(Re)Tracing the Radical Poetics and Vision of Guru Nanak: A Socio-Political Perspective

The entire landscape of Northern Indian religious practices underwent a sea change in the  15th and 16th centuries with Nirgun Saint poets like Kabir, and Guru Nanak. Nanak invariably became one of the leading voices of his times whose modernist vision can be visualized through his poetics. His egalitarian worldview has made him popular amongst all sections of society. Choosing a linguistic idiom of the masses he refuted the consecrated value rendered to scriptures, invalidated many prevalent notions of Karma Kand (Vedic rituals) and its hegemonic approach and showed a revolutionary path to devotion. His Japji sahib is a cultural model of co-existential plurality resistive to rigid authoritarianism and entails a democratized mysticism. It’s a unique philosophy that dismantles the regressive upholders of repressive ideologies. His Shabads and Gurbani in the Guru Granth Sahib are poetics of plurality offering an alternative model of openness and multidimensionality. Reminiscent of the style of English Romantics, in Nanak, the mundane and commonplace gets elevated to larger significance in his poetry. The rationality, equality and liberal ideology preached and rendered in his poetics stands in stark opposition to the irrationality, inequality and orthodoxy prevalent. The important rationale of Nanak’s philosophy is the psychological freedom it accords to those despised and dispossessed because of caste, class, and gender. It moves beyond the boundaries of community, religion, language, culture and nation. The consequential philosophy of holistic liberation becomes more relevant in a multilingual, multicultural, multireligious Indian ethos today. This paper therefore, shall explore the radical, emancipatory potential in the poetics of Guru Nanak, its contemporary relevance in an age of religious polarizations, bigotry and divisiveness; Further, it explores how the pluralistic paradigms of Guru Nanak’s vision and poetics become a panacea to the ongoing invasions on secular democratic beliefs.