Shap Journal 2001/2002

Living Community

Guru Nanak

Eleanor Nesbitt and Gopinder Kaur

The Shap Award for 2000 was given to Eleanor
Nesbitt and Gopinder Kaur. They write: Given
the theme of this year's issue, the reflections
which we have been invited to share on co-
authoring Guru Nanak (for Key Stage 3 and above) arise
from the experience of writing in relation to a living
community.

In religious education we are all conditioned to think in
terms of distinct faith communities, and the north India
of Guru Nanak's time was not so different. 'There is no
Hindu or Muslim: whose path shall I follow? I will follow
God's path', his words (in one translation) after his
transformative religious experience in the Bein river,
confirm this. Guru Nanak's pronouncement also
provides a key to his subsequent years of ministry: God
transcends religious distinctions and human spirituality
can be hampered by them. Not surprisingly, Guru
Nanak has won the esteem of Punjabis whether Hindu,
Sikh or Muslim, and so in the opening pages of the book
we reinforce this with a verse from the Muslim poet
Iqbal and a traditional north Indian rhyme.

Eleanor writes: At the same time it was through my
own growing acquaintance with a particular faith
community - Sikhs, some of whom I interviewed in
Nottingham in 1979/80 and others in Coventry in
1991/2 - that my own regard and affection for Guru
Nanak as poet and spiritual guide developed, and more
particularly through enjoying the hospitality of their
homes and gurdwaras. Guru Nanak's picture (often a
reproduction of one painted by the artist Sobha Singh)
and the singing of the Guru's shabads (poems in the
Guru Granth Sahib) evoked in me feelings of peace and
inspiration.

My curiosity about Sikhs and their Gurus, which led to
the initial fieldwork in Nottingham, was a direct result
of having Sikh pupils as a beginning teacher in the

1970s, first in Naini Tal (India) and soon afterwards in
Coventry. This fieldwork in Nottingham and Coventry
provided the incentive and opportunity to read not only
translations of the Guru's words but also of the janam
sakhi accounts of his life - especially the beautifully
illustrated B40 manuscript currently held in the British
Library.

Through teaching and researching aspects of Sikh
history I quickly became familiar with publications by
both Sikh and non-Sikh writers. These publications
included devotional material by Sikhs and histories and
censuses by British administrators during the Raj, as
well as more recent anthropological and sociological
studies carried out in India and the diaspora, plus
material intended for the British religious education
market. Whilst evaluating these critically, by reference
to each other and to my wealth of encounters 'in the
field', I became increasingly aware of two things. One
was the mismatch between (often generalised or
idealised) statements about Sikhs in textbooks and the
'messier' reality of a real live community with a
sometimes turbulent history. The second was a
mounting hostility from some Sikhs directed at some
western-trained academics (Sikh and non-Sikh).

Among the authors of RE publications several writing
partnerships of Sikh and non-Sikh intrigued and
impressed me. Daljeet Singh and Angela Smith's The
Sikh World struck me as an exemplary publication, and
the friendship of Owen Cole and Piara Singh Sambhi
had produced many carefully crafted books in addition
to the classic The Sikhs: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices.

When - to my surprise and excitement - Julius Lipner,
who was at that time the Director of Cambridge
University's Dharam Hinduja Institute of Indic Research
and the editor of its new series of books for young
people, invited me to write a book on a subject of my
choice, my immediate reaction was to suggest Guru
Nanak as my focus. I should explain that I already knew
that the series - which had begun with Jacqueline
Suthren Hirst's authoritative and innovative Sita's Story
- was concerned with values and was intended (as Julius
wrote in the editor's preface) to provide 'good, easily
readable books on the religious traditions in India'.

