Guru Angad Sahib: Cultivating the Sikh Mind, Body & Community

Welcome to SickCast, brought to you by Sick Research Institute, illuminating every path. In this episode of the SickCast, join researchers Santbir Singh and Dhammanpreet Singh as they discuss Santbir Singh's article titled, Guru Angad Sab, Cultivating the Sick Mind, Body and Community. Join in as they explore Guru Angad Sab's vision of developing the early sick community through institutions that nurtured the whole person. Why Guru Ji Ka Khalsa, Why Guru Ji Ki Fateh? Thank you for joining us today on the SickCast. Today we're joined by Santbir Singh, who's a research associate at the Sick Research Institute and is pursuing his PhD in Sociology at York University. My name is Dhammanpreet Singh and I'll be speaking to Santbir Singh today about his article, Guru Angad Sahib, Cultivating the Sick Mind, Body and Community, which explores Guru Angad Sab's vision of developing the early sick community through institutions that nurtured the whole person. Santbir Singh connects this cultivation of the whole self by Guru Angad Sab with the foundations being laid for the later development of Meethi Bedi, where the political spiritual doctrine and the forming of the Khalsa under Guru Gobind Singh Sahib. Thanks, Santbir, for talking to me today. Yeah, it's a pleasure. Raghur Jaka Khalsa, Raghur Ji Ki Fateh. Thank you so much for having me and I really look forward to speaking to you about this article. Of course, it was such a pleasure to read and we had a chance earlier to talk a little bit about your thinking behind it, so I'm excited to go a little bit deeper and to explore some of the points that you make. You opened the article by writing that Guru Angad Sahib's project was to cultivate both a new kind of human being and a new kind of collective. And your article selects three aspects of how Guru Sahib worked towards what you call the intellectual, social, spiritual and physical development of the six at both the individual and collective levels, often kind of simultaneously. To begin, I thought we could briefly discuss each of the three main sections of your article and just hear a little bit about what you're arguing and what you found in your own research. And then I'll ask you kind of two more broad questions to close our conversation. To start, you write about how Guru Angad Sahib developed and standardized the Gurmukhi script. And I think this is something that many six kind of know Guru Angad Sahib as having done. I wondered if you could go a little deeper for us and explain the social context in which Guru Angad Sahib was working and then describe the kind of multiple reverberations, the standardization of the script had for both kind of an individual six relationship to Bani and the sick collective's ability to engage with our own scriptural tradition kind of down the line. How did Guru Angad Sahib kind of establish that deep foundation for us? Yeah, thank you so much. It's always important to keep in mind as we have this conversation today that all of the things that Guru Angad Sahib is doing of course started with Guru Nanak Sahibji and Guru Angad Sahibji is of course building upon those. So we know that Guru Nanak Sahibji must have written Bani in some way and likely it was some type of shorthand script that may have been used by a merchant class in North India at the time. And then Guru Angad Sahibji of course formalized that and turned it into this script that we know today as Gurmukhi. And this was really and I know it's become cliché to use terms like that, but I really feel like it was a revolutionary act. And it was revolutionary for a few different reasons. The primary one is that especially within the India context of the time of the early modern era, the education was very much something that was stifled for the vast majority of folks. It was not something that was accessible to most people. So we know that in the cultural sphere and the religious sphere Sanskrit was the language of education and it was the language that was used by the Brahmin caste and it was not open to people from other cast to learn or to interact with traditional Indic scripture in any way. For literary texts, they were usually written not in the vernacular, but in certain literary languages, which also weren't usually in the grasp of everyday folks. And then in terms of the political realm, because India at the time, most of India at the time was ruled by Muslims who modeled themselves off of the Persian empire, the lingua franca of the country was Persian. And so for most people, they were isolated from being able to engage with the written word, both in the administrative sense through Persian or the religious sense through Sanskrit or the literary sense through these different literary languages. And what Guru Angasabji did was that he created a script that could easily reproduce the sounds of many North Indian languages, especially Punjabi, but not exclusively Punjabi, because