:: Madan Gopal Singh
There will be nothing outside…; for trees and mountains, clouds and waves will be but
symbols of the realities he will find within himself. Everything has flowed together in him…..The very ground beneath his feet is too much. He will roll it up like a prayer carpet. He will no longer pray. He will just be. And when he makes a gesture, he will create and hurl into infinity many millions of worlds… How other, remote worlds will ripen to gods I do not know. But for us, art is the way.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
The family of fairies have alighted to sing the śabda in the precious rāgas
– From Guru Amar Das ji’s Anand Sahib
I and the Word
At times such as these one stands before the word like the caveman – bare, inessential, a little in awe and deeply apprehensive… Rooted in the organicity of elements – of air and water in particular – the word, on the other hand, overcomes its fragility through the power of its symbolic excess…
The word, as such, is a much greater paradox than I thought it was.
In a specific sense I see myself existing in separation from the word or Śabda as the source of (all?) light. In a singular sense, however, I see myself moulding my being in its materiality which is definitely visceral and even somewhat dark. Do I then see this darkness also as the locus of my volition or is it still some pre-subjective clearing before one reaches the valley or the pass where one beholds what appear as two landscapes in an imagined separation?1
Darkness is an image of itself where all sources seem lost till God proverbially ordains
“light” by literally uttering the word – the śabda – as the invariant proto-sound and, if I may venture to add, causing the original sphoTa.2 Bhartrihari speaks of this moment of light as the moment of “unmixed truth”, where knowledge is “in itself”, where “om” is „back into its origin‟ and where contradictions have not appeared as yet. The domain of sound is as yet in a state of un-alienated coexistence with light. One wonders if this is the stage where the varņa (syllable), pada (word) and vākya (sentence) have still not emerged and if, in some sense, it is not comparable to the para or the beyond or transcendent state of the unstruck sound.
A schism, however, opens up when the light begins to facilitate seeing or, to use a Bergerian turn of phrase, „ways of seeing‟. This is a decisive break, only a first level of epistemological separation in a series of many such that might occur and never cease occurring as one progresses to communicate with the soul through the body with thought.
Exiled from the domain of the transcendent invariant, the word, as such, is an act of stylization always already – spiritually, existentially and politically nuanced. It enters the field of generative excess as part of an endless contention and playfulness – a syllable, a word, a sentence, an entire discourse – in variance and in connectivity at the same time.
The regime of the real – ironically, the illusory and, therefore, false, mithya (imaqyaa) – opens up a rupture and with this schism opens up the endless empire of images. Śabda begins to appear in this larger symbolic design of „seeing‟, as distinct from the para (pra)3, as an utterance in ethical, epistemological separation from and yet fundamentally tied to the real. It is in this sense, perhaps, that it is possible to speak of these first signs of pashyanti (pSyaint) as perhaps the appearance of a liminal, human ego which combines wonderment with celebration; the ineffable with a desire to sing…4 to find or perhaps invent the trajectories of madhyama (maQyamaa) and to eventually recreate individuated enunciations – vaikhari (vaOKrI) – to rediscover, as it were, one‟s singularity in creatively connecting with the other to establish a sense of the community.5
I am enjoined here to enter the universe of the word. I am called upon to configure its meaning. I am possibly expected to go beyond the conventions of semantics and pragmatics. I have to reprise the emotional surplus that gets aurally formed around its body as a creative
halo. I had hitherto experienced it from either a distance or from an ineffable interiority. But now I must break the silence and say what it means to me as a translectual6 practitioner who occasionally indulges in thinking and vice versa.
The order of constellation the precious pearls
The aromatic breeze from the south the incense
Blowing across in obeisance
All the forests the floral offereings
What a wondrous Ode to you, O Bhav-KhaNDanā,
The unstruck sound is rising from the cosmic drums.
(Bhav = that which is becoming; khaNDanā = that which
is disintegrating)
My first hypothesis is :
As one broaches the threshold of music and its hermeneutics especially with regard to the sacred, one has to necessarily charter one‟s way through a duel register of stylization – of the written and received word and of that which is melodically recreated and returned.
I wonder, however, if there is a life of the word before stylization.
The Word Before Stylization: in Sound and script
Sculpted within the warmth of breath, the word rises as a tonal singularity. As pure sound it is a mere resonance with vestiges of a memory that is unlikely ever to become specific. It has not yet been drawn into the field of meaning7. It exists in a state of pre-subjectivity of sorts.
