Words are “loaded pistols.”Footnote ¹ Guru Nanak’s 974 hymns speak; they fire. The five chapters of this volume – Guru Nanak’s Japujī, the rāga framework, his language of love, the sensuous quintet, and his revelation – illuminate his dazzling artistry infused with metaphysical knowledge and moral pragmatism. This is not art for art’s sake. This is not self-enclosed poetry unto-itself. The firing is not for the pleasure of hearing the shot go off. Seriously involved with the concerns of his age, Guru Nanak fires “to reveal man to other men so that the latter may assume full responsibility before the objects which [have been] thus laid bare.”Footnote ² His literary corpus is a dynamically active and alert engagement with the infinite One enacted in this world full of men and women, objects, events, and the perpetually stirring rhythms of the cosmos.

We end this volume then with the praxis birthed in Guru Nanak’s poetics: Sangat (being together), Kirtan (divine praise), Langar (community meal), Seva (selfless service), and Vak (numinous message). Even the five physical markers worn on the Sikh body materialize from Guru Nanak’s verse as I explored in The Birth of the Khalsa: A Feminist Re-Memory of Sikh Identity (2005). Here we look into the five key Sikh institutions, which again are aesthetic modalities quintessentially democratic, emancipatory, and empathy-generating. Each of them strengthens philial muscles – love for the infinite One (theophilia), love for fellow beings (anthropophilia), love for the environment (biophilia), starting out, of course, with love for the elemental body/mind (somatophilia). Sangat, Langar, Kirtan, Seva, and Vak are exercises performed just now and just here to cultivate and reexperience the infinite love the founder Guru experienced. Activating the ubiquitous vitality of aesthetics, they intensify our sense of possible reality.

Guru Nanak’s poetry and praxis, I argue, are not exclusive to the Sikh community; rather, they are a commitment to what Judith Butler calls “cohabiting” with an “open-ended plurality” that includes all inhabitants of our planet earth.Footnote ³ Guru Nanak honors “mātā dharati” (mother earth) herself, as stated in the epilogue of his Japujī (Chapter 1). Religious, class, caste, and ethnic conflicts we face today were likewise rife at that time. Hindu–Muslim divisions, oppressive female codes of pativrata (devotion to husband), satī (widow’s commitment to die on the funeral pyre of her husband), and purdah (veiling), along with age-old caste divisions “Brahmin vs. Shudra” were festering in Indic society. Guru Nanak closely witnessed bigotry, the caste system, untouchability, and basic human degradation, and his sublime poetry intones his political desire for a radically inclusive sociality instrumental for changing attitudes and worldviews. Real change comes from within because external rules and policies do not change consciousness. As Jean-Paul Sartre acknowledged, “The engaged writer knows that words are action … The word is a certain particular moment of action.”Footnote ⁴ Our songster-poet-jeweller imparts Sartre’s hope that literature can serve as an instrument of social, political, and economic action. Paradoxically, the goal of communal well-being is achieved through an aesthetic experience of the infinite One by each individual.

As Dewey said, the very point of experience “is that it doesn’t occur in a vacuum; its agent-patient instead of being insulated and disconnected is bound up with the movement of things by most intimate and pervasive bonds.”Footnote ⁵ The qualitative and affective dimensions of experience provide human meaning, understanding, and value. Guru Nanak’s aesthetics is an open invitation for men and women from all walks of life to be together (sangat), sing and hear divine praise (kirtan), prepare and taste communal meals (langar), do selfless actions (sevā), and reflect on the daily numinous message (vāk). The consequence? A “we-feeling” that sets the foundation for a borderless world. With their pragmatic impulse for amelioration, these five interrelated practices train individuals to stretch themselves toward a shared human experience, a living together phenomenon that Edmund Husserl calls “life-world” (Lebenswelt).

C.1 Sangat

Sangat aesthetics is a spontaneous feeling of kinship with people we are with, conceived as “spontaneous” or “existential communitas” by cultural anthropologist Victor Turner.Footnote ⁶ For Guru Nanak this shared experience transcending sociostructural positioning was essential for personal, social, and spiritual well-being. His ideal emerges prominently in his discourse with Siddha ascetics:

For a hermeneutics of Guru Nanak’s compressed comment, we turn to our American pragmatist philosopher:

The goal is to relate empathetically, intimately, across sects, races, nations, classes, and cliques. But how do we open our self to the other? How do we reach out to the other? The medium is the sensuous quintet – see with their eyes, hear with their ears. The unique somatic organs each individual possesses are flipped to the other so the egoistic individuality recedes and the experience, interests, aims, and desires of the other are understood from their perspective, not as we imagine we would feel. Thus it is the sensuous quintet by which we expand the self to “re +cognize (pachānai) ourself (āpu) in every (sarab) being (jīā).” Dewey’s process of “understand”-ing parallels Guru Nanak’s “recognizing” – at once sensory and cognitive. This is how we open our spirit to the pain of another and carry out “radical empathy” advocated by Wilkerson.Footnote ⁸