we know that Guru Granth Sahibji, of course, is not written just in Punjabi. It's written in a whole host of different languages. And that this Gurma Ki script was able to allow people through this promotion of literacy that Guru Angasabji did. And we know from the old Sakis and from old traditions that Guru Angasabji set up schools at Kadur Sahib to train people how to read and write both children, but also folks who had never learned how to read or write earlier in their lives. And this opened up a world of possibility to them, because of course, education and knowledge is one of the key factors that we have in order to try to transform the world. We need to understand the world before we can transform it. And it is through education that that happens. It's through reading and understanding different texts and incorporating those thoughts into our own mind, into our own thinking that we're able to then come up with ideas about how to change the world for the better. And then on top of that, in terms of just a larger idea of why literacy is important on a societal level or for a personal level. This was also, of course, very important in the Guru's project of creating a faith tradition where people engaged with the scripture directly, where there wasn't a in between. There wasn't a priestly class that interpreted the scriptures for the folks, like both in the Islamic and Brahminical traditions in India at the time, where you had bandits or Brahmins interpreting Sanskrit and you had Mullahs or Ankhazis interpreting the Quran and Muslim texts, Muslim religious texts. In the same way, Guru Angus Sabri wanted to remove that that idea of of needing to go to somebody else in order to understand one's own scripture. And so this was one of the real amazing things that Guru Angus Sabri had done, which was that he wrote a Bani in the script that was easily accessible. And once Guru Angus Sabri standardized that, it could be talked to folks and everyone could engage with the Bani directly. And that's something that we still get to do today, which is we can read Guru Granth Sabri directly and we can form our own relationship with it. We can try to understand a Shabad or a Bani or a particular composition and try to work with it and try to see how it impacts our lives, what it means to us. And that's what Guru Muki really opened up, this ability to form a personal relationship with Gurbani, one that was mediated through any third party. Yeah, I wonder if you could also speak to something that you mentioned in the article, which I thought was very interesting was that Guru Angus Sabri also has to be seen as setting the foundation for how Gurbani ends up being transmitted and then ultimately in the form of the Guru Granth Sabri that we know today and we engage with as our Guru. Could you talk a little bit about the importance of that kind of aspect of having this ability to transmit Gurbani in a way that was standardized and maybe speak to some of the implications of that? Yeah, when you create a literate community, a community that engages with literature, engages with scripture, engages with a written alphabet, you open up all sorts of really interesting possibilities. When it came to Hindu scriptures, Indic scriptures, these were very much controlled. And these were written by exclusively by certain groups of folks who had the knowledge and ability to do that. We know from Bhai Gurdhasis Vada and from other old Sakis that even by Guru Amritsa's time and Guru Ramdhas' time, six were a copying Bani into Bhautis or what we would today call Gortke and reproducing the Bani so that they could read it at home or read it in their communities. They could share it with folks. They could read this Bani with each other. And so that idea of Bani being something that could be shared, could be a community endeavor is really important. And that's something that happened with this thing that occurred was that Bani started to be written by the community at large. And that created a culture or an environment which allowed for more manuscripts to be created. And when Guru Arjan Saibji did start to compile the original copy of the Adh Granth of the Guru Granth Saibji, what came to be called Guru Granth Saibji, there was already a culture among the six of writing Bani and reproducing Bani and sharing Bani. And so very soon after Guru Arjan Saibji created the original what we today call the Katharapuri Bheer. Guru, the other six at the time had started to get in the habit of creating copies and copies of the Adh Granth started to be made very early on. And so this wasn't something that was exclusive, something that only could be based in Harmandar Sahib and not exist anywhere else. Instead, there was this idea that we need to copy Bani as much as possible so that people can engage with it and people can read it and people can form that relationship with it. And so what Guru Angas Saibji did was that he gave us the tools for that culture to emerge, that