https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3316-9406
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ABSTRACT
Nagar kirtan is a Sikh travelling court of poetry, prominent during the Punjabi harvest festival, Vaisakhi. Critics and celebrators alike overfocus on its visual optics, but there is an alternative bottom-up assemblage by which participants generate transformative power. This article decentres the politics of representation favoured by state apparatuses, politicians, and religious elites. I mobilize a decolonial feminist conceptualization with a walk from off the centerstage. Deploying the subaltern figure of the bride, I argue for an interpretation of nagar kirtan as embodied engagement with a poetics of a humanity. Fieldwork was carried out in Hong Kong, Vancouver, and Toronto.
Acknowledgements
I thank the many brides – interviewees, educators, sangats – who conversed with me on this journey and made this work possible.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Although the Hong Kong convention is a bus trip to an outdoor sit-down court, special commemorative years have brought out walking-style nagar kirtan: for instance, during Guru Nanak’s 550th in November 2019 and Guru Gobind Singh’s 350th in January 2017 in Hong Kong.
2 Spiritual adaptions also include those of Nath yogis and sant-poets (see Srivastava Citation2016). Furthermore, the range of barahmahs in their structure and gendered constructions are diverse, and Srivastava (Citation2016) suggests that what binds them is the familiar experience of yearning.
3 Pritam’s untitled barahmah poem has been titled in some English translations as The Story of Punjab (see Datta Citation2008, 13–14).
4 Another creative approach in barahmah reimagination is deployed by Amardeep Kaur (Citation2019) in a recent English-language diaspora poem, Red Dye: Barahmah Di Chitthi Guru Nanak Nu. Kaur’s poem addresses Guru Nanak and she initiates her journey onboard Guru Nanak Jahaz, which departs from Hong Kong in the month of Cet.
5 Guru Arjan composed his Barah Mah in Raga Magh.
6 Sara Ahmed (Citation2004, 182) offers an additional conceptualization of wonder grounded in feminist theory and learning. Of further relevance is Massey’s (Citation2005) emphasis on the elements of chance and surprise in her theorization of space as collections of stories-so-far and as always brings in-process, with possibilities of the encounter.
7 Nikky-Guninder Kaur Singh (Citation1993, 16) has offered a framework for Sikh cosmic philosophy as the ‘Primal Paradox’.
8 Louis Fenech (Citation2014, 168), for instance, has used the poetry of Nand Lal to provide philosophical insights on the immanent and omnipresent qualities of the Groom-bride union in Sikh poetry, and its philosophical and soteriological divergences from Sufi poetry.
9 See Alam (Citation2019) for a working of fana and nirvana.
10 Feminist of colour scholars (e.g. Collins Citation1990) have highlighted many kinds of off-centerstage organizing by women in different faith spaces and survival as a form of feminist empowerment.
11 Of relevance is Chen’s (Citation2012) theorizing of the political languages of queer and queer of colour critiques of the prevailing racial-species order.
12 In Chandi Di Var (Ballads of Chandi) in Dasam Granth, Guru Gobind Singh creatively re-conceptualizes and metamorphosizes bhagauti, by recalling the Hindu goddess Durga – transforming her to the sword and linking the sword to the conceptual plane of feminine power (see Singh Citation1993).
13 For an insightful discussion of the challenges of feminisms today, see the interview of Inderpal Grewal by Srila Roy (Citation2017).
14 All research interviewee names in this paper have been changed to pseudonyms to protect confidentiality. Interviews were carried out from 2016 to 2018 in Hong Kong, Greater Vancouver, and Greater Toronto.
15 The musical marches to Fort Gwalior as political actions are recorded in the seventeenth century Persian source, Dabistan-i-Mazahib. In an English translation, the march is described as: ‘During this time the Masands [seat holders] and the Sikhs used to go and bow down to the wall of the fort’ (Dabistan-i-Mazahib n.d., in Singh [trans.] Citation1940, 209).
16 While the spirit of nagar kirtan inspired respondents from the various places, the experience is far from a romanticized ideal and participants grounded the lived challenges of walking, sitting, assembling, and enacting the travelling court. Additionally, as crowds have grown especially in Greater Vancouver, navigating nagar kirtan’s processual complexity is both labour as much as it is inspiring.
17 Modern South Asian everyday culture construes traditional eyeliner as part of repelling the ‘evil’ eye or as make-up of consumer beauty trends. However, to offer an alternative usage in spiritual context and depth, surma and ajanu (eyeliner) are intimately intertwined to ideas of nazar/nadar and characterize the beholding of knowledge as insight and foresight (see Singh Citation1993, 80). The term nazar has several meanings and usages, which varies by religious and geographical contexts. In the popular negative connotation – the evil eye or the curse – nazar is signified as casting the gaze; this involves the gaze of objectification, usually against women. Colonial, orientalist practices against people of colour similarly produced racial ordering through white gaze. This meaning refers to the casting of sight as a form of othering and objectification. Nonetheless, there are other uses as well: Sufi, Sikh, and Punjabi poetry exalt a different nazar meaning, with varied spiritual connotations, that offer an auspicious invitation to see and to be seen. This favourable meaning of nazar signifies to see oneself as bride of the Beloved, and to see each other as all brides of the Beloved.
18 It is crucial to emphasize that although Sikh langar is a characteristic ideal of breaking down social stratification, social stratification prevail in Sikh and Punjabi contexts. Food, alone, does not eliminate casteism. Natasha Behl (Citation2010), for instance, highlights that ideas of pollution and food are narrow frameworks of analyzing casteism.
19 UHT is ultra-high temperature processed milk. This method of storing milk is newer than the canned evaporated and condensed milk method.
20 Scholarship (e.g. King Citation1999) working with postcolonial theory and religion have increasingly involved a discussion of situating Asian religious traditions in cultural studies. In Sikh and Punjabi contexts, the field and ethnographic work (e.g. Kalra and Purewal Citation2019; Takhar and Jacobs Citation2011) counters the discursive boundaries and categorical thinking that is reified in the academy. Furthermore, feminist approaches (Alexander Citation2005; Gökarıksel and Secor Citation2015) have unsettled the public/private and secular/religious dichotomies commonly reproduced in political inquiries into religion. Likewise, geographers of religions (Olson, Hopkins, and Kong Citation2013; Tse Citation2014; Gökarıksel Citation2009) are problematizing the prevalent secular theory for spatializing and discursively reifying demarcated notions of where religion belongs.