Unsayable word: gurbāni, Punjabi poetry, and the postsecular impulse

Abstract

1. INTRODUCTION

The past two decades have seen an increasingly critical focus on the role of secularization in fueling political conflicts traceable to the colonial de-structuring of indigenous knowledge systems during India’s troubled passage into modernity. Although the stated objective of secular ideology was to aid efficient governance, in reality it restructured the main communities of India—Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Jew, Buddhist, Christian, and indigenous cultures—into oppositional social identities that not only led to the partitioning of India along religious lines, but also shaped the ethno-nationalist form of majoritarian democracy in India.¹

An important site where the effects of secular de-structuring can be seen clearly are the literatures of the Indian subcontinent, notably in the formation that has come to be called modern Punjabi literature (MPL). This literature can be regarded as the secularized variant that emerged in the early twentieth century, initially due to encounters with European rationalism and later because of the political influence of Marxism on the literary imagination of writers in North India. MPL emerged from the older streams of Punjabi spiritual poetry, which reached its zenith between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries and goes back to the twelfth century. To distinguish this older spiritual poetry from the secular poetry and literature that appeared in the early twentieth century, secular scholarship in the late modern period distanced itself from the former, classifying it as “medieval” or “pre-modern” Punjabi poetry (or PPP). Arguably one of the most substantive literatures of PPP, and a major inspirational source for the development of the secular MPL, is a body of literature compiled, edited, and canonized as Sikh sacred scripture, the Guru Granth Sahib (GGS). For adherents of the Sikh faith, the compositions of the Gurus enshrined in the scripture are not treated as poetry in the ordinary sense, but as gurbāni (utterances of the Guru) or dhur ki bānī (“utterances from the far side”), thereby suggesting that gurbāni is in some way “revealed.”

For the most part, this state of affairs has upheld an uneasy truce between secular and ostensibly “religious” modes of scholarship. What has been elided in this truce, however, is the possibility of seeing things—specifically the nature of language that is gurbāni—from a perspective that eschews the distinction between the secular and the religious. Part of my argument in this essay is that the nature of spirituality in gurbāni creates a radically different kind of secularity from the normative European type, one that works according to a non-opposition logic. We can see the impact of this non-oppositional logic in several ways. For example, the GGS represents one of the most distinctive indigenous Indic responses to the cultural and civilizational impact of Islam. Perhaps more than any other body of poetic literature, it exemplifies a genuine cultural interaction and response to the difficult historical encounters between Islamic and broadly Indic (Hindu, Jain, Buddhist) civilizations. This interaction gave rise to the hybridization of languages (Persian, Arabic, Sanskrit, Pali, Prakrit, and others) that came to be embodied in the spiritual-socio-political movement known as Sikhism. This indigenous response to Islam was registered in two main ways: linguistic and philosophical-spiritual. Linguistically, it reflects the adoption of spoken vernaculars such as Punjabi, the language of the ordinary people. Since the eleventh century, Punjabi had begun to amalgamate Persian, Arabic, Sanskrit, and other Prakrit languages into the form of classical Punjabi constitutive of gurbāni. Philosophically, it represents the synthesis of non-dual ontologies characteristic of Indic spiritual-philosophical praxis with influential strands of Sufi mysticism. As critical analysts of Indian secularism have noted, this linguistic and philosophical hybridity was reflected in the flourishing of pluralistic societies in which concepts, pieties, and spiritual practices were shared across cultural boundaries between the fourteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and up to the era of European imperialism.² In other words, the essence of what many of us now strive to define as post-secular, was already present in some shape or form within pre-modern Indian literature and culture. The question, however, is why neither the writers who brought modern secular Punjabi poetry and literature into existence, nor those who their literary output as “religious,” could not recognize cultural synthesis in terms other than oppositional identity? What made this recognition so difficult?