culture of engaging with reading, writing Bani and made it a very democratic process, made it not an exclusive space but something that all six could do. And Bhairav Dasji and Aswada talks about that this is one of the best ways that we can serve the Guru and serve fellow six is writing Bani down. By writing Bani down, we are, you know, it also helps for ourselves to learn and memorize Bani. It helps a lot to write it down. Of course, we understand that writing something down has an impact on the way our brain processes information. But it also allows for the Bani to be spread. And when we're such a small nascent community that was growing, you know, very rapidly under the first five Gurus, the idea of having this Bani written down was really important because you can imagine six are going and setting up new Tharmasalle in different communities or the different communities that Guru Nanak Sabji had visited are being developed into Sanghas that they would need their own collections of Bani's, their Bhautis in order to, you know, do gear then do bot as a community or as individuals. And so that's what Guru Nanak Sabji gives us, this culture of reading and writing Bani. So where you ended there, that actually leads me to ask about the next part of your article about the question of Sangha, then particularly the practice of lungar, this kind of collective community consumption of food, which you discuss as kind of negating various ideas about ritual purity and pollution that had determined how food was prepared and consumed in the early modern context of Guru Angad Sahib. And you contextualize the institution of lungar very interestingly within a preexisting history of the provision of free food in the South Asian subcontinent, but also explain how lungar actually pushed ideas of how food can be distributed and consumed further. I wonder if you can explain the significance of lungar in that early 16th century context for us. And in particular, you discussed the role of Matta Kiwi in the development of lungar as a practice and an institution. And I wondered if you could speak to her role in the development of lungar. Yeah, thank you. You know, a lungar again is something that, of course, was introduced by Guru Nanak Sahib. He was a very famous Saki, the Satchasoda. When Guru Nanak Sahib, you received money from his father and had to go buy provisions which you were supposed to sell and he instead made lungar for four folks that he had met in the jungle outside his village. And that's sort of the first lungar and the idea of lungar started from there. There must have been some type of proto lungar that was happening at Kartarpur Sahib when Guru Nanak Sahib returned to Punjab after his Odassis. But under Guru Angad Sahib, he and especially under the administrative care and organizational skill of Matta Kiwi, who is so exemplary in her organization of lungar that she's even mentioned in Guru Granth Sahibji, which is very rare because Guru Granth Sahibji is not really a historical text in the sense that it doesn't write history or or or preserve history. It's more poetry, of course, right? But Matta Kiwi is mentioned in by Satan Bhavan's Vahar, Ramgali Ki Vahar Satan Bhavan. And she is praised in that in really amazing language. You know, Guru Angad is in fact compared or described as the husband of Matta Kiwi, which is this beautiful idea that Guru Angad Sahibji is being. His relationship with his wife is the primary way that he is being recognized, as opposed to her being the wife of Guru Angad, he's husband of Matta Kiwi. It's a real reversal of gender norms, as we usually understand them in the way that we speak about women, especially in this early modern period. But even today, and not only Punjabi culture, South Asian culture, but even here in the diaspora, where women are often mediated through their relationships with men, and that's how they're understood. So Matta Kiwi did this incredible thing, which was create this very organized lungar and like I wrote in the article, the idea of serving food is not something that Sikhs invented, of course, the Buddhists had some type of community kitchen idea, which was a gender, though, between nuns and monks. And Sufis, we know also in South Asia and other places, would sometimes have free kitchens for travelers as well. So the idea of food that was given to visitors or to travelers was something that existed, but there was a very radical idea embedded within the Sikh concept of lungar. And that radical idea was that as we see in Asakiva, Guru Nanak Sahib Ji and Guru Angad Sahib Ji very much reject the idea of ritual impurity. And ritual impurity is very much linked to misogyny and casteism because certain bodies are considered to be ritually impure, primarily female bodies or the bodies of so-called low caste people or or outcast people. And so by rejecting the idea of ritual purity, Guru Nanak Sahib, Guru Angad Sahib Ji very explicitly and they say this in Asakiva, so they