This volume is a homecoming of many sorts. I grew up in a Sikh home in the Punjab, resounding with Guru Nanak’s hymns. A part of life, they were simply taken for granted – a hearing without listening. It’s only when I came to the USA to attend a girls’ high school and felt uprooted from home and heritage that I became attentive to the world I had lost. A course on American Transcendentalists was quite nourishing, for just as Walt Whitman’s earthy democratic “leaves of grass” began to seep into my psyche, the vitality of Sikh scriptural verses began to unfold inside me. The urge to learn about my literary heritage took me back home each summer to study at the Punjabi University where my father chaired the Department of Religious Studies and later edited the Encyclopedia of Sikhism. For my BA honors thesis at Wellesley College, I chose to study Sikh literature. The academic areas and methodologies of my teachers in New England and in the Punjab were worlds apart, and the geographical distance between the two continents in the 1970s was dauntingly wider. But Professors Lucetta Mowry (Christianity), Robert Garis (English), and Ingrid Stadler (Philosophy) in America and the Sikh scholars Dr. Taran Singh, Dr. Attar Singh, Giani Gurcharan Singh, and Dr. Rattan Singh Jaggi in India were equally valuable to me. What intrigued me then was the extraordinary feat of Guru Nanak: How can he express an utterly metaphysical subject so sensuously?

This project is a return to that very matter, a focused attention on Guru Nanak’s transcendent aesthetics. By “transcendent” I do not mean the other world beyond, nor does “aesthetics” pertain to some elite sphere of art and philosophy; transcendent is the all-inclusive materiality of Guru Nanak’s poetic body, and aesthetics is its affectivity in the everyday lived realities. In fact, the founder guru of the Sikh religion identifies himself as a poet (shāir) and songster (ḍhāḍhī) whose breath (sāsu) and flesh (māsu) belong to the infinite One (Guru Granth Sahib [GGS]: 660), and enraptured by the Beloved who informs each physical phenomenon, he voices a love that extends to all finite bodies, forms, and shapes. But patriarchal presumptions, dualistic intellectual habits, and scholarly emphases on Guru Nanak’s theological and historical contributions have eclipsed his aesthetic legacy. Here I explore how his sensuous lyrics sanctify bodily faculties (somatophilia) crucial for divine love (theophilia) and extend to fellow beings (anthropophilia) in this very world (biophilia). My desire is that Guru Nanak’s hymns make their way beyond Sikh religious discourses and spaces of worship to their public multisensory reception so that new imaginaries and new existentialities can be reproduced in our twenty-first-century global society.

My research entails a revisiting and revisioning of primary Sikh source materials. These have fueled a wide variety of scholarly approaches for me, including a feminist analysis (Cambridge University Press 1993), scriptural translations (HarperCollins 1995, Penguin 2001, I. B. Tauris 2012, Penguin 2019, Harvard 2021, Harvard 2022), visual renditions (Roli 2023), introductions to the Sikh religion (I. B. Tauris 2011, Penguin 2019), and rememory of Guru Gobind Singh’s Khalsa (State University of New York Press, 2005). At this point I am using that lens to closely study Guru Nanak’s literary constellation composed of tiny rhythmic tissues. And boundless each of them is! They resist denotations, subvert conventional linguistic models, and motivate psychological, social, environmental, and political changes to happen. Promising practical consequences in the here and now, Guru Nanak’s poetics foreshadows the recent burgeoning philosophical subfields of “Somaesthetics” and “Everyday Aesthetics.”

This undertaking has come to be a heartwarming reunion with my revered editor Alex Wright. Some thirty years ago the topic of Sikhism was basically an academic outcast in the West. During an annual conference of the American Academy of Religion, I recall going around the book exhibition halls with my manuscript, “The Feminine Vision of the Sikh Transcendent.” While other editors treated it as an untouchable, Alex at Cambridge University Press greeted it with a sparkle in his eye. That moment is deeply imprinted in my mind and has been a constant source of inspiration. I am ever grateful to Alex and am delighted that Cambridge University Press will be publishing this lifelong project of mine. I also want to express my gratitude to the anonymous readers for their excellent suggestions. Thanks also to my colleagues far and near, to my endearing Colby students, and to the Sikh community. Their encouragement and love sustain me more than I can express.

I end by repeating the words of Sardar Harjinder Singh Dhami, President of the Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee. During an online celebration of the India Heritage Month in Ottawa (April 30, 2022), he urged audiences to wear (hanḍauṇī) the guru’s language (gurbāṇī) on their body (pinḍe te). Guru Nanak’s transcendent aesthetics is a disclosure of the colorful fabric that all beings, animate and inanimate, are equally a part of. By wearing his language as this study recovers, the fabric wears out and becomes the skin of each wearer: we feel the oneness we are.