The question however is if, in some way, this pre-subjectivity happens only after the gamut of subjectivity having been run always already? Or whether at the core of this originary sound, there lie other, un-deciphered origins?
Om ओम् – as the Varna sphoTa पद स्फोट
Let us dwell a little here on some of the key sacred words from across South Asian religious
registers to elucidate our point.
Let us begin with om. It is a sound that recurs most frequently in the Vedic chants – as part of near homophonic mantras (stylized incantations) and pāThs (sacred recitations with minimal melodic variations). Occasionally, the word is also heard in the Buddhist chants and once in a rare while one hears it in the Sikh manglacharans (the auspicious opening hymns with cosmological orientation) as well. With regard to its chanting in Veda pāTh, the question that immediately comes to mind is whether this verbalization is indeed a meaning generating act or essentially the installation of a pure, abstract sound. Where does the meaning of om take us independently of its verbalization? What is its meaning other than the sound in which it is
clothed? To metaphorize the act a bit further: does the difference between the flesh and soul exist? Is it possible to separate the spirit from the body?
The word “om” begins with a mid-back rounded vowel „o‟ and ends with a nasal sound which emanates from either the base of uvula or, which is its exact opposite, the closed lips where the vocal passage comes to an end. The possible trajectory of its verbalization could be either
deep within or close to the threshold where the inside ends and the outside begins. In phonetic terms, the nasal consonant could either be pronounced as a velaric „ŋ‟ sound or as a bilabial „m‟. The rounded vowel „o‟ followed by either of the two nasal sounds facilitates the sound to travel inwards, to achieve as it were an interiority of sorts. The only partial rupture it has by way of an opening finally are the nostrils. These openings act primarily, if one may put it like that, as a passage of silence and saturation. The sound travels inwards and finds abode mainly in the lower octave. When pitched in the higher octave, it seems to lose its (melodic) raison d’être except when it is projected as a sound collectively achieved by a group of singers or when placed within a syntactic chain as a clearly semantically marked
sign8. Either whichever way one looks at its (melodic) verbalization, the meaning of the singular „om‟ resides in its sound and does not seem to exceed it9. As an undifferentiated
singularity10, it isn‟t easy to move it out of the mañdra saptak or the lower octave where it seems almost naturally housed. It is only when it is accessed within the specificity of a group that it shifts to a higher octave. It must however be remembered that in moving from the individual to the group chanting of „om’, one shifts from intra individual singularity to the
inter-dividual specificity.
Allāhل لاه – as the Pada sphoTa पद स्फोट
In contrast to this paradox of a sound sound that divides into itself, the word „Allāh‟ reaches us as a differentiated specificity much before it is recreated through sound. It is invariably surrounded by a sense of an imagined or real community. It may be piously whispered, minimally moulded in melody, constructed against a continuous wall of human sound often anchored in a single musical note or rise in and against an ecstatic crescendo where the sense of the ephemeral self dissolves – the last stage of zikr-e-khafi-ul-akhafi11 being the desired maqām – till well after one emerges from the experience of listening and remembrance through performance. However, it already implies an other, distinct and separate reality – nearly inaccessible and definitely beyond the experience of the day to day lived. It is located within a field of relational, cultural semiotics. How does one travel here from the symbolic to indexic; from the ineffable to the phatic – in primarily bringing the unreachable within the
ambit of one‟s own breath? The idea of one-ness between one who remembers and the one remembered does not pre-exist in an un-alienated space. It is, on the contrary, arrived at
through a series of phonetic moves collectively initiated. Even when it is individually attempted, there is a distinct sense of separation built into it. The sound exists primarily as a
call. At a certain level of enunciation, the call becomes inseparable from the religious subjectivity in which the musician-vocalist is rooted. What happens if an atheist like me picks
up the bait and enters the pada-sphoTa? What happens to my avowedly non-religious
subjectivity?
