckily, both my parents were astoundingly avid readers, and we had what I may with confidence call a small library in our basement. Accordingly, there were plenty of books I had access to that were both vital classics (like the entire theatrical output of Shakespeare) to books completely outside the mainstream (obscure art catalogues or single editions of Bible translations by some unknown group of Dominican monks). By their own admission, the more than five thousand books they had kept were selected either because they were books that must be returned to or because they were nearly impossible to come by. Greek mythology, major theatrical and poetical works, treatises and tractates of all the major classical philosophers, literary classics and more of this type of literature was easily accessible in my home.
So I read. At some point, I asked my father if there was anything on Sikhī I should read. He very nonchalantly pointed me first toward the history books, namely those by Khushwant Singh, Patwant Singh, and Sangat Singh. After devouring those—and still coming back for more—I was given more specialized works, for example by Kahn Singh Nabha or Kapur Singh (who I maintain is to this day the greatest Sikh theologian I have ever read) and historical texts like the janamsākhī-s. Slowly I came to the source texts, like the Zafarnāmā and translations of Japjī Sāhib. I was immensely impressed by this way of life; immediately after reading the historical accounts, I had no doubt left in my mind that these were the people I wanted to follow. The ideas I encountered in Sikhī were unlike any others I could find elsewhere; I could not, to give a rather commonplace example, find any other religion that from the very outset so emancipated women. Sure, I worked at a church when I was in high school that accepted women as ministers, but it was a 20th century denomination that, in my understanding, engaged in some twisting and turning of more traditional Christian theology. The more I continue to read and understand (which is not always the same thing) I find more and more distinctive and convincing aspects in the Sikh tradition.
So it was when I was thirteen—and of my own initiative—that I informed my father that I wanted to start keeping my hair. He was proud of this decision; I think not so much that I had decided to accept the outward appearance (at least for the time being) but more for the reason that the ideas had made such an impression on me. They were important ideas to him as well and he was pleased they had prompted me to make such a commitment. He saw then that his patient, humble, and sweet way of introducing us to Sikhī had worked.
Another aspect of his religion that I think deserves mention is the influence it had on his demeanour—and more precisely—on his emotions. It is simple enough: he was in general one of the calmest people I have known. He always tried to be patient, even when his deafness made this difficult, and he liked to speak to people sweetly and to act as a mediator. Once, when I was around ten I think, we went together to a certain store in the neighbourhood; it was owned by an Afghan, who made roast chicken in a way that we had become very fond of. Upon entering the store with the purpose of buying such a chicken for dinner, we saw that there was a large kerfuffle between the Afghan owner and a customer, a Somalian woman, accompanied by a few veiled friends. The argument was in full swing when we entered, so it was difficult to understand what it was all about, but it seemed to me that the woman was the aggressor, as she was in the midst of hurling all sorts of base insults at the man and, in her words, ‘his people.’ At first, the man was reasonably calm, asking her to leave and not cause a hassle to the other customers, but quite soon, his face began to flush red, his brow darkened, and he began to raise his voice. One always knows when someone is genuinely angry, because the person unfailingly succumbs to speaking one’s mother tongue. And so, what I imagine to be hurtful words began to be heard in Afghani, and at this the kitchen staff came running out to see what was the matter. The woman, seeing these reinforcements, started backing away, apparently not any closer to getting whatever she was arguing for.
In all this, my father, immediately upon entering had gone to the cash register, in the middle of it all, and after a preliminary time spent trying to understand what was happening, he started placating the situation; he was of course known to the Afghan as a returning customer and hoped to have some influence on diffusing the situation. His arms out as if putting out a fire, he bellowed various generally peaceable phrases like ‘Let’s not be rude,’ ‘That’s enough of that,’ ‘Ignore that!’ and the like. The woman had left the store, but the Afghan was so worked up at this point, perhaps because of the appearance of his staff, that he even grabbed a butcher’s knife and attempted to swing over the counter, to get out the door and presumably at the woman. This was, I believe, the first time I had really heard my father shout, though every subsequent time nearly always had the same effect. When my father would get upset, his voice could have such power that it literally stopped people from doing whatever they were doing and caused them to fall in line, like soldiers at a general’s bark. And this is what happened. The Afghan, and really everybody in the store, immediately stopped in their tracks and looked open mouthed at him after the roar. Taking a moment to gather himself, he smiled and quietly said, “Today, I want an entire chicken.” It is, I must say, a moment of which I remain proud to this day not only as a show of strength—which it clearly was—but also as a demonstration of how quickly he was able to master himself.