Part of the answer to the above question lies in the nature and legacy of colonial epistemic frameworks. During the colonial era, classifying such cultural, philosophical, and spiritual syntheses—routinely embodied in lived practices—created a problem for colonial administrators and modernist writers. The former tended to dismiss such syntheses as promiscuous hybridities that had fallen from the original purity of Islamic, Hindu, and Sikh monotheisms. Secular thinkers who brought modern Punjabi literature into existence in the early twentieth century assumed that the characteristics inherent within pre-modern literatures such as gurbāni were incompatible with modern knowledge. These characteristics included gurbāni’s proclivity for non-oppositional frameworks of thought and piety, the inseparability of reason and affect within its logic, and its irreducibility to a belief system. Following a broadly orientalist mode of reasoning, Punjabi modernist writers in turn rationalized gurbāni as essentially in compatible with modernity by classifying it as “religion.” By doing so it was possible to distinguish their own modern secular poetry and literature from gurbāni. In doing so, however, the Marxist literati used a secularized understanding of poetry, language, and literature to reclassify poetic genres such as gurbāni within a new “progressive” schema of literary evolution. An important consequence of literary humanism was the disempowerment of indigenous Sikh conceptualizations of language and self. This disempowerment was achieved by de-ontologizing the concept of śabad (language/Word) by disinvesting śabad of its connection to everyday reality, thus making it subservient to the dominant epistemology of modern knowledge.³ The de-ontologization effected in this manner was arguably as destructive as the work of orientalists and missionaries during the early periods of colonial encounter.⁴

One of the clearest methodological articulations of secular framing of modern Punjabi literature can be found in Attar Singh’s book Secularization of Modern Punjabi Poetry (1988) (hereafter SMPP). SMPP not only presents a clear statement of secular theory of Punjabi literary humanism and its philosophy of language; it was published at a time when religious conflict was resurgent within mainstream Indian politics in the form of a Sikh political insurgency against the secular Indian state. In the next section, I highlight key moves in Attar Singh’s secularization thesis which serve to delimit the status of language/word (śabad) in gurbāni, as part of Singh’s aim to project the “evolution” of poetic consciousness. In the third and final section of this article, I suggest a different way of reading the notion of śabad, one that not only uncovers a paradoxical, non-oppositional understanding of self/language/revelation, but allows us to reconsider the relevance of notions such as pre-modern and post-secular to genres such as gurbāni.

2. The secularization of Punjabi poetry

A key argument in Attar Singh’s SMPP is that whereas religion existed in India prior to the encounter with Western modernity, concepts such as the secular and secularization were imported through the intellectual engagements of colonial elites with Western philosophy and theology. According to Attar Singh, to make a “meaningful study of how the secular principle transformed the aesthetic consciousness of Punjabi poetry,” it is necessary to “understand the role of religion as a point of departure.”⁵ As I show below, this sentence, and specifically Attar Singh’s philosophical assumptions about religion, constitute the hinge upon which Attar Singh’s argument pivots, and at the same time, its Achilles heel.

Within “medieval Punjabi poetry,” Singh argues, religion was important as a “progenitor element” and for “describing and sustaining group boundaries and providing the cultural background” (23) for poets and their poems. Furthermore, Singh argues, given that the “poetic consciousness of medieval mystics was derived from the fervor of their faith,” it seems clear that “central to the ideological structure of medieval Punjabi poetry is the idea of a personal God” (39). As such, medieval Punjabi poetry such as gurbāni was fundamentally compromised by its “theocentric” impulse, which served to fetter the nature of language to a source other than the human imaginary. Thus, the primary orientation of language (śabad) was not towards this world, but to a realm beyond this world, a “transcendent reality” where “life after death is the most important concern for man” (38).

How then did this “medieval Punjabi poetry” become secularized according to Attar Singh? How did the secular principle transform the religious sensibility of medieval Indian literature from theocentrism towards an anthropocentrism characteristic of literary humanism? Attar Singh identifies three stages in the evolution of secular consciousness and the concomitant decline of “religious sensibilities.” The first movement emerged on the back of the so-called “religious reformist” movements of the late nineteenth century. This movement not only institutionalized modern Sikhism as a religion, but, equally importantly, produced a literary renaissance led by figures such as the poet Bhai Vir Singh (1872–1957; hereafter BVS). Beginning with the annotation of theological interpretations of Sikh scripture, this activity widened considerably and helped reestablish a separate Sikh literary tradition and social identity by the early twentieth century. BVS’s poetry, in conjunction with his scriptural commentary on the nature of God’s existence, identified and reduced the figure of the divine to verifiable rational categories, allowing a systematic concept of God to become available for intellectual discussion and polemical interreligious debates rife at the time.⁶ This abstract, almost idol-like concept of God was essential for producing a split, dualistic consciousness, a subject/object framework essential for fleshing out modern Sikh subjectivity.⁷ Commenting on poetic novels such as Baba Naudh Singh (1907), Rana Surat Singh (1905), or poems such as Kikar (1908) and Binofsha Da Phul (1910), Attar Singh notes that BVS’s theological reflections on the a priori reality of a transcendental divine led his readers to identify the writer’s poetic “I” with an interiority of consciousness achieved through “man’s craving for peace and solitude in and by itself” (75). As Singh states, this “I” “achieves a subjective personality as distinguished from the ‘I’ borrowed from the traditional Sikh poetry as a symbol for the human soul” (76). The transference from God’s transcendence to the psychic state of the individual helps produce a “nebulous individualism which, though conceived within a religious framework, is inherently capable of breaking with it” (69). This nebulous but peculiarly modern subjectivity was precisely the kind of individualism needed to counter the rising influence from Christian theology on the one hand, and a growing Hindu and Muslim political consciousness on the other.

