The Socially Involved Renunciate: Guru Nanak's Discourse to the Nath Yogis.

• Author: Fenech, Louis E.
• Position: Book review

The Socially Involved Renunciate: Guru Nanak's Discourse to the Nath Yogis. By KAMALA ELIZABETH NAYAR and JASWINDER SINGH SANDHU. Albany: STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS, 2007. Pp. xvi + 181.

It has been said that:

anjan mahi niranjani rahiai jog jugati iv paiai Reside pure amidst the world's impurities--[this is how] to practice [true] yoga. (Guru Nanak, Suhi rag 1:8, Adi Granth, p. 730.)

The language of this refrain has always struck me: the impurities of the world are likened to anjanu, collyrium or antimony which is at once black and dusty and thus equated with the metaphysical "filth" (malu) one acquires by virtue of worldly involvement. It is this very material that is used to beautify the face by application to the eyes, and as such symbolic of the vanity, pride, and self-centeredness that congenitally afflict humanity from the Sikh perspective. But paradoxically collyrium is also a substance, appearing as a trope in both Sikh and Persian poetry, that supposedly allows one to sharpen one's gaze, and so it also implies insight. In this vein the Sikh Gurus often ask us to apply the antimony of the Name of God to the eyes so that we may see the divine present everywhere (for example, Guru Arjan's Bavan Akhri gauri 22, Adi Granth, p. 254). In Suhi rag above, although lampblack touches the eye, one must remain untouched by it, niranjanu, free from taint; use it to help truly see while simultaneously seeing through it, and by so doing perform "true" disciplined meditation or yoga whose end result is to free oneself of the fetters that bind one to the wheel of transmigration.

As a young student of South Asian studies it took me some time to realize how innovative this statement in fact was. Here was cast a challenge to the ancient Indian belief in renunciation as a suitable means to secure release from bondage to existence. This was an emphasis that was representative of the blind formalism and severe orthodoxy confronted by the Indo-Islamic period sants, a group of spiritually sensitive devotees (Hindu and Muslim) all of whom spoke of a formless Lord whom they would approach in humility, with perhaps their most famous ambassador being Guru Nanak (d. 1539), the founder of the Sikh tradition. Simply put, liberation from the cycle of existence was no longer the sole prerogative of those who renounced mundane existence and led sheltered yet itinerant lives. Now emancipation could be embraced by those who shared their lives with others, had...