At the end of his travels Guru Nanak settled in Kartarpur. Upending the “uncivility of their civilization,” he welcomed men and women, old and young, Hindu and Muslim, widow, married, and single, Brahmin, Khatri, Vaishya, Shudra, or Dalit. In the natural landscape of the flowing river Ravi, they grew crops, farmed, harvested, cooked, cleaned, and sang Nanakian melodies. This new Sangat followed his liberative philosophy and praxis. Rejecting biological identities and hereditary professions, his followers put into effect the values of equality, civic action, and inclusivity. These seekers practiced religiosity in companionship, not in renunciation of the world. As the Guru said, “There is no satisfaction without the company of the good – binu sangat sādh na pradhiye” (GGS: 20); “it is only in the company of the good that we taste divine elixir – sādh sangat mahi hari ras pāiai (GGS: 598). Affirming marriage, family, society, and every kind of profession, Guru Nanak fuses sapiential tasting with ultimate knowledge: “so glorious is true company that we recognize reality, we get to know true being – tat laheh antargat jāneh sat sangat sāc vadāī he” (GGS: 1026). In a passage of exquisite beauty, he compares good friends with a bottle of perfume which we must open to breathe in the scent (Chapter 4), while stressing the bonds of friendship: “with our body bound to theirs, our thoughts fused – ehu tanu jin sio gādiā man līaṛā dītā” (GGS: 765). True companionship metamorphoses the state of imperfect existence into one of spiritual perfection. “Just as iron rubbed against the philosopher’s stone turns into gold, so does dark ignorance transform into brilliant light in the company of the good – pārasu bheti kancanu dhātu hoī sat sangati kī vaḍiāī” (GGS: 505).

The first men and women who befriended Guru Nanak subsequently came to be known as “Sikhs.” The sensuous quintet was common to all genders, ages, religions, castes, classes, and religions, and in their coming together as allies, men and women broke free from stifling societal restrictions. Guru Nanak “saw no stranger” (a popular title of books)Footnote ⁹ precisely because he recognized physical sensibilities common to everybody. Whatever differences of complexion, hair color or texture, culture, sexuality, or religion, how could anybody with eyes, nose, ears, mouth, and skin be a stranger or foreigner? His final successor Guru Gobind Singh reiterates: “Different vestures from different countries may make us appear different, we have the same eyes, the same ears, the same body, the same language – niāre niāre desan ke bhes ko prabhāo hai ekai nain ekai kān ekai deh ekai bān” (Akal Ustat: 86). The senses activate the timeless inner spark of each individual for warm encounters, linguistic interactions, and communal networks.

Foremost Sikh historian Bhai Gurdas poetically describes the revolutionary spirit unleashed by the first Sikh Guru. “The four social classes are shown as one – cāri varan ikk varan dikhāia,” “kings and paupers are equal – rāṇā rank barābari” (Vār I: 23). Seismic divisions of Indian society dissipate: “Ganga is made to flow in the opposite direction – ulṭī gang vahāīoni” (Vār I: 38)! In lengthy passages Bhai Gurdas conveys the radical social and religious transformation brought about by Guru Nanak: just as a needle sews materials ripped asunder, he brings harmony to the torn and conflicting groups of Hindus and Muslims (Vār 33: 4).

Closer to our times, we note that the Nanakian Sangat bears a striking affinity with Martin Luther King’s “beloved community” and Desmond Tutu’s “Ubuntu” since their substratum likewise is the equality, interconnectedness, and enhancement of humanity. In his address “The Birth of a New Age” social activist and Baptist minister Martin Luther King imagines:

On the strength of the love of God in the human heart Martin Luther King founded and preserved his beloved community that lived like a family, and justice for all people was the expression of that love.Footnote ¹¹ Similarly, Nobel Peace Prize winner, anti-apartheid activist, and leading spokesman for nonviolence in South Africa, Bishop Desmond Tutu invoked Ubuntu from his African Weltanschauung, meaning inter-relationality. The maxim of Ubuntu: “I am because I belong, I participate, I share.”Footnote ¹² Whether Sangat, Beloved Community, or Ubuntu, the coming together of diverse people is an ontological identification of the self with others – with the ethical responsibility to work for the collective good. Martin Luther King’s precept “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” is shared by all three visions of community.

Sangat aesthetics is at once a philosopher’s stone and a touchstone. In the physical proximity of good people, negative proclivities diffuse; transcendent light lights up within. Its transformative power turns an iron-like egoist into a gold-like citizen. Sangat is a touchstone against all sorts of segregations and discriminations. The contact point is the skin, which S. Brent Plate reminds us gets ignored in the construction of body, self, others, world, and social-sacred space. In his gripping article “The Skin of Religion: Aesthetic Mediations of the Sacred,” Plate defines “skin” as the “liminal, semi-porous boundary between inner and outer worlds, between self and world. Here is the edge of productive space: the ebb and flow of sight, scent, sound, touch, and taste.”Footnote ¹³ Plate’s thesis is meaningful: skin is deep, there is nothing superficial about it. Whether farming or cooking or partaking of a Langar meal or singing divine praise, the “religious skinscape” passes sensations, perceptions, emotions, knowledge, imagination, spirituality in and out from body to body, solidifying a Sangat’s cohesion and communality.