To get back to the sacred word, Allāh, phonetically it ends in an open unrounded back vowel
“ā”. It has to act as a carrier of a pre-established meaning. Within the field of meaning, it is also expected, if it may, to generate sudden intuitive leaps where one is beginning to feel a
„presence‟ or zikr-e-khafi and eventually get „overwhelmed by that presence‟ or zikr-e-akhafi. All this is highly subjective but the „aural surplus‟ of which I speak here, somewhat hazardously, is in any case a subjective negotiation for both the singer and the listener. The
sound may continue to deepen through strategies of repetition and/or unbroken persistence and may help create a listening experience where the spell of the semantic field is eventually broken and the listener even as s/he is subsumed by the larger hegemony of the word is set
free. In a non-melodic yet rhythmic recital of the Name staging both sound and as an experience of that sound headed towards a semantic realization gradually in time through
ritualized throw of slightly aspirated vocalization as in Qadriya or Naqshbandiya zikr, the eventual goal is once again to reach a state of oneness induced through strategically repetitive waves of just one Name. The very mode of breathing becomes visibly and audibaly stylized.
For a singer, more clearly rooted in the continuous mode of melody, however, it becomes important to arrive at this sound through a range of musical choices of finding a musical
space, constructing it through a durative relation which involves carefully distending the note
with volume, releasing it through a variety of pitches, letting the note fall in a visibly slow move. In other words, each melodic phrase conceives the note as a transient abode. It must,
therefore, realize the impermanence of that abode as such. It has to somehow reveal more than it contains in its phonetic being It isn‟t as such an exploration of the sound in a way in where the very act of verbalization begins to be the desired goal of this spiritual act.
However, even though the sound, „Allāh‟ cannot entirely overcome the rhetorical weight of the overladen spiritual
¡ – Ik Oankār – as the Vakya SphoTa
The original mantra of the Japu Ji by the First Nanak begins by invoking the parā, the Primal
Being which is the zone of immanence, where the mortal attributes do not exist and where
timelessness reigns supreme refracting eternal light and disseminating the Original Truth.
This is the domain of the invariant Truth, Knowledge, Word that Bhartrihari referred to while
defining sphoTa in Vākyapadiyam.
The first Nanak enters this world of parā with an incantatory economy of resonant nouns and nominal attributes. In the opening pauRi12 or verse of Jap Ji the only verb Guru Nanak uses to invoke and install the Name is hai/hosi or „to be‟ in its present and future affirmative certitude. In this cosmology of an endless present and only an ethical future, the past seems to have been perennially coopted into the present. The verb jap or “to reflect” is used as an abstemious imperative. The seer-poet deflects the verb “to say” – a poetic strategy markedly different from most of Kabir‟s declarative endings, for example – while making the final affirmative statement in his own name… Nānak hosi bhi sach in the last line of the first pauRī is woven around a double verb – one hidden and the other asserted. And, this, I think, is important within the overall economy of the mūlmantra is important.
This is equally the zone, therefore, of endless deferral – in deference to the Name that is reflectively deferred in the actual act of Naming. The Adi Nanak can stand in this space with
authorial confidence and playfully pronounce a selfhood even as he describes the Name…
The One Primal Form
The Name of Truth
The Original Doer
Without fear
Without rancour
The Timeless Form
Un-begotten
Self-effulgent
the Gift of Grace
Reflect
the True in the beginning
the true across Time
is True
says Nanak shall always be True
But there is a larger area of reception beyond the authorial Selfhood where the act of āmad actually happens. As the mūlmantra begins to travel, the authorial singularity inevitably
begins to embrace larger social specificities. The dialectic between the authorial Self and the first recipient of his verses, Bhai Mardānā, for instance, is already a nuanced hermeneutic act. As this dialectic further spreads out and reaches a much larger following, the mūlmantra becomes a vibrant lived discourse though not necessarily internalized only at the semantic
level alone…
With what swaras on the rabāb would Bhai Mardānā have received this deflection? We must return to an imagined past. To the space of side alleys of vaikhari! The mantra is a specific incantation that structurally moves from word to word and lends itself to the bare simplicity of a gentle whisper. Melodically, however, it mandates a different reception. In ik oankar, for instance, we move from a slight stretched opening of the vowel “i” to a relatively more open though rounded vowel „o‟. It finally ends with the open vowel sound „ā‟. In a sense, it incorporates both the relatively narrow and open vowel sounds as we saw in “om” and “allāh” but quite magically holds them together with the nasal sound in the middle. The opening verse is also divisible into three discrete units, namely “ik” “oŋ” and “kār”. In terms of its
actual verbalization, the first unit “ik” is the point of entry and therefore the shortest in terms of the time spent in articulation. The second unit “oŋ” is the substantive unit of internalization
where one stays a lot longer to finally predicate itself into an open sound “kār”. It is perhaps possible to map this triad also along the subjectivities of the “beyond”, “self” and the
“community”…
The Imagined Child Before the Artisan
A little more abstract than it is in its visceral origin as pure sound, the word also once existed,
and possibly still does, a little differently perhaps also as a graphic spell – to seduce the gaze
primarily as a spectacle. Etched in the deepest black of inks, it drew attention to its precariously transient being before it was subsumed as a rapidly disappearing foreground by
a more permanent and conventionally stable textual order. As pure visuality, it existed briefly on the canvas as a muted rustle bringing the hand and mind together in an artisanal flourish.