So, having selected my subject I stipulated that I would
work with a Sikh co-author, and I knew that I would be
asking Gopinder Kaur to collaborate with me. For some
years we had worked together in the Sikh Bulletins
editorial group, and I knew that her commitment to
Sikhism, coupled with her creative flair, would complement
my own 'outsider' perspective and my experience as a
religious educationist and ethnographic researcher. As a
woman in her twenties she was closer in age to the
series' intended readership of 'young people' than I was.
She was amritdhari, and had followed her modern
languages degree with postgraduate study of the Sikh
scriptures at SOAS. Her professional experience with
Barefoot Books, a company publishing superbly
illustrated multi-cultural books for children, could only
improve whatever we managed to write together.

The text of the book benefited from her, and her family's,
first hand experience of singing, hearing and reflecting
on the Guru's compositions, and from her sense of Guru
Nanak's primary emphases. The visual content of the
book was enriched by a store of pictures including
illustrations from her own childhood books, and
Gopinder's was the deciding vote in replacing a 17th
century depiction of the Guru with Sobha Singh's
contemplative portrayal. The illustrations were to be
integral to raising issues of representation.

Gopinder writes: When Eleanor approached me about
collaborating to produce a book for the Indic Values
Series and sent me a copy of Sita's Story for reference, I
was struck by the many ways of seeing that the book's
format offered, together with its strong and diverse
visual content. I remembered how at school I had
tended to feel a bit estranged from the way many a
classroom book had presented Sikhism to me; although
the content would be 'correct', with illustrations to
match, somehow it didn't quite convey my experience of
growing up as a Sikh in a way I found engaging and
wanted to share with others. Perhaps such books were
already limited from the start by briefs that required
them to be didactic rather than explorative, observing
from the outside rather than attempting to understand
from the inside, f therefore found the idea of creating a
book along the lines of Sita's Story very appealing, with
chapters asking broad questions and presenting
different voices and points of view, and images that told
their own story and set the mind thinking as effectively
as words.

In some ways the choice of theme - a book on Guru
Nanak - was not original, and we did wonder whether
we should have selected something a little more off the
beaten track. However, our intent was to look at a
familiar topic with fresh eyes. In fact. the whole process
of producing the book reflected my own evolution,
personally, socially, spiritually, culturally, emotionally,
intellectually - and in many other ways - as a Sikh. I
have come to understand that one cannot always
explain why one does what one does with simple
answers of the 'we do this because it is our tradition'
kind. It is unfair and limiting to build a picture of
oneself, as a member of a religious group, if one is under
the constraints of such expectations. It was therefore
refreshing to produce a book whereby Sikhs could 'taste'
a broader approach to understanding themselves and
begin to see the 'living' of their heritage in a different light.

'Seeing' is an important element in the book - quite
literally so, because the visual content has played an
important part. This was a very enjoyable and fulfilling
part of the job for me, selecting some of my favourite and
most absorbing pictures from childhood books,
including photographs which I felt had a more 'human'
and engaging dimension, and paintings that gave rise to
questioning how and why the subject matter was
conveyed in a particular way. Perhaps partly through my
experience in children's picture book publishing I have
come to appreciate more than ever the degree to which
images offer a 'way in' to a story by involving us
aesthetically and emotionally, as well as a 'way out' of
the story that leaves the tale lingering in the
subconscious long after the book is closed. I wanted
readers to warm to the book aesthetically, hoping that
this would unlock a willingness to warm to the content
and delve into it with a more open mind.

I have really enjoyed working with Eleanor and felt it
was fitting to marry her academic background in
education with my experiences being brought up as a
Sikh. I honestly feel that there is so much I do not know
about Guru Nanak, so much of his teaching that I have
not read or recited or sung or lived, that there is so
much still to try and fathom. On my personal journey,
there is a long path ahead. But I hope that 'Guru
Nanak' will help give readers a sense of where Sikhs are
'coming from'. Where the readers are Sikh, I hope it will
help them think about where they might really get their
bearings from. beyond established presumptions or
expectations that have shaped their sense of identity. As
we concluded in the penultimate chapter (a final one
was added with a pun on the number 13), this is a book
that allows many 'glimpses' of Guru Nanak. This is all
we have offered and if for a moment someone's vision
has been broadened, looking in or looking out, our
efforts have been worthwhile.
 