The second and third stages in the emergence of secular consciousness involved a significant shift from BVS’s transcendental metanarratives towards aesthetic experience characterized by a more spontaneous and sensuous experience of nature. Exemplified by the writings of poets Dhani Ram Chatrik (1876–1954), Puran Singh (1881–1931), Mohan Singh (1905–1978), and others, this stage can be seen as a mystical synthesis of the transcendent and immanent matched by attempts to expand the narrow frame of theologically grounded reformist Sikhism. Eschewing BVS’s quest for certainty of the Real vis-à-vis proofs for the existence of God, Puran Singh explores aesthetically grounded forms of mysticism in his writings, as in his poetry collection Khuleh Maidan [Open Domains] (1923). In Attar Singh’s reading, Khuleh Maidan discovers an ambivalence within human subjectivity ascribable to man’s inability to perceive a self-evident God. This failure of human perception points to a different psychological disposition featuring a self-conscious individualism whose sense of wonder (vismād) grows weaker.

Although Attar Singh’s probing and sophisticated analysis engages multiple fields such as history of religion, psychoanalysis and literary theory, the limits of his theoretical assumptions about the nature of religion become apparent in his reading of the maverick writer Puran Singh. In contrast to Attar Singh’s unravelling of the relationship between divine transcendence and subjectivity in BVS’s poetic novels, a very different psychological disposition can be discerned in Puran Singh’s writings, one that firmly resists being pigeon-holed under a reason versus faith binary through a fluid, mystical synthesis of immanence and transcendence. This synthesis results in a more nuanced model of the self as an “open domain” (khula maidan) in which difference comes to be associated into a unity. Contra Attar Singh, the self that emerges in Puran Singh’s work is not an internally separated individualism which perceives the world through oppositional logic. Rather, it is an expression of a fluid in-betweenness—one might even say “diasporic” sensibility—of Puran Singh’s lived experience.⁸ In short, a more helpful way to think about Puran Singh’s work is to see it as a bridge between the theocentric religion-making of BVS and the more explicitly secularizing tendencies of the third wave in the evolution of modern Punjabi poetry.

This third wave in Punjabi poetry’s evolution is its secularization proper, which took shape in the 1930s alongside the political rise of communism in India, accompanied by a proliferation of Marxist re-readings of medieval Punjabi poetry. Unlike their predecessors and contemporaries, these poets and novelists were vehemently anticolonial, antireligious, and part of a secular Indian nationalism which espoused literary humanism along Western lines, even as they opposed the West politically. According to Attar Singh, the early forms of this anticolonial Punjabi literature found expression in the diasporic (pardesi) movement of the Gadhr activists, and a homegrown (desi) expression of Punjabi nationalism as seen in the writings of the communist Kisan movement (102–104). At the heart of Attar Singh’s tri-modal secularization thesis is that modern Punjabi poetry wrests sovereignty from the religious bedrock of “theocentric medieval thought” (which includes what he considers to be constraining genres such as gurbāni) and reinvests it in literary human consciousness. This human consciousness now exerts its own epistemic sovereignty over language, as demonstrated by the worldliness of modern Punjabi literature. Stated more simply, secularization liberates the essential nature of language (śabad) from the clutches of a “personal God” and gives it to Man.

