Columnists

Who is Responsible?

Should We Have Icons of Our Gurus?

The Roundtable Open Forum # 132

JOGISHWAR SINGH





I have just returned from a short two-day vacation with my wife in one of the beautiful Swiss mountain valleys (Simmental).



On our way back I had quite a shock which has crystallised my opinion about writing this piece. I had even earlier thought about writing about this subject but had desisted from doing so because I did not want to unnecessarily attract stupid messages from fundamentalists who are prone to verbal violence without understanding an iota of Sikhi or what it stands for.



So, what has made me change my mind?



On our way back home, my wife and I stopped to look for some decorative statues for our rose garden at a shop near Aigle. The owner of this enterprise is a well known photographer who is supposed to know India. His shop complex has a restaurant where we planned to have lunch.



Before going in, I went to wash my hands. Imagine my stupefaction when I found a portrait of Guru Nanak fixed on the door of the men’s toilet for showing that it was a men’s toilet.



Stupefaction soon gave way to extreme anger.



I went to the firm’s office and demanded to see the owner. I was told he was on vacation.



I asked for the manager. I was told he was away for lunch. I explained to the sales person who met us that what they were doing was sacrilege.



The poor man had no clue who Guru Nanak was or what Sikhi is. I asked him how I could contact the owner of his company. He gave me an E mail address to which I have written a message informing them about what I discovered.



I have also informed my personal lawyer and requested him to take immediate legal action to remedy this sacrilege if the concerned enterprise does not remove Guru Sahib’s portrait from that door.



On my return home, I telephoned the sales depot and spoke to the manager who had returned from his lunch break. I informed him about the consequences which might occur if Guru Sahib’s portrait was not removed. He promised to do so without delay.



He assured me that they had no idea whose portrait it was (I believe him on that).



They were just looking for a typical Indian man’s portrait to show a connexion to India since they sell statues and other goods from that country.



Immediate emotions having abated slowly at home, I decided to write about what I consider as a more fundamental issue: the increasing tendency among Sikhs to do image worship by fixing portraits of our Gurus in our homes, our gurdwaras and at other places.



I have always considered this to be against the essence of our Gurus’ thoughts and message.



Do I blame the employee who fixed Guru Nanak’s portrait on the door of the men’s toilet or do I blame ourselves for the fact of rendering the diffusion of portraits of our Gurus so banal that some low paid employee of a small restaurant in a small town in a small country like Switzerland finds such a portrait so easily?



Whence the title of this piece: Who is Responsible?



When I see some Sikhs giving long sermons to non-Sikhs about how Sikhi is totally against idol worship but who themselves prostrate themselves, rubbing their noses in front of portraits of our Gurus, I feel that they have literally understood nothing of Sikhi.



I do not claim to be a theological scholar but from what little I know of Sikhi, had our Gurus been alive to see the plethora of their portraits being venerated by today’s Sikhs, they would have forbidden such actions.



I respect Sobha Singh as a good artist. I also consider that he rendered an extreme disservice to the Sikh fraternity by painting portraits of our Gurus. Firstly, the images of our Gurus in these portraits are pure figments of Sobha Singh’s own imagination, having zero resemblance to reality.



Guru Nanak was a social and religious revolutionary. I cannot imagine him as an ethereal being with half closed eyes and an impeccably groomed beard, as represented in Sobha Singh’s portraits which have acquired iconic status in Sikh households.



For me personally, Guru Sahib represents eternal light. I cannot even think of imagining him as a being with half closed eyes. For me he represents a primal force, the force to combat injustice, bigotry and social inequality, not a detached semi-divine being lost in another world.



What Sobha Singh has painted is simply and purely his own imagination of how he imagined Guru Nanak to be. I have never shared this imagination and do not do so now.



My relation to Guru ji is a personal one. I keep it for myself without any effort to foist it on others by printing endless number of copies of what I perceive to be Guru Sahib’s image.



I cannot understand why the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee or Sikh scholars do not take a clear stand against the vulgarisation of images of Sikh Gurus through the mass printing of their pictures on calendars, diaries or other documents. By not doing this, they are facilitating emotional shocks like the one I suffered today.



However, at no stage did I think of any violence or fanatical reaction to what I perceived as sacrilege, precisely because I consider these portraits as pure figments of some artist’s imagination. The grandeur of my Guru Nanak is untarnished by some fool putting up his supposed image on the door of a men’s toilet. His legacy is a shining light which can never be tarnished by such actions by ignoramuses.



I do, however, deplore the lack of courage of any prominent Sikh scholar, historian or spiritual leader to raise his/her voice against this retrograde practice of venerating portraits of our Gurus. Why does nobody have the courage to say that such portraits should not be in any of our gurdwaras because by displaying them there we are sending out a wrong message to the impressionable minds of many Sikhs? Why are we not laying more emphasis on the immanent nature of our Gurus’ message rather than losing ourselves in false worship of their imaginary portraits?



An essential part of the curriculum at all gurmat camps, theological courses on Sikhi or discourses by Sikh scholars should be about freeing our minds from the onset of such idolatrous practices, fostered by artists painting portraits of our Gurus. Works of art do not require physical representation of our Gurus. There are enough Sikh heroes from more recent times where the portraits could be based on authentic sources rather than purely the artists’ own imaginations.



Having suffered an intense emotional roller coaster today because of what I lived through, I am deeply grateful to Guru Nanak for having finally brought me to the point of putting down my thoughts on paper to share with my fellow readers.



I believe that we all are responsible for rendering banal the images of our Sikh Gurus to the point that they start to represent what some ignorant foreigner considers as the image of a typical Indian looking man. If this is what we want, we should continue to do nothing to educate our future generations about the evil of converting what should be pure works of art for personal consumption into religious icons.



My wife showed me a newspaper cutting from the local newspaper today containing a prominent news item that the company ZARA is withdrawing a T-shirt which had a yellow Star of David printed on the front with navy blue horizontal stripes, resembling attire worn by Jewish Holocaust victims under the Nazi regime.



Just another reminder of why we should never underestimate the extent of human ignorance.



If we do not do something to curb the unrestricted spread of imaginary portraits of our Gurus by educating our youngsters about how such portraits are contrary to Sikhi, we will keep finding ourselves in situations similar to the one I found myself in today.



This would avoid unpleasant confrontations, unless we choose to turn a blind eye and do nothing.



So, once again, Who is Responsible?





THE ROUNDABLE OPEN FORUM # 132



We invite our readers to share their thoughts on the issues raised herein.







[Dr. Jogishwar Singh was with the IAS (Indian Administrative Service) before leaving India in 1984, the year of cataclysmic events for Sikhs in India. With an M.Sc. (Hons School) in Physics and an M.A. in History from Panjab University, Chandigarh, he did his D.E.S.S. at Sorbonne in Paris, followed by a Ph.D. from Ruprecht-Karls University in Heidelberg, Germany. Now a Swiss citizen based in Le-Mont-sur-Laussanne, he is serving as a Managing Director with the world famous Rothschild Group in Geneva, having earlier served as Senior Vice-President, ING Bank, Switzerland and Director with the Deutsche Bank Switzerland.]

August 30, 2014



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