Eleanor writes: We shared our commitment to making
the Guru (a contemporary of Martin Luther) accessible
to a wide range of 21st century readers (including
Sikhs, but also spanning secular and religious back-
grounds) of secondary school age and above. To do this
we would pitch the linguistic style appropriately and (on
the pattern of Sita's Story) we would start each section
with a contemporary question. We also drew on a
spectrum of material that included (as it happened) the
Big Issue, Indian comic strips, UK television and the
internet.

The questions, all intended to suggest the Guru's
relevance to today's dilemmas and to make readers
think about how we understand and represent great
figures of the past, include 'Does life have a meaning?'
'Can our specific experiences teach us universal truths?',
'Does integrity matter?' and 'Rituals and institutions:
are they a help or a hindrance?'

It was also crucial that our representation of Guru
Nanak would be sympathetically received by the Sikh
community and impact positively on them, as the
community that is most closely identified with Guru
Nanak. At the same time I was exercised by the tension
between Sikhs' devotional assumptions about Guru
Nanak and secular history's dismantling of cherished
stories as unproven, improbable or impossible.

One highly emotive issue is the separateness (or
otherwise) of 'Sikhism' from 'Hinduism'. While keen to
respect Sikh sentiment by ensuring that the series was
retitled 'Indic values' (rather than 'Hindu values') I also
realised that Sikh education could not be well served by
using 'Sikh' and 'Hindu' in over-simple, uncontested,
mutually exclusive ways that erased the ambiguities, the
substantial overlap and the only gradually evolving
separation. So we included 17th century representations
of the Guru from the B40 janam sakhi, which show him
not, as more recent pictures do, with full beard and
turban but instead with a crown-like head covering and
a tilak mark on his forehead, and we invited our readers
to think why artists' representations of the Guru have
changed. According to the janam sakhi account, when
Guru Nanak flouted convention at the pilgrimage site
by throwing Ganges water towards Punjab (ie north-
west like Mecca) rather than towards the sun, onlookers
asked him whether he was a Muslim. We deliberately
give his reply (that he was Hindu), explaining that 'he
had been born into a Hindu family'.

Guru Nanak was to be published in two countries - in
Canada by Bayeux Arts and in the UK by the Religious
and Moral Education Press. But it was not only for this
reason that Gopinder and I included references to the
real life story of a Canadian Sikh, Tara Singh Bains and
the novel (and resultant film) The English Patient, written
by another Canadian, Michael Ondaatje. The book,
which is now advertised via the internet to Sikhs
worldwide, was intended to reach young Sikhs growing
up outside India in a global diaspora. We hoped that the
illustrations as well as the text could reflect the trans-
national dimension of the contemporary Sikh
community, and were delighted to be able to include a
picture of Guru Nanak with details of the Sri Guru
Nanak Sat Sang Sabha Gurdwara Katong in Singapore.

While we waited with suspense for feed-back generally
we were especially interested to know how Sikh readers
would respond to the book. It was heartening to be
invited to speak on 'Guru Nanak and Religion in
Education' at Leicester's Sikh Welfare and Cultural
Society, and to have the endorsement of Bhai Sahib
Mohinder Singh Ji of the influential Guru Nanak
Nishkam Sevak Jatha Gurdwara (Soho Road,
Smethwick) at the Shap Working Party meeting at
which the award was presented, as well as to read in the
British Journal of Religious Education Dr Sewa Singh
Kalsi's recommendation that Guru Nanak 'should be
given to Sikh children as a birthday present or as a gift
on Guru Nanak's birthday or at Baisakhi.'

But we hope that through the book Guru Nanak, and the
issues we've raised, can speak of personal integrity,
selfless practical service and unwavering spiritual
orientation to a living community that goes far wider
than any one 'world religion'.

Guru Nanak is published in the Indic Values Series edited
by Julius Lipner. ISBN 1-85175-192-0. Price £8.99. The
publisher is RMEP, St Mary's Plain, Norwich. NR3 3BH.