It seems, as if, there is a deferred „before‟ and an inferred „after‟ the life of this word.
The child recites the word – aloud at first and then in whispers.
This is the first signpost of memory that cuts across both a forgotten past and an unchartered future – a move that may appear somewhat akin to Wordsworthian „trailing clouds of glory do we come‟13. This then is first stage of joy, neither fully primal nor even partially normative.
In Sufism one identifies the act of cultivated remembrance at its very beginning as zikr-e lasāni14 where, if I have understood the process correctly, one recites the sound without the accompanying baggage of the symbolic overload which is eventually going to accrue as the speaking subject‟s engagement with the stylized word deepens in time. The overload, if any, appears through the act of obsessive repetition. The word creates an aura – a state of being in an initial loss and through repetitive incantation eventual recovery – much before it embarks
upon the enterprise of meaning.
I transpose this state or remembrance across a dual trajectory with regard to the metaphoric child who recites, sings or writes. For the child, it may well be the domain of sheer
playfulness. At least in the beginning, that is how this experience of speaking, hearing, seeing and reading is received. The excitement of playing with the word – both orally and visually – may suddenly swell as the child experiences a first glimpse of the field of subjectivity which isn‟t yet hers. Here is for her the possibility of an unknown arrival. The more s/he plays with the word, the more the certainty of its eventual arrival gets entrenched. The joyous repetition
of the word pushes the libidinal discovery of pure sound into the domain of takrār 15or dialogicity with the invisible, the unknown, the undifferentiated other.
In purely gaming terms, we have here the seeds of what Roland Barthes describes as the hermeneutic code16 albeit in an altogether different context. But isn‟t there a text and a
narrative embedded in each act of enunciation always already? The hermeneutic code functions like a maze of discovery to begin with and eventually like a maze of revelation. It
has to take us through various maqāms17 which act as sonorous clearings. But within this topography of discovery and revelation, some of clearings may well act as organic lures – almost like a dark spell – and may actually lead us into taking paths more difficult, if not more complex, than those that promise a revelation at the end. In this first encounter with
sound, there is a promise of a pristine though uncertain subjectivity. The child begins to slide, as it were, between plaisir and jouissance18. The reader in her already begins to experience the joy of the unborn writer – such indeed is the excitement of this enunciation. The word‟s
stylization here is its own undifferentiated lure. In other words, it is not fully stylized in relation to the other – a process whereby the domain of the symbolic becomes irreversibly installed. As of now, it has no other cultural registers to invoke other than its own sense of
becoming19.
The metaphoric child hasn’t moved into the collective ceremonial of simraņ20 whereby one recovers a sacred singularity through togetherness. In other words, one becomes multiply singular or, perhaps, singularly multiple as one sits amidst a crowd of believers and
participates in sarvaņ21. (It is interesting to note that even though the methods may differ, the ritual of „listening‟ and „remembering‟ is common to the Vedic –śravaņ/smaraņ22 – the Sufi – sama’a/zikr and the Sikh – sarvan/simran23 – traditions of chanting and singing the sacred
word.) S/he has as yet no idea of the community or sangat24 as a distinctly laid out code of a social selfhood earned over a period of time. S/he has also not aligned the self with its own
singularity yet. That will come with age, acceptance and practice as when s/he moves away from the near narcissistic imaginary of her in-alienated self. S/he puts together the letters to bring the word into being yet again and paradoxically, as if, for the first time. There is in this
act of stringing together the abstract sound and the symbolic word a pristine excitement of discovery. It isn‟t knowledge as yet. It is only a spell as the poet Margaret Atwood25 would have us believe.