There were other times that I remember this characteristic of his though I think every other time, it was the result of some foolishness perpetrated by myself or my brother. There was even a time that my cousin remembers; he was eighteen and visiting from Poland, and my father took us both to Niagara Falls for the day. On the way back, we had had some sugar candies—I think—and we were play-fighting in the backseats, moving around quite a bit, and screaming at the top of our lungs our various imagined battle-cries. Needless to say, this was all very distracting for the driver, and when one of us gave off a particularly loud exclamation, my father roared, and we snapped back into line and were quiet the rest of the way home. His roar had a physical effect on people, whether they knew him or were strangers. There was something quite simply terrifying about it.
I would not like this to sound as if my father were always in control. No, I do remember a situation or two where he unfairly snapped at someone, usually a worker at a store or a restaurant. I cannot say if he had a particular disdain for these services or if these reactions were caused by something else—perhaps a bad day or some other such trivial happenstance. There is one such situation that I remember quite clearly which has left a sore spot on my conscience, perhaps because I was old enough to have comprehensive enough understanding of the situation that I might have comforted the poor waitress. It was at a Pizza Hut, which was, I must say, a rare enough occasion; usually the restaurants we went to, and quite infrequently at that, were Indian restaurants or other ethnic ones as we had plenty in our neighbourhood. So, I was quite excitedly looking forward to gorging on all the saturated fats. I do not remember if this was an occasion of some sort or if it was one of those times that my father was too lazy to cook something. Waiting to be seated, we were asked by the waitress, a happy-sounding young girl who was giddily going about her job, if we would like to be seated in the smoking section. My father, hard of hearing, did not understand the question and asked her to repeat it, which she did. This time, he understood, and was incomprehensibly outraged. He asked gruffly what kind of a question that was to ask of a parent and his child. Unfortunately, the waitress immediately lost her lightness of step, her smile, and the sparkle in her eyes. She led us as if by punishment to a table in the non-smoking section, and every time I saw her going around to other tables, it seemed she hadn’t yet recovered from this unwarranted rudeness. The pizza was slightly less tasty than what I had anticipated.
I only saw my father weep once in my life, and it was a short outburst of sadness, less than a minute long. It was not when he told me about the various tragedies of his life, nor when reminiscing about his parents, childhood, long-dead friends, nor the good old days. It was when my mother’s mother died. He took my brother and I and sat us down. I was ten at the time, so my brother would have been twelve and a half, and he told us, “Babcia has died.” Needless to say, he was immensely fond of my grandmother.
Laughter was an important part of his life, though like anger and sadness, the truly uninhibited kind came to him rarely enough. He liked a good joke, especially long-winded ones, and he had a few favourites that he would repeat at social events if he got the chance. One I remember he used to tell with particular relish was the one about the two old, deaf Sikh gentlemen going to the village Gurdvārā. They know each other, and upon meeting, one asks the other where he is going. The second answers that he is going to the Gurdvārā, and asks the same of the first, who answers that that is too bad, as he is going to the Gurdvārā, and had hoped that they could go together. Then the second likewise pronounces his dismay at the other not going to the Gurdvārā, and so on. Basically, it is a joke about senility and deafness. There were many more, of course, and plenty of them have a cynical scepticism to them; there is a two-liner where an observer asks, ‘How is it that all the Sikhs’ faces are shining when they leave the Gurdvārā?’ The answer being, ‘After they eat the parshād, they rub the ghī into their faces.’ One of the truly uninhibited times my father and I enjoyed a laugh was at Khushwant Singh’s chapter about farts from one of his joke books, I believe. We read it out loud and had an immense laugh together.
