Sikhs celebrate arrival of ‘our guru’

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This article was published 14/11/2014 (4339 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Hundreds of Sikhs turned out at a temple in northwest Winnipeg Thursday to welcome 25 copies of the Guru Granth Sahib, their holy book, that had travelled all the way from India.

The scriptures, which are considered by the Sikhs as a living guru or spiritual leader rather than simply a book, were part of a batch of 400 copies from Amritsar, Punjab, India. They had made their way to Surrey, B.C., and the Sikh Society of Manitoba chartered a bus to bring them here.

“Today is a very historic day for the Sikh people in Manitoba,” said Harbans Singh Brar, president of the Sikh Society.

“This our guru. We worship him as a living guru.”

The scriptures received a rock star welcome at the gurudwara (Sikh temple) on Mollard Road, with the books carried on the heads of worshippers who walked along a red carpet extending from the bus to the building.

There were fireworks and a crowd of more than a hundred people filled the night sky with iPhone flashes and cries of “Jo bole so nihaal… sat sri akal!”, a traditional Sikh greeting that means “the one will be blessed who says God is the ultimate truth.”

“There are eight gurudwaras in Winnipeg and they wanted more copies of the Guru Granth Sahib for their congregations and programs,” Brar said.

The scriptures will spend the night at the Sikh Society gurudwara and then some will be given to other gurudwaras in the city, with a few more going to private homes.

The eight gurudwaras in Winnipeg serve a community of about 10,000 Sikhs, according to Statistic Canada’s 2011 National Household Survey.

In recent years, the Sikh community and, consequently, the congregation at the Sikh Society, has been growing.

“We’ve seen a number of our functions just grow in size. Because of that we’ve had a multimillion-dollar renovation happen in the basement,” said Jasdeep Singh Devgan, a member of the society’s board. “It’s affected us really positively.”

Worshippers lined up to bow down before the Guru Granth Sahibs. Some were taken to a quieter upstairs room, while below in the main prayer hall volunteers took turns fanning a copy of the holy book with a whisk and three musicians sang and played the tabla (a classical Indian hand drum).

The scriptures in the Guru Granth Sahib are written in verse form and divided into 31 ragas, or musical settings, each characterized by a certain mood or pitch. In gurudwaras around the world, musicians sing the verses in the Guru Granth Sahib all day long.

“People bow down to the scriptures because (the Guru Granth Sahib) is a physical embodiment of our 10 Sikh gurus, so we treat it as if it were a living guru,” said Devgan.

Currently, copies of the Guru Granth Sahib can only be printed by the Sikh religious body in Amritsar, which is the holy city of the Sikhs. The printing must conform to a strict set of guidelines. Any copies not printed properly must be cremated.

In Sikh gurudwaras, the Guru Granth Sahib is treated as a living guru, with a “granthi” waving a whisk while it is placed under a canopy and wrapped in cloths to protect it from the elements. At night, the scripture is moved to another room where it is laid to rest.

Translations of the scriptures, however, are widely available.

There are about 30 million Sikhs worldwide, mostly in the Indian state of Punjab, with diaspora communities scattered around the globe. There are 455,000 Sikhs in Canada.

inayat.singh@freepress.mb.ca

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