Durkheim’s anthropological reflections shed further light on Sangat dynamics: “When they are once come together, a sort of electricity is formed by their collecting which quickly transports them to an extraordinary degree of exaltation. Every sentiment expressed finds a place without resistance in all the minds, which are very open to outside impressions; each re-echoes the others, and is re-echoed by the others.”Footnote ¹⁴ The electric current passing from person to person is through the bodily quintet. All connections are made by embodied and embedded beings. Grounded in lived events, Sangat is the aesthetic feeling of a group when life together takes on full meaning – a shared intimate transcendence. And so to cite Guru Nanak again, “we recognize reality, we get to know true being.” The first Sangat started by Guru Nanak at a particular moment in history may have consisted of a small group of men and women, but its ecumenical momentum resonant with every era and region reaches out to embrace a global Sangat.

C.2 Kirtan

From the very origins, the central Sikh devotional practice has been kirtan, which I define is the synergy of “singing, listening, and nurturing love – gāvīai, suṇīai, mani rakhīai bhāo” stated in the Japujī (Chapter 1; GGS: 2). Singing was songster Nanak’s supreme mode of divine praise, and the Kartarpur community gathered around Nanak to sing, recite, and hear his melodies of divine love. In Bhai Gurdas’ poetic testimony, “So Daru and Arati were sung in the evening, Jap was recited in the morning” (Canto 1: 38). Distinguishing between the evening singing (gāvīai) routine and the morning recitation (ucārā) of the Japujī, Bhai Gurdas depicts Guru Nanak’s multisensory aesthetics: “ghari ghari bābā gāvīai vajani tāl mridangu rabābā – each and every home resounds with Baba’s songs; music of drums and rabab fills the air” (24: 4). Artistically he proceeds to convey Guru Nanak’s contagious synesthesia – “like the fragrant sandalwood makes all vegetation fragrant.”

Kirtan aesthetics is at once ontological, physiological, and epistemological. Nanak exists (jivā) singing (gāe) divine (hari) praise (guṇ). Singing is his ontological condition, and it is an anatomical process and product. Andrew Hicks’ “Sonic Materialisms” is a useful depiction of the complex combinations involved in vocal sound. Our lungs and windpipe serve as bellows for the exhalation of air necessary for the production of voice, and the “mouth, in turn, provides the natural ‘instruments’— the lips, tongue, palate, and teeth – by which the passing air is given shape …”Footnote ¹⁵ Emerging from the body, the material sounds of divine praise in Kirtan performance travel through the medium of physics to the ears of the audience, echoing and re-echoing spiritual meaning and joy amongst audiences.

The epistemological value of singing extensively elaborated in the Japujī (Chapter 1) continues on: “Singing praise, the mind attains understanding” (GGS: 1125); “Singing divine praise wisdom is enhanced” reiterates Guru Amar Das (GGS: 161). “When we sing rapturous divine praise, we are enraptured, we line our eyes with knowledge” (GGS: 1113). The joyous contents of divine song enlighten singers with a blissful cognition of the universal One opening their senses to the marvels surrounding them: Singing makes us wonderstruck – bisam bhae guṇ gāidā (GGS: 1036). Plato too had acknowledged the aesthetic power of music: “musical training is a more potent instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul, on which they mightily fasten, imparting grace, and making the soul of him who is rightly educated graceful” (Plato, Republic, Book 3. 401d). For Guru Nanak, the song and music of divine praise soak mind and body with the transcendent One such that the singular sound, from which all sounds arise, becomes audible.

His successors built upon his musical praxis. As noted in Chapter 2, most of the GGS is framed in thirty-one rāga sections, and acoustic piety continues to bring Sikh communities together whether in their homeland or in diasporic communities. Over the centuries, diverse Kirtan performers have introduced diverse musical styles and a plurality of intonations.Footnote ¹⁶ From Bhai Mardana’s rabab and the typical twentieth-century tabla and harmonium, the musical repertoire has expanded considerably in the modern milieu. Ancient instruments are being revived, new ones are being added, and both Eastern and Western instruments and accents reverberate Guru Nanak’s sublime words. Kirtan ensembles include instruments such as the saranda, taus, dilruba, tanpura, jori/pakhawaj, santur, sitar, zithers, violin, cello, mandolin, piano, and even the Australian didgeridoo. Professional groups from India travel widely to perform Kirtan in all corners of the world. Diasporic Sikhs in America, Australia, Africa, and Europe are avidly training in Kirtan.

It is heartening to witness Dhāḍhi Nanak’s musical legacy diversifying and expanding transnationally and transculturally, touching listeners in all corners of the world – just as he desired (GGS: 150). I would say, both the revival of traditional instruments and the inclusion of new ones in the contemporary Kirtan ensemble are in consonance with the plurality of accents, regions, centuries, religions, philosophical notes, classical ragās, and folk tunes enshrined in the GGS. Fostering relationships among diverse people, the universal language of music accompanied by Eastern and/or Western musical instruments amplifies the allure and impact of Guru Nanak’s wondrous poetry. The recent academic attention to the sensory affect of “soundings” of sacred texts should engender a sustained aesthetic engagement with Kirtan.Footnote ¹⁷ It is through songster Nanak that “Sikh” subjectivity came into being, and through his melodies it is being sustained.