Food, as already mentioned, was tremendously important to my father. He was the primary cook at home, and he categorically did not tolerate any sort of pickiness whatsoever when it came to food. If it were made, it had to be eaten. Often, when I was practicing my piano, he would cut up fruit in a bowl and bring it to me; it sometimes annoyed me, but I always ended up eating it all. To this day, because of his schooling about food with his rejection of pickiness, I treat eating primarily as a responsibility akin to doing laundry. In my home, we ate everything, though compared to other North Americans, I think our consumption of meat was on the light side. Most of our food was dāl and the square parāṭhās already mentioned along with yogurt or other vegetables. He also made a mean spaghetti, and we always had our own ghī, yogurt, and guṛ. We children were not given tea or coffee, though I believe that was more my mother’s doing. In this way, tea and coffee only became a part of my life a few years after I left home, in my mid-twenties. I did ask him about why he ate meat; although I did not find a definitive answer to the vegetarian question in Sikh theology, I was dimly aware that this question must come up because of it, and of course we had relatives and family friends who were vegetarians. He told me simply that he believed that one of the core messages of Gurū Nanak—and one of the most important things that he taught in terms of liberating religious thought from dogma and exclusivity—was the idea that ‘All food is sacred.’ He saw the avoidance of a particular kind of food—if not out of necessity, of course—as a result of mindless dogma and therefore as antithetical to Nanakian thought. Whatever one may think of this reasoning, I can readily say that he was committed to this idea very completely and that he lived very much in accordance with it. This, I think, is admirable.
Art
Two drawings on one paper, Hardev Singh. Courtesy of the family’s private archive.
No discussion of my father would be complete without some consideration of his thoughts on art. They constituted a unique blend—as far as I can make out—of the Eastern concept of māyā, where material things are seen to be illusory in that they are finite, and the Western Enlightenment ideal of works of art produced by an individual for consumption or perception. Retrospectively, I think his attitude to art was quite informed by his theology; it was a blend of ideas and affect that gave rise to a historically-grounded and deeply-consistent viewpoint. There is one anecdote that I think perfectly encapsulates his thought, though it is not itself about art. During his last visit to Poland, he stayed with me, of course, and told me that we should make time to go to Koszalin to go see the Słowik sisters and their families. I readily agreed, and so one day we made the journey in my car. On entering Koszalin, he mentioned that he wished to visit the grave of his deceased Danuta. The cemetery was close to this side of the city, and he knew where it was by heart. So, we stopped, and he knew exactly where to find the tombstone; after so many years, he still remembered its location among all the thousands of others. It was my first time at this cemetery, and I remember feeling a little confused. I do not really know how to behave in such situations, and this is true of every grave I visit. But, he said something that I think sums up his thinking perfectly. Standing near the grave with his hands clasped together, he said, not looking at me, ‘I don’t know which way is better; our way, or this way,’ gesturing at the grave. What he meant is what he thought about the Western and Eastern death rites; in the West, or more precisely—in Abrahamic countries, people are buried, and their graves are then visited, even regularly, by their closest families. In Poland this is very visibly so; relatives even clean the grave and place flowers and candles upon it. There is even a holiday specifically for this. In India—on the other hand—the bodies of the dead are cremated, and their ashes are scattered, usually in water, so as not to leave any tangible place to be visited by partners or descendents. In his typically agnostic stance, he did not know which way was better.
It was so with art as well. He was a great admirer of the various festivals in India, where annually—or sometimes less frequently—great, big effigies are made by hundreds of highly-skilled craftsmen for days on end and at great expense. These figures are usually very ornate, beautifully carved, painted, and decorated with excruciating attention to detail by artisans, only to be cast into a river or to be otherwise destroyed. On the other hand, he knew and admired many great artists of Europe, who tended to create things to last. He was somewhere in the middle, often drawing or painting on materials that were not meant for this purpose. He would sometimes just feel like creating and would do it with whatever and on whatever he had close by. And so, to this day, my mother laments his making excellent paintings that are now lost because they were painted on bed sheets rather than canvases. Then again, when there was time and he had in mind a specific project, he could be very demanding when it came to materials—be it the ink that he used for his drawings, the exact colours he needed, or the required technology.
Hardev Singh from the early 60s. This way of creating, I think, is a perfect example of how my father would work. Picking up a stick—or at the very best a decrepit old brush—sitting nowhere in particular, in no real comfort, in chappals of course, he could draw tens of excellent drawings in precisely this manner. Courtesy of the family’s archive.