The word and sound thus begin here not from the first of the four vākas26 or the uttrances – the parā nāda or the utterance that is the imagined transcendental, beyond, inaccessible.
I wonder if it is also possible to place this metaphoric child a little differently? Here then is an artist who stands both inside and outside the subjectivity of the sacred word and melody. Her‟s is an involved otherness.
The Artisanal Shifts and the Artist Eventually
The artisanal imagination takes off. This is the time of āmad. The word is arriving. Mardānā, the Muslim musician, a mirāsī by caste, a childhood companion of the First Nānak, strums the rabāb under the benign gaze of his murshid and guru. The First Nanak, the Ādi Guru,
touches the word. The bare notes on the stringed instrument await the poem and the melody.
This raises interesting questions about the relationship of the accompanying music as perhaps a recipient of the Sacred/Poetic Word that arrives without a warning but never without an essential artisanal preparation. We know it on good authority today – our source of information being the great exponent of Gurśabda kīrtan and the current khalifā of the Amritsari bāz Bhai Baldeep Singh himself – of the convention of opening each performance of kirtan in a congregation or divān with a vigorous composition on the pakhāwaj or joRi.
The practice was known as Shān or quite literally a non-verbal ode played to the glory of the Almighty. In the Sufi music of Persia and South Asia likewise there is a musical convention
in which the poetic vocalization is preceded by long prefatorial pieces of instrumentation. The use of such instrumental naghmas in the qawwali format are especially very common
although in the Persian maqāms such pieces could be stretched into nearly autonomous pieces.
It is in the smithy of this imagination that the birth of an artist is renewed and recast with each act of enunciation and differently each time. Here, the resonance begins to far exceed the exegesis of meaning and the lure of the word – its body and breath – overwhelms the ecology of mind and its highly codified ethics of unfolding or revelation. How does one
address the inchoate yet intensely felt process before embarking upon the larger issues pertaining to the interpretation of the word received as a fait accompli that may possibly
indicate a somewhat ironic foreclosure of all attempts at interpretation/s. One wonders if one
can at all incorporate all this and more within the field of hermeneutics. There is a materiality embedded in the vey grain of ontology which demands our attention.
- Commenting on Heidegger‟s End of Philosophy, John Sallis speaks about the transgressive openness or the free region which Heidegger has called Lichtung or clearing and which he is at pains to distinguish from light. Quoting from Heidegger, “Light can stream into the clearing, into its openness, and let brightness play with darkness in it. But light never first creates the clearing. Rather, light presupposes the clearing”, Sallis goes on to remark that “Thinking is of the clearing.” „Echoes: Philosophy and Non-philosophy after Heidegger‟ in Hugh J
Silverman (ed.), Philosophy and Non-philosophy Since Merleau-Ponty (New Yourk: Routledge, 1988), pp. 98- 99 ↩︎ - Bhartrihari, Vākyapadīyam, verse 1.9
satya viśuddhis tatro ‟kta/vidyai ‟vai ‟ka-pada-‟gama/ yukta pranava-rupena/ sarva-vada ‟virodhina ..
Where unmixed truth is spoken of/ it is there knowledge in itself.
The one-word mantra „om‟ joins there,/ back into its own origin –
not contradicting any way/in which its truth may be explained. ↩︎ - Bhartrihari Vakyapadiyam verse 1.142
Vaikharyā madhyamāyāś ca
paśyantyaś cai ‟tad adbhutam .
aneka-tīrtha-bhedāyās
trayyā vacah param padam ..
The word that‟s spoken is threefold.
It consists of „vaikhari‟,
of „madhyama‟ and „pazyanti‟.
And it has many different ways
of crossing over differences.
But where it ultimately stands
must be amazing to the mind.
[It‟s only reached where mind, confounded,
has completely disappeared.] ↩︎ - One cannot perhaps find a better example than the Ārtī that the First Nanak had sung standing before the temple of Jagannath. It simultaneously installs a cosmic design and expresses an equally celebrative sense of wonderment. The Poet stands both within and without this design. It carries an overwhelming sense of the enormity of the universe and at the same time an unmistakable assertion of the creative self.
Gagan mai thāl ravi chaNd Deepak bane
tārikā maNDal janaka motī
dhūp malayān lau pavan chavro kare
sagal banrāi phūlaNt joti.