C.3 Langar

Sikh aesthetics of Langar (community meal) also goes back to men and women who gathered around Guru Nanak. Langar kitchens were common in Sufi shrine complexes.Footnote ¹⁸ The earliest memories of Guru Nanak recount the importance he gave to food for the sustenance of the body and for its aesthetic consumption in the company of others. Even when he was young, Nanak fed hungry ascetics with the money his father had given him to start a business. When he worked in a granary shop, he would happily give away food items to the poor and needy. The B-40 Janamsākhī narrates his discourse with a group of ascetics practicing severe austerities up in the Himalayan range. The Guru beholds them fasting and dipping their bodies into icy cold water where some even die. He then points them to a lukewarm lake to bathe in, and with his cupped hands – that can hold pounds of rice, ghee, and sugar – he feeds the famished ascetics (B-40, p. 133).Footnote ¹⁹ Likewise many other narratives showcase him disrupting body-negating practices and feeding the needy. In another B-40 narrative he ensures that the Langar be served twice daily, and that it include items people would aesthetically savor (bhuncai, B-40: 91). This sensuous verb used by Guru Nanak is the very same word we find in the epilogue of the GGS (p. 1429). Thus the fifth Guru reinforces the aesthetic efficacy of the text he meticulously brought together: a “platter” with dishes to be savoured (bhuncai), and not simply eaten (khāvai). Richard Shusterman describes eating as an instinct-driven, habitual behavior of ingesting food and drink thoughtlessly, automatically, and insensitively.Footnote ²⁰ Guru Arjan’s distinction is important because the Sikh sacred text – like food taken into the body – is to be thoughtfully, sensitively savored.

The institution of Langar must have been established early in Sikh history because Mata Khivi (d. 1582, wife of the second Sikh Guru) is extolled in the GGS by bard Balvand:

Mata Khivi is regarded as a bountiful shady tree who provides comfort to all. This noble and generous woman prepares khīru. This milk pudding metaphorically used by Guru Nanak (āpe backhrū gaū khīru, see Chapter 3) is actually prepared in the kitchen, drenched in ghee, served to men and women by Mata Khivi, and savored like ambrosia. In her generous distribution of Langar, Mata Khivi advances Guru Nanak’s somato-bio-anthropo-philia.

Like Kirtan, the practice of Langar has evolved in unprecedented ways. In Sikh places of worship in India and abroad, it is voluntarily prepared and served to people irrespective of caste, class, religion, or sex. At the central Sikh shrine, the Golden Temple in Amritsar, about 80,000 visitors daily eat meals prepared by enthusiastic volunteers. Over the weekends, almost twice as many are served Langar. The New York Times calls it the “world’s largest free eatery.”Footnote ²¹ Rich or poor, Sikh or nonSikh, everybody partakes of the Guru’s vegetarian Langar sitting on the floor equally in horizontal lines.Footnote ²² Currently Langar is making its entry into academia: the University of Denver in Colorado developed a full credit course incorporating Langar as the basis for building community. During the pandemic, Langar broadened in many ways including “take out” and “delivery” services. Sikh communities supplied rice, lentils, and vegetable dishes to hospital workers, the homeless, the elderly, or anyone in search of a hot meal in metropolises all over the world. Even lorry drivers stuck in Kent due to the UK–France travel ban, had Langar. During the oxygen shortage crisis, Sikh gurdwaras and NGOs opened life-saving medical “oxygen langars,” and converted some Langar halls into Covid care centers with oxygen beds.

Why is Langar placed center stage in Sikh religiosity? The food is instinctively partaken, but the somatophilial ingredients suffusing its ideals and praxis are rarely acknowledged. I trace the phenomenon to Guru Nanak’s embodied revelation when he consumed food and drink given to him by the formless One (Chapter 5). That is the first moment in Sikh history, and that meal I believe constitutes the very texture and taste of Langar cooked and served and consumed worldwide today. To transmit the taste of what he himself tasted during his divine revelation became the raison d’être of his life and mission. We know food is a complex dynamic, “a system of communication, a body of images, a protocol of usages, situations, and behavior” as Roland Barthes unfolds.Footnote ²³ The Sikh Guru inaugurated this basic practice to bring about a paradigm shift from his somatophobic society to a somatophilial existentiality; the community meal became his mode of demolishing religious, social, and psychologically ossified hierarchical structures that robbed people of respect for their body and identity. His egalitarian new community would equally and freely partake of the transcendent One.