I do tend to think that his emphasis was rather on creating than the creation. The best acts of creativity came spontaneously, he claimed. Of course, they were backed up by rigorous training as well as extraordinary knowledge and memory, but they built something out of these, and that act was what art was all about: capturing those times when the building was happening. The art that he produced, therefore, cannot be seen to be static; his works are snapshots of the lifelong process of creating that he undertook when he first decided to be an artist. I am reminded here of something Gould wrote in 1962: ‘The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenaline but rather the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity’ (“Let’s Ban Applause”).
This did, however, elicit criticism, both from my father’s colleagues and from my mother. The first and most fundamental critique of his art that I have heard—and sometimes reluctantly agree with—is that his paintings were often not actualizations of complete concepts. He admired Sohan Qadri for always doing the opposite, telling me once that he invited him to Poland for that very reason: that every painting he produced looked like a finished project. The regularly manifesting carelessness of my father’s creative processes I believe stemmed from his thought. It is a weakness, but also a strength. His outlook on my musical training was such, for example, that he would often encourage me to learn the scales, learn the musical language, saying the playing would happen by itself; the art would create itself.
Music was extremely important to him, though in my experience, his understanding was somewhat limited. But there were small things that he did, that he observed that I find bottomless in their profundity. He enjoyed Bach very much, claiming to me once that he heard it similarly to how he heard Indian classical music—that Bach was the closest composer in the West he knew to his native classical culture. At the time, I dismissed this quite lightly as it seemed absurd at best; this was before my own adventure began with this music, and now I certainly understand what he had in mind when saying this. He also recalled a particularly moving set of episodes—at least for me—after we visited a friend of his in Chandigarh by coincidence. It was during our stay in Patiala, and I had of course made a stink for the lack of having a piano. So, he asked around and was told there was a gentleman in Chandigarh who would be happy to have me practice, if the instrument suited me. We went over, and my father did not recognize the man until he introduced himself as an Avtar Singh. It turns out, Avtar was an adamant admirer of European music and that in the 50s he had introduced my father and several colleagues to Beethoven and others. They would stand with fists raised while blasting Beethoven symphonies on the gramophone, empowered and deeply moved. The instrument, as a side note, was quite awful. He once told me that dhurpad was ‘pure music.’ I find this categorization extremely helpful and cuttingly insightful; it shows me that my understanding of his understanding was not very good. He knew practically everyone important in the Indian art scene—whether they were writers, artists, or musicians—or had at least come into contact with them. He was a great admirer of khayāl, but believed Bhāī Avtar Singh to be the most knowledgeable singer he had heard. I remember he was greatly saddened when he heard of his death. He was also a staunch admirer of the efforts of Bhāī Avtar Singh to reintroduce the traditional string instruments into Kīrtan; he was of the generation that remembered how the music sounded in the old days. Coincidentally, he also remembered how things looked in the old days, and the second thing he did when we visited Harmandir Sāhib together (after showing me the place where Bābā Deep Singh fell) was to criticize the new, domed gates built around the complex. He saw their badly-proportioned, wrongly-angled, modern forms as purposefully overshadowing the temple itself, as if to diminish its grandeur. In fact, continuing on this trope, he was critical of practically every decision made by the contemporary ruling Sikh bodies—from the codification of the rahit maryādā to the appointment of graṅthī-s and rāgī-s to the awful ‘depictions’ of Gurūs that started to be hung in Gurdvārā-s all around the world sometime in the latter half of the 20th century to the various ‘renovations’ of various gurdvārā-s that had taken place in India, basically homogenizing their appearances while ignoring indigenous architectural principles. What is more, he saw these decisions as the result of what he considered to be a complete lack of understanding among contemporary Sikhs about what art is. He was critical of nearly all contemporary Sikh painters, particularly the most popular ones, who seemed to be trying to outdo each other, in his own words, as to who can more exactly replicate a photograph. He was candidly against any ‘life-like’ attempts at reproduction, calling them at best technical studies. The sceptical side of him, rightfully I think, rejected conventions such as halos around the Gurūs’ heads, not in their original historical contexts, but in their contemporary pictorial manifestations. He questioned why Gurū Nanak’s beard always had to be white, why Gurū Gobind Singh was dressed in contemporary clothing, and even why they were represented at all. I recall that he told me of a series of paintings that he once produced, which he named ‘Portraits of God.’ They consisted of blank canvases, with only fantastic splashes of colour framing the whiteness. This, he would say, is real Sikh painting; what better way to represent a formless, timeless, nameless, hate-less, fearless reality than to make it just so? The boundaries that Nanak broke, in his view, in the religious field were all-encompassing; for him, Nanak was the first abstract artist, the first modern thinker, not limiting his view of anything by even the most basic of human instincts, those of language. The abstraction of God as an alpha-numerical symbol: what could be more conducive to modern art than that kind of concept? And such was his lifelong lament at the Sikhs’ state of mind: having something so precious—and at the same time—so profoundly misunderstanding it.