are explicitly rejecting the idea that some bodies are impure, that some bodies are by nature of existing impure. And by having a lungar, you know, where explicitly you must eat along with people from other castes, other regions, other races, other genders together in this communal environment is really remarkable. And we must remember that in the Guru era, it was often the principle was to go first to lungar or what we call bangat, then to go to the sangat, then to go into the davan and be in the presence of the Guru, so that the lungar actually came first as it's almost cleansing, not a cleansing of the body, of course, but a cleansing of the minds impurities towards discrimination of other folks so that we are rid of those inherent discriminations and prejudices which we hold on to before we come and connect with the Guru and with Gurbani in the Gurdwara, in the Gurdwara space, in the davan or the davar space. So the lungar is very much mixed in with ideas of spirituality, mixed in with ideas of political and social reform. And lungar is still such a central aspect of the Sikh tradition. It's something that Sikhs are famous for. It's something that Sikhs know how to do. I remember just seeing with a lot of pride, the dhili farmers protest that as soon as they got to dhili, they started setting up lungars. And this is just something that Sikhs know how to do because we've been trained in our Gurdwara for generations how to run lungars. And this is something that they automatically did. No one told them that they should set up lungars in dhili, but they automatically did and started to feed the folks that were around them. And that's just something that Sikhs do. So this is very much built into our DNA at this point. And that really, though it started with Guru Nanak Sahibji, it was really systemized and made into a really enduring institution under Guru Angad Sahibji and under the leadership and guidance of Matta Kiwi. Yeah, thank you. The last part of your article discusses how Guru Angad Sahib also prioritized in addition to the kind of undoing of caste hierarchies and ideas of purity and pollution, impurity and pollution, the educational cultivation of the Sikhs through the standardization of the script. There's also he's prioritizing the physical development of the Sikhs. And you talk about how physical development as a warrior was restricted in the context of the kind of early 16th century based on one's caste status, much like the preparation and consumption of food was. Can you talk a little bit about what the significance was that Guru Angad Sahib also emphasizes physical strength, but not only strength, but the cultivation of that strength in a disciplined way. What's the kind of significance historically and what did that end up meaning for the Sikhs? Yeah, we've created this and this is largely outsider's perspective of the Gurus, but Sikhs have also sort of taken on these perspectives, unfortunately, that there's a difference. The first five Gurus were a certain way and the last five Gurus were a different way. The Guru Hargobind Sahibji introduced all these aspects of Sikhism that didn't exist before. But we know that's not true. And we see here that this warrior tradition, it started with Guru Nanak Sahibji and was developed by Guru Angad Sahibji very overtly. And so Guru Angad Sahibji set up at Kuru Sahib was a wrestling Akhada or wrestling space or an arena, we can call it, where Sikhs would learn how to wrestle and learn how to essentially get into shape and learn how to fight and grapple and learn hand-to-hand combat essentially. And so we can see, this is generations before Guru Hargobind Sahibji introduced the idea of wearing weapons that this martial tradition exists within the month from a very early time period. And in the context of India at the time, and this had gone back, of course, thousands and thousands of years, this idea was that only certain castes or certain groups were allowed to access martial tradition. That weapons were something that were exclusive to the Kshatriya class and that other castes or varnas or groups of folks within Indian society were not able to become warriors. Now, while there is evidence that there were, you know, like militias made up of peasants and stuff, so it was a completely exclusive space in the way that we might think of it, the idea of being a warrior though, and the prestige that went along with that was something that was very exclusive and something that only belonged to people of certain castes or certain traditions like the Rajputs. And what Guru Angasabji here is doing is again, just like the Langer and just like with writing with the introduction of Gurma Ki, he is democratizing something that's an essential core component of being a human, which is the ability to defend oneself and to fight and to enact change through one's physical actions. And it's very important, like you said, that this is something that's a disciplined. So, you know, the idea o