It is important that the full potential of Guru Nanak’s emancipatory Langar be realized. “When food brings people together, the results are not always cheerful” cautions Jon Keune.Footnote ²⁴ Cultural anthropologist Mary Douglas studied food as a “natural symbol” functioning in multiple symbolic systems with its visible (gross) and invisible (subtle) properties exuding enormous power.Footnote ²⁵ Rules of purity and pollution – what was taken inside the body and with whom – led to horrific segregations in Guru Nanak’s era, and they even fester today. Mind–body dualism, with its toxic binaries of male–female, sacred–profane, material–transcendent, Hindu–Muslim, Brahmin–Shudra, us–them is rampant. Body-disparaging, son-privileging, and misogynistic codes prescribed in ancient texts and internalized by the north Indian patriarchal society from centuries ago need to be shaken off. The touch of an “untouchable, of a menstruating woman, or of anyone who has fallen (from his or her caste), of a woman who has just given birth, of a corpse, or of anyone who has touched any of these objects” is considered pollutant by Manu (Laws of Manu, 5: 85), and Manu’s views from two thousand years ago continue to prevail.

Evidently the dishes of Guru Nanak’s Langar have not been fully savored or digested. Women are calling attention to the gender bias in Sikh communities. Opinderjit Takhar examines taboos imposed on women cooking Langar meals and preparing kaṛāprasād during their menstrual period at gurdwaras in the United Kingdom.Footnote ²⁶ Barbara Bertolani observes the gendered roles and practices among Sikhs in gurdwaras in northern Italy.Footnote ²⁷ Jagbir Jhutti-Johal correlates exclusion of women from various activities in Sikh religious institutions with the sexual divisions in Sikh society.Footnote ²⁸ In her widely researched work, Relocating Gender in Sikh History, Doris Jakobsh traces the historical development of a hypermasculine militaristic ideology that has led to gender hierarchy in Sikh practice.Footnote ²⁹ Customarily, the celebratory Langar for the birth of a son has much more zest than that of a daughter, and gender roles for sons and daughters continue to be very different throughout their lives. To come to think of it, why in public worship have I never received kaṛāprasād from female hands? Women are especially impacted by purity/impurity binaries implicated by power and identity. As Githa Hariharan depicts through her protagonist, a ninety-year-old Brahmin widow, oppressive food taboos have been imposed upon women’s bodies for centuries.Footnote ³⁰

Conventional exclusionary practices are diametrically antithetical to Guru Nanak’s Langar aesthetics. As his works demonstrate, dietary regulations for the Guru were constructed by religious elites to control and enforce social hierarchies. No substance was polluted in itself, nor biological birth in any caste or religion. As he said, the categories of purity/taboo were human concoctions: “the mind’s pollution is greed, the tongue’s is lies, the pollution of the eyes is to covet another’s wife, wealth, beauty; the ears’ pollution is to hear malice and thrive on mistrust” (GGS: 472). Guru Nanak bitingly condemns the absurdity and hypocrisy of the dominant caste’s “pure” food:

Here is another sharp critique of the stringent food norms upheld by his hegemonic Brahmanical society:

Guru Nanak’s bold denunciation with a satirical edge resounds in the loud laughter of the aged Brahmin widow Rukmani as she gulps down cakes made with eggs, and green chili snacks cooked by nonBrahmin hands from a Christian bakery in Hariharan’s narrative.Footnote ³¹ For the partaker of transcendent Langar (Chapter 5) all human beings are born equal in dignity and rights, and the constructs of purity/pollution were but self-serving artificially fabricated egoistic attitudes and behaviors.

The Langar meal, with everybody sitting and eating together, would dismantle social hegemonies and spatial demarcations. No male or female, upper caste or lower, is designated to be served first. Lyrically Guru Nanak depicts slow swallowing motions bringing kinesthetic enjoyment in good company: “sipping elixir stirring – jholi amritu pījai” (GGS: 766). His three words illuminate the ambrosial effect of gastronomical and reflective stirring amid good people. Rejecting the fuss over “pure” food contingent on the hands, place, or the time of the month it is prepared and with whom it is partaken, Guru Nanak values interactive food aesthetics. No Michelin-starred highbrow aesthetic, it would be a sensory experience of simple meals collectively cooked and shared.

Guru Nanak’s Langar aesthetics evokes respect for ingredients and mediums supplied by mother earth. “Grain is holy, water is holy, fire is holy, salt too, and by adding ghee, the fifth, our food is purer still …” he says (Chapter 4). The meal elicits respect for the water, seasons, bees, and the environment that enable production of those diverse and delicious items, respect for the acts of cooking and eating, respect for the bodies we cook and dine with, and ultimately respect for the life we lead on a daily basis. A widespread narrative in public memory highlights Guru Nanak’s stress on food ethics: when he squeezed fancy bread from a wealthy exploitative Malik Bhago, blood spattered; when he squeezed a plain crust from an honest carpenter Bhai Lalo, milk flowed. Langar practice intensifies existential unity. Each bite feeds us transcendent joy; each bite compels us to confront food apartheid. How can we let millions of men, women, and children starve? What must we do to resolve food injustice, environmental devastation, and the global hunger crisis? Guru Nanak’s invitation to an all-inclusive preparation and intake of Langar must no longer remain a utopian ideal; it has to be concretized into daily practice.

C.4 Seva

Community-oriented, Seva (selfless actions) is another powerful aesthetic glue for human bonding.