A “Portrait of God,” from the Portrait of God series, Hardev Singh. Courtesy of The Anād Foundation and Bhāī Baldeep Singh.
Needless to say, he expended a significant amount of energy in trying to rectify this problem, not by trying to change Sikhs; the small-minded, petty politics of many who claim to be academics, priests, or other authorities in the Sikh world had thoroughly turned him off this level of intervention. No, his foundational work with the Sikh Educational Society was basically one aimed at raising awareness among people in general and providing opportunities for ‘outsiders’ or children of the diaspora to come into contact with ideas that he considered transformational. Out of this was born the ever-present ‘Punjabi Reader,’ a publication that has gained notoriety among kids who grew up in Canada as the book that was always at every Gurdvārā camp or used as a textbook in every after-school Punjabi class. The Society’s annual conferences attempted to discuss current topics in the Sikh world by mixing different people from different fields. There were also other projects undertaken under the auspices of the Society: for example, the translation by Dr. Jarnail Singh of Gurū Graṅth Sāhib into French, German, Spanish, and other languages. It seems that he shared the belief, mentioned in Khushwant Singh’s History of the Sikhs, that Sikhī was disappearing, being replaced by some strange amalgamation of misunderstood theology and career politics, at least to some degree. At the same time, he was a believer in the necessity of Sikhī continuing to exist, often saying things akin to it being the religion of the future, on account of its being completely inclusive and not housing any superstitious beliefs. He was an admirer of the 3HO Sikhs as a movement, saying often that they were the best Sikhs he had ever met—at least much better than those in India. This is not to say he was not also critical of their practices; in fact, he saw some of their tantric practices and elements of kunḍalīnī yōgā as superstitious, un-theological interpolations. But, the level of their understanding of scripture and the central messages of Sikh thought was, for him, unparalleled in any other community
What it All Means
Sikh scholars have long bemoaned the sorry state of the Sikh masses and have been predicting the end of the religion as such since the early 20th century. Somehow, despite all the troubles, it has not quite disappeared, though I am tempted to say that its appearance now in the second decade of the 21st century is profoundly different from anything that came before. The biggest concern I have—and I think it is one that my father instilled in me—is that Sikhī will be put into the same bag as other religions and just as quickly dismissed by diasporic youth and Western academia as just another superstition-laden, polarizing, theological system tending towards dangerous fundamentalism—without the dismissers paying due attention to what is actually being dismissed. It is so because when looking in from the outside, that is what the current state of the Sikh masses appears to be; there is not a Gurdvārā that is nor filled with the awful ‘portraits’ of the Gurūs in some pose or another, sporting a mishmash of Hindu-Abrahamic symbolism. The uniform of the ‘Five Ks’ has practically lost all meaning and has been turned into a superficial image that must be adhered to because it is proper. A spirit of ritualistic compulsion, superstition, and mission creep has infected numerous aspects of Sikh life—from ritual cleaning with milk to the way to relate to the marriage ceremony—and perhaps most dangerously of all, the professionalization of a regular clergy, though such spiritual out-sourcing cuts strongly against Sikh doctrine and tradition. These are just some of the symptoms of the despicable state of affairs, and all the while the community’s energy is being funneled into having conversations about whether or not women can remove body hair, who can cook for whom, how much exactly is a tenth of one’s income, how many wives did a certain Gurū have, and if that was correct or not.
The force behind my father’s scepticism is not perhaps of a metaphysical nature; that is why it is perhaps better to describe him as an agnostic. Sure, there are things that we do not understand, maybe even cannot understand, that affect the physical world. His view was that this did not matter, and that attempting to prescribe ritualized claims about the Ultimate Truth was profoundly un-Sikh. He resisted these things as best as he could. It was not all honey and milk though, and I am under no illusion that my father was successful in this endeavor. In fact, he most definitely failed as nearly every similar attempt has, and I think part of the solution must lie in understanding why this was the case. Why have Sikhs, despite success, wealth, education, and all other manners of material development, failed at communicating their faith to the outside?