Kaisī Ārti hoye Bhav-KhaNDanā terī Ārti
anhatā śabd vājaNt bheri…
In the firmament of the sky,
The sun and moon the lamps ↩︎ - The hermeneutic enterprise dealing with the Sacred music of the Sikhs invariably shies away from addressing specific soci-cultutral issues pertaining to the creative interpreters of the Sacred Word who relocate, if not refashion, the Śabda in melody. Questions regarding caste configurations, for instance, are never raised whereas historically the sacred performative space has been largely dominated by the artisanal community of the Rāmgarhiās from amongst the Sikhs on the one hand and that of the Muslim professional singer-exegetes, the rabābis, from among the clan of the Mirāsīs since the time of Bhai Mardānā on the other. One also notes with a sense of dismay at the paucity of credible research work on the marginal articulations especially of the rural folk
variety involving the Sikh peasantry on one hand and the downtrodden dalits on the other. Our cultural history is almost culpably silent on the question of the representation of the feminine gender within the pantheon of Gurśabda kirtankārs. Likewise the impact of the major historical events on musical enunciations in the life of the community have gone largely unnoticed by the academia. ↩︎ - Translectual transactions might occur loosely across a multiplicity of fields as against the rigors of
interdisciplinary transactions that mark the vocation of an intellectual. Translectual activity also marks, in this sense, the recession or marginalization of the intellectual who may be consciously hidden, whose persona may be put through a process of renunciation or simply put under erasure. In a sense, a translectual transaction is one where the conventional intellectual transaction is willfully given up in favour of a more organic and involved engagement with life – an exploration as it were through both the physical and mental energies. Each translectual transaction would necessarily involve a degree of impassioned practice. However, not all practitioners of an art or craft may be termed as translectuals. An example of translectual engagement may be
the life of Baba Nanak, Kabir, Baba Bulle Shah… Width rather than depth is the dominant metaphor of the translectual activity. ↩︎ - This position is at an almost complete variance from the conventional view that establishes the primacy of meaning above all else. The reception of verbal sound is relevant only as a carrier of the textual meaning and any attempt to cause a split between the two is viewed as an attempt to curb the „natural tendency in us to complete the act of meaning‟. Consider the following statement by Roman Ingarden who states: One does not apprehend the verbal sound first and then the verbal meaning. Both things occur at once, in apprehending the verbal sound, one understands the meaning of the word and at the same time intends this meaning actively.
In “The Phenomenological Theory of Meaning” in The Hermeneutic Reader, ed Kurt Mueller-Vollmer, BasilBlackwell1985, p 196 ↩︎ - The articulation may vary further if it was sung by a group of chanteuses. ↩︎
- Peter Hallward, while distinguishing Deleuzian idea of the „immediate intuition of the unlimited, or purely creative‟ from the Foucauldian „limits of classification, at the edge of the void that lies beyond every order of recognition or normalisation‟ refers to „the absolute univocity of being‟ in Deleuze. He goes on to state that, in Deleuzian conception of individuation and experience, “the plane of consistency is the abolition of all metaphor” where “all that exists is real”.
See Peter Hallward, “The Limits of Individuation or How to Distinguish Deleuze from Foucault” in
ANGELAKI – Journal of Theoretic Humanities vol 5, no 2, 2000. Pp 93 and 94. ↩︎ - “Deleuzian difference must be “immanent” or “internal” difference, self-differing (and thus “without others”. Deleuzian reality is nothing other than a process of self-differentiation: “everything divides, but into itself”. And it is an unlimited process of (self-)differentiation, because there is nothing outside reality – no second or further reality, no horizon to reality, no dualism of subject and object.”
Peter Hallward – Ibid pp 94-95 ↩︎ - Amongst the many types of zikr, the Sufi practice of remembrance, zikr-e-khafi-ul-akhafi is the very last stage. Some of the other stages, in a hierarchic order of spiritual experience, are:
Zikr-e-lasānī which is the oral/ incantatory stage where words are recited.