A recent ethnographic study brings out Seva’s salient features:

Seva prescribes no specific action. Guru Nanak cast off professions based on biological caste hegemonies, with actions imposed during the four stages of life (varnā shrama dharma), and with actions based on gender role (stridharma). An intensified sense of the all-inclusive One is his sole criterion for ethical behavior.

In Jacques Derrida’s philosophical discourse on “hospitality” we discern two requisites which also happen to underlie Sikh Seva. The first is the unconditional reception of others – irrespective of caste, class, race, or species. Hospitality “must, would have to open itself to an other that is not mine” says Derrida.Footnote ³³ Guru Nanak’s panc can sense others as the self and extend selfless service unconditionally across social and religious divisions. Seva is performed here and everywhere for the benefit of all others – in the home, neighborhood, surroundings, workplace, sports, nature. Nobody is excluded. “Living in this world let us serve – vici dunīā sev kamāīai” (GGS: 26) urges Nanak, our pragmatist philosopher. Not confined to gurdwara precincts, ritual acts, or donations as generally conceived, Seva is in and for the world at large (vici dunīā). Derrida’s second requisite is the conditional welcoming of the Other with joy: “it is hard to imagine a scene of hospitality during which one welcomes [accueille] without smiling at the other, without giving a sign of joy or pleasure …”Footnote ³⁴ Such joy (cāo) is elemental to Nanakian existentiality (Chapter 1), and its varied joyful signifiers such as blushing, going round and round, or swinging the arms abound in Guru Nanak’s oeuvre. We must not let societal codes, fears, and phobias get in the way of serving all others cheerfully.

Seva is foreshadowed in his Japujī realm of action (Karam Khanḍ, stanza 37) “where live mighty warriors and heroes” (tithai jodh mahābal sūr) including the cherished Sita and women like her (sīto-sītā). Since these courageous ethical exemplars made their passage through the aesthetic realm (Saram Khanḍ), their faculties are refined; they are not beguiled by vicious lust, anger, greed, attachment, or arrogance (Chapter 1). Their hearts beat with the true One (sacā mani soe). Radiating the transcendent within, their (tā kai) beautiful bodies (rūp) are beyond expression (na kathne jāhi). They are not alone. These residents of Karam Khanḍ live with “devotees from diverse worlds – bhagat vasahi ke loa,” extending their hospitality to each and all. Japujī # 37 compositionally conjoins this realm of actions (Karam Khanḍ) with the realm of truth (Sac Khanḍ) where dwells the formless One (Nirankar). The beauty of the singular truth expands the individual self to welcome others, so together they perform joyous actions (karahi anandu). Ontological truth is lived out by these archetypal volunteers (sevādārs) adumbrated in the Japujī.

A contemporary example of Seva in Delhi during Covid-19 is Jatinder Singh Shunty. He is the personification of humanitarianism, heroism, pluralism, and relentless service. At the peak of Covid-19, he took up the job of the untouchables to perform the last rites of Covid contagious patients. Unconditionally he received the dead bodies of Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, and Christians and cremated or buried them with the dignity they deserved. In his Seva, Guru Nanak’s ideal of the One reality ikkoankār, and one morality eko dharam, are admirably actualized.

C.5 Vak

Morning and evening, in private or in public worship, Sikhs open the GGS at random and read the first hymn on its left-hand page as their Vak. Literally speech, Vak is received by readers and listeners as their transcendent message. The tradition goes back to the day in 1604 when Guru Arjan enshrined the sacred volume in the newly built Harmandar (divine temple), the modern-day Golden Temple, and appointed Bhai Buddha to conduct the inaugural ceremony. In Sikh memory the first Vak read by Bhai Buddha was an exaltation of the divine One for standing by the completion of the momentous task (GGS: 783). The numinous verse intersected with that specific historical moment.

Thus the Vak is a juncture of the personal with the universal, a daily connection with the timeless One. Its suspense is exciting. The initial “what will the message be?” transitions into “what does it signify?” Words read, heard, and seen are matter and they matter (both noun and verb); these are not static, they create a material intimacy with the infinite One. Depending on the reader’s temporal location and stage of life, the multivalent words offer different meanings and solutions, a response to whatever particular anxiety, hope, question, or dilemma the reader or listener may have, Vak elicits an understanding of the composition, its interpretation from one’s immediate situation, and its implementation. In Sikh routine Gadamer’s threefold hermeneutics is thus put into practice at least twice a day – at the beginning when the GGS is opened, and at the end of the day when it is closed for rest. We can say Vak is an aesthetic response, aesthetically received, and aesthetically applied in making everyday choices, shaping attitudes, thoughts, and actions.

Guru Nanak’s all-embracing verses and practices were intended to bring about equity, inclusivity, and the dignity of the masses. Exalting the universal One, cooking and dining together, working selflessly for the common good, are ways to dissolve selfish ego, melt away limiting prejudices, infuse infinite love within, and to guard mother earth and defend civil and human rights for people across castes, religions, and genders. These aspirations are couched in the finale of the Sikh liturgical prayer Ardas recited morning and evening for “the good of all – sarbat dā bhalā.”