Part of the answer is certainly the pernicious assumptions that have crept into understandings of Sikh doctrine from the ‘outside.’ That being said, I personally have never come across any set of ideas, whether in religious thought or otherwise, that so persistently negate and refute the separate categorization of reality into groups of ‘inside’ and ‘outside,’ ‘us’ and ‘them.’ Now, perhaps there is some utility in understanding one’s interlocutor, because it may guide the propriety of the communication, but this must be done while recognizing that one is on the journey with one’s interlocutor, and that is the moment when the separation dissolves. So, when playing a concert, the performer is obviously separate from the audience and has a different function, but a true performer must be keenly aware of what he himself is playing, and must be engaged in the process that he is initiating through his instrument. In short, he must be an audience to himself, a witness to what is happening; only then can the message of the music be understood. Realizing then that we are all on the same boat, crossing the same river, becomes the key to the message. So, when we take part in preparing laṅgar, we are not feeding others, but ourselves.
A second point that comes to mind is also about communication, and is also a point in which people like my father failed, and quite miserably at that. My father used to make achār, usually out of lime and mango. I love this pickle, and when I moved out I wanted to be able to supply myself with it and so asked my father how to make it. The answer I got was rather comical, now when I think about it, and did not in the least contribute to my being able to make it: he told me that one should put whatever you want to pickle in a jar with some salt and spices, and then leave it for sometime, giving it a shake from time to time. And that was it. No details, no idea of what spices, no idea of how long it was to be pickled for, and just a “It is very easy” to discourage me even further. Now, I very much doubt that my father wanted to keep his achār recipe a secret, and I also do not think he was annoyed at me and did not want to speak or anything like that. I genuinely believe that he thought he had done a satisfactory job explaining what I was to do. Of course, I am not arguing for the existential importance of achār or for the ability to make it, but imagine that this same nonchalance and underestimation of the difficulty of knowledge-transfer also figured in explanations of other matters, things vital and more complicated. One can be in a bad mood; everyone has that right, or there can legitimately exist a protocol to be followed when expounding certain facets of knowledge. The teacher can deem the student not to be ready for a particular piece of knowledge, but when the time for explanation arrives, a certain sense of precision, honesty, and systematicity is needed. And these qualities, I would say, are ones that are as far from the contemporary Sikh educational ethos as possible. The scholars that fulfill these criteria while remaining free from career politics or other shameful tendencies are truly few and far between.
The problem, however, seems to be the result of a collision of cultures. The vision of Gurū Nanak is a complicated one, or perhaps more precisely, it is so simple that it is extraordinarily complicated to faithfully unpack. One of the historical advantages that immediately drew me towards Sikhī was that because the Gurūs lived for a combined period of about 250 years, they had ample time to think through how to institutionalize certain ideas so as to make them livable experiences. Laṅgar is perhaps the most powerful of these institutions; it is very easy to throw around slogans professing the equality of all or unity in diversity, but these things need not be explained to someone who has regularly attended laṅgar, especially from a young age. It does not need to be explained that all have the right to food, no matter if they are backwards, forwards, upside-down, sideways, young, old, poor, rich, atheist, polytheist, agnostic, hateful, loving, women, men, animal, or poltergeist. No, they all sit on the floor and eat the same food and can serve the same food. This is an embodiment of the experience of seeing no other; it is institutionalized theology at its non-ritualistic best. The connection between living this experience and iterating it, however, is lost when this institution is ritualized: when it becomes about free food, about penance, about mixing the lentils a certain number of times, about excluding people from preparing the food. And the original institutions uniquely prevalent in Sikhī have unfortunately all become so, and the masses have been left without any of the tools necessary for thinking properly about their religion. In fact, it seems that the cognitive awareness present from the very beginning of the religious movement was nearly completely lost around the middle of the 19th century with the fall of the Sikh empire and the rise of colonial rule. Education of peoples must supply three vital needs. First—it must equip a people to study the wisdom of previous generations, second—enable them to digest it to the point of sustaining it among themselves, and third—prepare them to communicate and cooperate effectively with others. All three of these necessary skills are virtually absent from the average contemporary Sikh, though the awareness about the lack of these abilities is becoming greater and greater. This consequently also poses a threat; it may be that the inquiring minds within the community clumsily apply epistemologies and ideas from without the indigenous circles to rediscover their own roots. The original, traditional pedagogies are in dire straits at the moment, and all effort must be made by whatever means in order that they be at least documented. Barring this urgently needed action, the essence of Sikhī will truly disappear.