Zikr-e-qalbī which is remembrance through a study or meditation of Allāh‟s name
Zikr-e-rūhī which is remembrance as experience of God
Zikr-e-sari remembrance where the presence of God is felt
Zikr-e-khafi remembrance when the presence of God begins to overwhelm and the dissolution of the
self begins
Zikr-e-akhafi remembrance as union and ecstasy
Zikr-e-khafi-ul-akhafi the stage where the distinction between remembrance, the one remembered and one remembering is lost ↩︎ - The One Primal Form
The Name of Truth
The Original Doer
Without fear
Without rancour
The Timeless Form
Un-begotten
Self-effulgent
The Gift of Grace
Reflect
The True in the beginning
The true across Time
is True
Nanak shall always be True ↩︎ - Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
From William Wordsworth‟s Ode to Intimations and Immortality,
lines 59-67, Arthur Quiller-Couch, ed. The Oxford Book of English Verse: 1250–1900. ↩︎ - First amongst the seven stages of remembrance where the zākir or the one who remembers is expected to recite aloud. ↩︎
- Takrār, literally repetition and dispute, but in the Sufi music, especially in the qawwali genre, it is a mode obsessive return to a word or a phrase to philosophically deepen an argument. It is also used as a melodic mode of surrender to a higher order of reality. ↩︎
- Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Noonday P, 1974. ↩︎
- Literally place, position or office, in the Sufi cosmology as expounded by Zu‟n-Nun, it implies along with ahwal or the mystic states, „a station on the mystic way‟.
SeeSaiyid Athar Abbas Rizvi‟s A History of Sufism in India Vol I, Munshiram Manoharlal, 1975, p 47 ↩︎ - Barthes refers to plaisir, as part of what he conceives as the hedonistic aesthetics, equating it with “a pleasure of consumption” for the reader is eventually “cut off from the production of these works”. He avers that the remoteness of the work establishes the reader‟s modernity‟. The text, on the other hand, is for him „bound to a pleasure without separation‟ or jouissance.
See Roland Barthes‟ From Work to Text in Niall Lucy ed.
Postmodern Literary Theory, Blackwell 2000, p 291 ↩︎ - This is a bit like the pristine „environment‟ or „milieu‟ or in an ontological sense, what Heidegger terms as umwelt‟. Here is a world which cannot be easily observed because it is that with which‟ we see rather than what‟ we see. ↩︎
- website www.rarasahib.com p. 729 Gur Shabda Ratnakar Mahankosh by Bhai Kahan Singh Nabha
Derived from the Sanskrit smaraņ which implies memory but also harbours the notion of (being with) that which is not there or which is dead, the Punjabi simraņ implies being spiritually focused through meditation and incantation on His Name. ↩︎ - website www.rarasahib.com p 918 Gur Shabda Ratnakar Mahankosh by Bhai Kahan Singh Nabha
Derived from the Sanskrit Śravaņ, the word implies the carefully cultivated habit of listening – especially listening in a gathering of believers and thereby constructing a new community or sañgat. ↩︎ - śravaņ/smaraņ implies the practice of listening and remembering within the principles of Vedic incantation ↩︎
- Sama’a/zikr as indicated in the footnotes vii, viii and ix, once again implies listening and remembering within the congregational Sufi practice but the ceremony – depending on the Sufi order – varies in the degrees of codification whereby this ritual is installed. ↩︎
- As mentioned in the footnote 10 above, the word sañgat implies a coming together in belief and meditation to construct a new community. ↩︎
This is a metaphor.
How do you learn to spell?
Blood, sky & the sun,
your own name first,
your first naming, your first name,
your first word.
From Margaret Atwood’s – Spelling ↩︎- the śabda that resides within the founding kernel of things
arriving from the kernel into the heart
from the heart into the throat
The śabda that eventually finds sound
(Bilawal Mehla 1 Thitti)
Baba said, “There are four bānīs. First there is parā, then there is pasaNti. The third is
madhdhamā, the fourth baikhari. But only that bānī is special which aligns with our hearts
and enables us to remember God. (Jasbhām)
Janmasakhi Bhai Mani Singh Ji
page 1656 Gur Sabdaratnakar Mahankosh, Bhai Kahn Singh Nabha
website www.rarasahib.com ↩︎
Madan Gopal Singh (b 1950, Amritsar) is an Indian composer, singer, lyricist, actor, screenwriter, film theorist, editor and polyglot. He is currently Senior Fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi while on leave from Satyawati College (Evening Classes), where he taught English literature. Son of well-known Punjabi poet Harbhajan Singh, Madan Gopal Singh has written and lectured extensively on cinema, art and cultural history besides performing the world over as a singer with his ensemble Chaar yaar.