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Inconclusive Conclusion

Poetry-praxis launched by the First Sikh can make significant contributions to contemporary discourse of “the everyday aesthetics” (Alexander, 2013; Berleant 2010; Eaton 1989; Irvin 2016; Kupfer 1983; Leddy 2012; Light & Smith 2005; Mandoki 2007; Novitz 1992; Saito 2017). Generally neglected by traditional aesthetic theory, the aesthetic response to ordinary things and daily activities solicited by Guru Nanak centuries ago is now moving out from its confined walls of arts and philosophy to personal, domestic, social, economic, global, sports, environmental, and educational spheres. In various disciplines scholars are championing the transformative power of aesthetics: “when the sensible is followed through on its own terms the results are indeed metamorphic” remarks Arnold Berleant, an expert in both philosophy and music.Footnote ³⁵ The urgency to connect aesthetics with ethics is proclaimed by Yuriko Saito: “everyday aesthetics discourse has a social responsibility to guide its power toward enriching personal life, facilitating respectful and satisfying interpersonal relationships, creating a civil and humane society, and ensuring the sustainable future.”Footnote ³⁶ The wish for better world-making includes the soil, water, air, animals, insects …, what wildlife ecologist Aldo Leopold called the “land ethic.”Footnote ³⁷

As my study has shown, these goals inform Guru Nanak’s aesthetics. Artistically, Guru Nanak reminds us that we emerged from the basic matter of the universe, we share the singular source, and we are a part of the reality of the diverse chemical, biological, and material shapes and forms.Footnote ³⁸ His reverence for a tiny ant, sparrow, bumblebee or sugarcane, for all beings big and small, makes us question the relentless way we are ruining our ecosystem, and aesthetically motivates us to realign our estranged relationship with the biosphere. Akin to modern writers and activists, Nanakian aesthetics is closely bound up with ethics – performing everyday actions for the betterment of humanity and the environment. Engaging the Sikh Guru in conversation with contemporary scholars should prove to be an interesting and valuable future venture.

Although Nanak’s aesthetics aligns well with contemporary activists, philosophers, and environmentalists, the Guru’s everyday aesthetics is distinctly defined by the transcendent One – the constant of all that is done, desired, thought, imagined, and enjoyed. Søren Kierkegaard demarcated three existential categories – the aesthetic, ethical, and religious, but Guru Nanak’s existentiality includes all three simultaneously. To discern the hallmark of Guru Nanak’s aesthetics we turn to Marcel Proust. A Proustian excerpt cited by Thomas Leddy in The Extraordinary in the Ordinary: The Aesthetics of Everyday Life provides us with an interesting and instructive comparative lens:

A counterpart to Proust’s detailed description is a compressed Nanakian verse:

In both instances the magnitude of exquisite pleasure is bodily expressed: the shudder running through Proust’s whole body parallels Guru Nanak’s entire body glowing in crimson. The catalyst? Their tasting tongue. Gone is the feeling of mediocrity, mortality, anything mundane; a spacious timeless reality is being sensuously experienced. Their bodies are flooded by the precious essence of love, “this essence was not in me, it was myself.” From his literary and artistic world Proust gives us an insight into the mechanics of Guru Nanak’s aesthetics: the extraordinary is experienced in the ordinary through the transcendent power of the senses. Comprised of the essential substances (tatu) these five constitute the very self.

The novelist and poet are both engulfed by an all-powerful joy, but the difference is that Guru Nanak is fully cognizant of its origins and significance. Proust’s questions “Whence did it come? What did it signify?” do not arise in Guru Nanak’s oeuvre. He has no doubts that the dyer coloring him so vibrantly is the transcendent One permeating everybody – dūjā rangu na koī (there is no other). His alliterative “r’s” – rasi/tasting/experiencing, rangu/color, rātī/soaking, and consonant ati/intensification, echo in rātī, to deepen his crimson passion (calūlai); as they resound in his symmetrical versets, they ingeniously reinforce the intensity of his sensuous cognition of the ontological One. He needs no proofs ontological, epistemological, moral, or teleological. Like the French author the Guru expresses his inability to “define” the experience, “as hard as iron” as he often admits. But he does seize upon its all-powerful joy: shattering the dichotomy between “rational word” and “sensuous flesh” his vast literary constellation constantly emits it. A tiny slice of it stimulates embodied knowledge – ethical actions that affirm the body, matter, and matrix.