One of the monumental facts that continues to strike me the deeper I understand Sikhī is that it is, or at the very least has been, a complete system. Sikh thought is not just thought; it is a practicable set of experiences that are truly catholic. Gurū Graṅth Sāhib is not just a book; it is music. Gurbāṇī Saṅgīta is not just music; it is a pedagogical system of preserving, sustaining, and imparting knowledge. Like all attempts at defining wholeness or oneness, this is also bound to fail and has doubtless already done so. But perhaps it is not something that we should be attempting to define at all, instead striving towards the integration of the experience of oneness into our everyday activities. The understanding that comes from the attainment of such integration is more valuable than any of the sort that can be consciously put into words. However, this means that the entirety of Sikhī is found also in its parts, that if one facet of thought or practice is lost, others lose their meaning. This further means that each thought, each idea, each sentence, each word, and each letter cannot be without the other, providing us yet again with a testament to the genius of the founders of this system. Sikhī is itself as complete a being as the creation that it describes and imbibes; it is therefore the ultimate metaphor for it.
Another “Portrait of God” for the Portrait of God series, Hardev Singh. Courtesy of The Anād Foundation and Bhāī Baldeep Singh.
Thus, when reading in my teens about the various traditions of the world, I was shocked as to the lack of quality information about Sikhī. There was basically no readily-available work at a level approaching that of practically any of the literature on Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism or Daoism. The things I read I most often would dismiss as they seemed to me to be the work of amateur academics. There were grammatical mistakes in books that annoyed me endlessly, even spelling mistakes! How could anyone take this work seriously, I wondered. Anyone reading this work is bound to have taken it as lightly as I did. I found solace only in the writing of Kapur Singh, something which did not change until only a few years ago when I became aware of the beginnings of the work being initiated in different parts of the world at an acceptable level. Honestly, it seemed to be a miracle that anyone at all educated in the contemporary system took Sikhī seriously. I can only imagine what this must have felt like for people like Hardev Singh, who despite his scepticism, agnosticism, and vodka-loving disposition, was immensely proud of his heritage, while at the same time being keenly aware of how it was being trodden upon by its own representatives. He remembered the elements which were nowhere to be found; he remembered the instruments, expressions, protocols, practices, humour, and saw that not only were these being ignored or pushed aside, but also they were actively being subverted. He did what he could; as I mentioned, he was a direct person, and if he did not like somebody or what he was doing, he had no qualms about declaring his displeasure loudly, for all to hear. He tried to meet this problem at other levels, encouraging independent thinking in art, film-making, and poetry. He even started an institution so as to better disseminate knowledge about the religion. And this was not enough; it has all failed. Maybe the problem was in the goal itself, in the paradox of organized religion. It is a little like trying to teach about a language rather than teaching the language itself.
I do not wish to sound like a doomsayer, because I am not one. My father was an optimist, and whether it be genetics or otherwise, I can say I inherited this trait and pushed it to its extreme; there is no situation that I cannot turn on its head. This gets me into trouble sometimes, but I find it an extremely useful skill. But there is clearly work to be done.
I think a metaphor is appropriate here. If the movement that began with Gurū Nanak all those years ago was a fire that was added to by his successors and followers—a movement both destructive in successfully hobbling old, pernicious, and immoral societal norms, and Creative in the way that it is fundamentally a transformative power, able to re-forge humans into autonomous, loving beings, and indeed the entirety of Being into Heaven—the fire has now burnt low, and only embers are left, lacking the vitality and the oxygen—the various original, uncolonized practices and thought, but also caretakers and responsible attendants of tradition so necessary for a fire to keep burning—and the fuel—the generations of Sikhs brought up disconnected from the beauty of their own culture, are largely unaware that they themselves potentially are the caretakers so sorely needed— to keep it burning brightly. The good news is that the embers still exist and that they have the necessary properties that can, with care, be brought back to their original radiance, illuminating and warming us all. There are now individuals, scattered all over the world, who have been working tirelessly (all the while being neglected by the wider diaspora, who have perhaps forgotten that they themselves can do the same) to blow oxygen back onto the embers, to keep them burning for as long as they can. The embers, under such treatment, are slowly expressing contentment, and give off sparks here and there—meant to catch onto the still cold and wet wood which needs to be piled up into a proper, blaze-welcoming heap.
