Author: Dr. Amardeep Kaur
Lecturer, Canadian Studies Program, University of Toronto
The Sikh street practice of nagar kirtan – consisting of musical processions, political assemblies, and langar distribution – have grown phenomenally during April’s Vaisakhi season. With that have come challenges as celebrators, often male elites, carve out a place and spotlight for their own glory. On the other hand, critics overfocus on the visual optics and representation-based politics as the foundation of nagar kirtan analysis and critique. Either way, celebrators and critics cluster at the visual spotlight of the centerstage.
How does one see what one cannot see? That’s the undertaking of my nagar kirtan poetics. I cue a walk from off the centerstage to sense the bride on her journey.
Livdeep Singh1: Baba Buddha ji started the tradition of nagar kirtan I believe. I’ve been reading a lot of meditative practices, like walking meditation and stuff in Buddhism. I feel that’s what it was, a way for connecting to kirtan and bani [poetry or Word] and different space.
Experiencing this mobile court through Sikh poetics and cosmology facilitates a decolonial feminist intervention. I use the barahmah genre to unravel the practice of journeying and yearning of the Beloved, and concurrently, I read nagar kirtan walking practice as if it is poetry itself.
Vaisakh, when new leaves blossom
I yearn the sight of the holder of nature’s wealth,
Come to my heart’s gate,
come home, Beloved,
ferry me over!
Without you, I am worthless.
Who dares a price tag on your bride?
I crave to see your true sight,
Not far, I sense, a presence within.
O Nanak, experiencing Vaisakhi one finds Beloved
in the spirit of embodied poetry.
(Guru Nanak, GGS, 1108)
My research article brings in the figure of the human bride from the poem Barah Mah (Twelve Months) above by Guru Nanak. I deploy human-as-bride for her radical possibilities of being human against Eurocentric ideas of human-as-Man. Human-as-Man builds a white supremacist world based upon the Darwinian idea of an evolved being with his privileged rights on Earth conducted by capitalist exploitation on nature, which is made to be separate from political society. Such a world order is made in the image of white Man and based in race, gender, and species hierarchies. On the other hand, human-as-bride, of all genders, in Sikh cosmology is a practice-based approach of being human, who communes with sargun (all form) in all its forms, and who seeks the union with the nirgun (no form) Beloved.
Barah Mah offers a feminine imagination and symbolism of a bride’s journey with cosmic seasons, which I creatively map and ground with the Punjabi harvest festival of Vaisakhi in the month Vaisakh. I further extend the metaphors and themes of barahmah genre to the displacement from the land and rivers of Punjab, bloodied by colonialism and Partition, that is expressed in the creative renditions of barahmah by poets Amrita Pritam and my own poem “Red Dye”.
O king, reigning over the land –
This is the month of Vaisakh
Ashes are blowing on the face of the new century
(Pritam, in Datta 2008, 14)
In weaving the anguish of separation from the Beloved-in-nirgun to the anguish of Partition – as separation from the Beloved-in-sargun, the research signifies the diaspora condition by which Vaisakhi and nagar kirtan is lived in various locales as I pursued ethnographic fieldwork in Hong Kong and Canada.
The key argument I make in the Sikh Formations article is that nagar kirtan is a mobile court of poetry where performance takes place, as poetics of a humanity. Moreover, through its walk, a poetic journey is experienced as an inner transformative pilgrimage of self.
Zorawar Kaur2: Kirtan is a great way to reach to your real self, and to the Almighty.
As a performative and moving site, assemblage is a useful term to delineate how the event is woven from pluralistic world-making practices and how the mobile darbar (court) is put on in different political spaces and geographical contexts.
There is a coming together of Vaisakhi and sikhi, the musical performances, and the celebration of harvest with langar that brings the assembly of peoples. Various political and migratory struggles are remembered, and social justice futures are paved. The multi-sensorial experience is invigorated by mantra (chant), darsan (glimpse), and rasa (taste). Ample decorative labour goes into the Groom’s chariot and the bridal make-up for the sensuous awakening. The walk brings into embodiment the polyraga (musical mood), polylingual, and polyauthored poetic anthology of Guru Granth Sahib. Then, there is the intangible spirit to catch that glimpse for the Beloved, as in the passionate entanglements of Sufi, Sikh, and Punjabiyat traditions of barahmah.
I end my nagar kirtan analysis with poetic insights on the sipping of endless cups of cha, the art of waiting, and the longing of that union.
In the nagar kirtan is a love story – between the bride and her Beloved.
Footnotes
Footnote 1: Pseudonym, Toronto-based participant
Footnote 2: Pseudonym, Hong Kong-based participant
Further reading: Kaur, Amardeep. “Sensing the bride: Sikh poetics, barahmah, and a seasonal journey with Vaisakhi nagar kirtan.” Sikh Formations 17, no. 3 (2021): 245-275. DOI: 10.1080/17448727.2021.1949915