The joy of eating a slice of cake soaked in tea may subside, but Nanakian joy soaked in the transcendent hue stays perpetually high – sadā mani cāo (Chapter 1). For the celebrant of difference and diversity, each material has its unique glow: “wherever I turn I see Your light, what a form You possess! Your one form is everywhere but no two forms are alike” (GGS: 596). The One is absolutely single, the One animates each entity in this pluriversal multiverse, and yet wonder of wonders, no two entities are alike (koe na kis hī jehā, Chapter 4)! The metaphysical One is physically seen, heard, smelt, and felt in every bit of the finite world. As the boundaries of an entity collapse, Guru Nanak’s wonder moves on to the beauty and magic of the next, and so he stays perpetually inebriated: “You are one, but with so many forms, says Nanak, I just can’t grasp Your wonders – eku tū hor ves bahutere nanak jānai coj na tere” (GGS: 356). In form after form, shape after shape, big or small, Nanak is fascinated by the disclosure of beauteous truth. The cognizance of singular unity in its magnificent diversity keeps the magic going: “sahibu merā nīt navā – my Sovereign is ever anew” (GGS: 660). In the transcendent hue, whatever is overlooked and ordinary in the domestic, social, natural, and interior landscapes, shines and rings out. The disclosure brought about by the sensuous quintet happens in the moment now – not before or hereafter, and in relationships with others – not in isolation or renunciation.

The role of the imagination is crucial to Nanakian aesthetics, extending beyond museums, music halls, pilgrim spots, and outdoor stages to a jeweller’s smithy, a granary shop, a kitchen. Whatever the activity, it is done with a sense of the infinite One, intensifying the experience to infinite possibilities for the common good. A popular narrative recounts a young Nanak working in a granary store. One day while he was weighing food materials, he got stuck at the number thirteen (terā) a homonym for “yours” in Punjabi. So a wonderstruck Nanak kept on repeating terā terā terā (“Yours” referring to the all-inclusive One) as he went on doling out goods and his customers assuming he was addressing them kept on filling up their bags and sacks. This simple Punjabi story illustrates the role of the imagination in activating daily aesthetics. The transcendent One is spliced with the needy male and female customers.

Guru Nanak leaves us with the answer to Michel Foucault’s question: [C]ouldn’t everyone’s life become a work of art? Why should the lamp or the house be an art object, but not our life?”Footnote ⁴⁰ Life is art at its supreme when lived freely with family and friends, colored in love and beauty. For sure, art is not confined to objects or to the expertise of artists. Our poet-songster-jeweller-prophet-pragmatist philosopher generated a new “sikh” subjectivity. He steered away from pregiven prescribed ethics, refusing to follow his society’s fossilized do’s and don’ts. Deconstructing the conventional power systems that control and regiment people, his transcendent aesthetics is a heightened, creative, liberated mode of artful life for everybody, every day, amid everybody. Let us not impose those oppressive do’s and don’ts that reinforce the hierarchies of sex, caste, and class denounced by Guru Nanak.

Innovatively, constructively, continuously, Guru Nanak’s compositions affirm the kaleidoscopic dimensions of daily existence. Consuming all sorts of foods – salty, tangy, tasty with their thirty-six flavors, dressing in fine robes and sashes, riding horses with golden caparisons, playing sports, receiving honors, travelling, being in the home close with family, visiting places of worship … are equally celebrated (GGS: 16–17). In the visual rendition of this Nanakian hymn from the 1733 B-40 manuscript, our mental eye can see a slice of Proust’s cake soaked in tea among the mouth-watering platter of typical Punjabi sweets beside Guru Nanak.Footnote ⁴¹ What makes life a work of art? A sensuous feel of the transcendent material informing and coloring all items sipped, eaten, worn, touched, smelt, heard, given, visited, received, worshipped, related with. “All thirty-six ambrosias lie in the singular love – chatih amrit bhāo ek” but without it, “this body sinks in pain, vice enters the mind and makes it go insane – tanu pīṛīai man meh cale vikār” is the refrain of his four-stanza composition (GGS: 16–17). Guru Nanak’s aesthetic modalities are self-practices to awaken love for that infinite One so that life becomes “a perfect and sublime work” – beautifully colored, informed, and intensified.Footnote ⁴²

Set into motion more than half a millennium ago on the banks of the river Ravi, Guru Nanak’s aesthetic legacy is ever accumulating, and holds enormous import for future experiences of our global community. Going beyond gurdwara precincts, beyond the Sikh community, beyond all parochialism and communitarianism, his sensuous transcendence invites intimate and pervasive bonds with religious, racial, gender, ethnic, and national others close and far. The Nanakian art of living is not an ivory tower aspiration but an immersion into the nitty-gritties of everyday experiences, a labor for the construction of a just, equitable, inclusive, and sustainable world. “The aesthetic dimensions of experience are what make possible our ability to make sense of, be at home in, and intelligently reconstruct our world.”Footnote ⁴³ Guru Nanak’s Transcendent Aesthetics welcomes everybody to experience the infinite unicity in their own unique embodied, embedded self. By embracing the infinite One, we “shake off all worldly shame – bisarī lāj lokanī” (GGS: 1197), and “live forward” to engender exciting new horizons.

To conclude our inconclusive Conclusion, we recall Gadamer cited in the Introduction, “the poet is the I which we all are.” The phenomenological immediacy of Guru Nanak’s Transcendent Aesthetics reflects back to the reader, and in that vibrant fusion we experience his enduring delight in truth and beauty – sati suhāṇu sadā mani cāo. The contagious ripples can move us out of our anesthetized mode of existence to work aesthetically charged so that “everyone’s life become[s] a work of art,” everybody – equally – gets to enjoy truth and beauty.