Work initiated and continued by Bhāī Baldeep Singh comes particularly to mind; he is like a bellows, blowing steadily onto the embers, and some of his students and colleagues are like the sparks resulting from this breath, potentially re-igniting parts of the fire. His is perhaps the archetypal Sikh story of the 20th and 21st centuries: that of an individual, who clearly perceived the absolute failure of institutions around him to preserve what he undoubtedly knew to be valuable. He set himself the sensitive task of applying the systematic learning he has been fortunate enough to glean from some of the most extraordinary Sikh masters of the twentieth century—rescuing some from the neglect they had suffered following the socio-cultural rupture brought about by Partition—to initiate work of the highest order in as many fields as he has seen possible. And of course, like all work of this kind, it was met by trouble and resistance from the very beginning, at first from his direct environment, and finally from the most destructive elements of his own community, guilty of stealing irreplaceable tools, manhandling him and his students, and even smashing revived, hand-crafted musical instruments to pieces, as happened in May 2018. Let this represensible act of cultural genocide rouse the Sikhs at large from their apathy again. I sincerely hope greater public awareness of these crimes will inspire Sikhs to take intelligent steps to build a brighter future.
And so, Sikhs around the world must now ask themselves; how can I become a spark? The answer is a complicated one, but I think one of the first measures that must be taken, and I say this with a heavy heart, is to remove the institutions that are slowly attempting to monopolize and homogenize Sikhī. Institutions like the SGPC and other Gurdvārā committees, provided they ever served a purpose, have clearly outstayed their welcome. Thankfully, the Gurūs wisely vested authority in two, uncompromising bulwarks. The Gurū Paṅth must re-enter into an age of self-awareness, guided by the eternal flame of Gurū Graṅth. Further, individuals must take up great personal responsibilities once again. We must question those actively spreading misinformation and disinformation, but we must question ourselves just as unflinchingly. What, truly, is Sikhī? Just this one question and the ensuing search for genuinely adequate answers will do us a world of good. Finally, let us avoid the tendency we have in communicating like my father did about his achār; it is not good enough to say ‘God is One’ or ‘See no other’ or ‘Your God is the same as mine’ or any one of the unthinking catchphrases that we can reduce Gurū Graṅth Sāhib’s instruction to, particularly when faced with the question, ‘So, Mrs. Kaur/Mr. Singh, what is it that you believe?’ It is important to see that many religions fundamentally preach the same truths, but it is equally vital to identify the points where they differ.
The embers are still lit, the sparks are still flying off, and this fills me with limitless optimism. If we get close enough and are fortunate enough to receive the ever-flowing gifts of the Kartār, then we—like the pieces of driftwood my father sought—can catch ablaze too, and in our own small ways, help illumine the world.
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1. This, as written, is a direct quote, albeit with the formatting condensed. Both my mother and I, however, remember the date as 1969.
2. As no space in this text is given to Hardev Singh the author, here, for interested readers, is a list of his more important publications: Adhunik Chitarkala di Jan Panchan (Punjabi University), Punjabi Folk Tales, Doodles and Scribbles (Sabd Canada, second edition 2013, published by The Anād Foundation), Baramaha Tukhari: Homage to the Great Verse of Guru Nanak, Sankh Sippian—a book of poems in Punjabi and ‘Visual Renderings of Rags’ (The Anād Foundation, 2012).
3. This is an affectionate derivation from the Polish ‘tata,’ meaning ‘daddy.’
4. Osieki was the site of the most important artistic gathering in Poland in the 60s; it was where my father rubbed shoulders, met with, admired, and was admired by some of the most important European artists of the 20th century, like one of the fathers of ‘happenings,’ Tadeusz Kantor.
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Cheslav ‘Bala’ Singh