It is here, where Attar Singh’s philosophical assumptions about religion intersect with his philosophical assumptions about language, that the secularization model begins to unravel under its own weight. His thesis founders, ironically, because it occludes any serious reflection on the nature of that which is supposed to have been liberated by the secular principle, namely, language itself or śabad. It assumes that language is simply language. And in so far as it is mere language, it is essentially a vehicle for communication, either for expressing God’s Word, or for expressing and sending-receiving human words. Closer attention to the concept of śabad in gurbāni, however, shows that it fits into neither the religio-centric model, where the putative ultimate referent of śabad is God, nor into the secular model, where the putative ultimate referent of śabad is Man. From the perspective of gurbāni’s understanding of śabad, both theocentric and anthropocentric models conspire to de-ontologize language. That is to say, śabad (or language) in the context of gurbāni works according to an entirely different system that gives rise to an ontology by breaking out of the field of ego-consciousness. This breaking-out of ego-consciousness inspires a different relationship between language and psychology, between Word and self. Whereas humanism posits an autonomous self which produces language/words that it owns, śabad (in gurbāni) is a sovereign principle in its own right. The sovereignty of śabad is expressed in different ways. It can be expressed through the concept of mystical revelation (dhur ki bani), the self-sacrificial surrender of ego (haumai māranā), the self-overcoming of ego, and through the notion of the Word that speaks without being spoken, that is, the un-struck or un-sounded word (anhad śabad). As I argue in the next section, these articulations of sovereignty radically critique some of the basic ideas associated with of humanism, secularism, and religion, ideas such as the autonomous self, individuality, and linear time. As a result, it may thus be more helpful to think of śabad as a post-human, post-secular, post-religious concept. This of course raises the obvious question. What is the sense of “post” in relation to śabad? Or, how do we make sense of “pre-modern” literature whose motivating impulse is inherently “post-secular”?

3. Resonant word and self: reading the “postsecular” as a shift in consciousness

If the critical axiom of secular humanist literature espouses something like the following: “the death of God is necessary to free the ego so that it can make its own words,” then gurbāni posits a different axiom: “kill ego and transform self-nature by meditating on the singular Word (śabad).” We can call this the sabdic model. In this model, the devotee undergoes spiritual experience with the Word (śabad) of a true master (satguru). Undergoing such experience with śabad can be likened to an apprenticeship in which one learns how to “die” to oneself. As the ego (which represents one’s normal everyday use of language/words) undergoes the dissolution of its own boundaries, albeit without annihilating itself completely, the nature of self is transfigured by reconnecting to its ground state, the state of oneness from which the self is separated from its Beloved Other. The resultant form of this fusion of self and other, I and not-I, lover and Beloved, is embodied in the figure of the gurmukh, a person whose self-nature is pure relation, and whose speech manifests as anhad śabad (the Unstruck Word), the underlying resonance that connects all beings and non-beings.

The central theme in the above model, namely, the self-overcoming of ego by deepening the experience with śabad (vibration/language), is expressed poetically by Guru Nanak and other authors of gurbāni. The conception of śabad within Nankian poetics inverts the secular humanist model of śabad as ordinary language, demonstrating a more complicated relationship between language and immediacy. While fully recognizing the failure of ordinary language to speak of reality and directly touch it, śabad nevertheless holds out the promise of a language that can access reality, which is not an other-worldly realm but rather the time of one’s life and world. To glimpse this relationship, however, it is necessary to make language immediate and to make immediacy expressible—both of which are anathema to literary humanism. For literary humanism, language must remain ineffable if it is to express reality. In the literary humanist model, since language’s purpose is mediation, and mediation can only take place in everyday, linear time, then language can never express immediacy. Within the secularist model, ineffability serves as a means to divest concepts such as śabad of connection to a life lived in the stream of history and the everyday.

Quite the opposite message is relayed in gurbāni, for which language (as śabad) can potentially access an expanded, non-linear, or extra-ordinary mode of time (akāl), and that such access to extra-ordinary time (akāl) takes place within the crucible of the self. Once this self is transformed, it provides immediate access to reality, which is expressible, as opposed to ineffable. Śabdic philosophy, in other words, re-ontologizes ordinary language. In Sikh scripture, the repetition of references to this reinforces the philosophical coherence of the teaching and suggests the semblance of a technique (sādhanā) corresponding to its philosophy. Consider for example the composition Siddh Gosht, which narrates in poetic form a dialogue between Nanak and the famous yogic practitioners known as the Siddhas. The Siddhas ask Nanak to reveal the source of his authority as a spiritual master. Nanak replies that his authority does not come from a living person, but from śabad (Word) itself, and specifically in the interaction between šabad and ego that leads to self-realization:

The central themes emerging from these verses can be summarized as follows:

• (a) There is an experience that can satiate one’s ultimate desire, but that experience is ineffable/unsayable (akath). It can be expressed only as the un-pulsed/un-struck Word (anhad śabad) which is inaudible to physical is. Language fails.

• (b) Through the intervention of a satguru, that experience can be attained. However, the satguru is not a person or human, but an impersonal, nonhuman, and therefore non-contrivable principle, namely, śabad (Word). As a non-contrivable principle, śabad is not a thing but a spontaneous and immediate happening to one’s self, a process that one must undergo.

• (c) To undergo this process, to attain immediate experience, one must learn to kill one’s own ego. When ego is silenced and one is released from its grip, then one can say or speak the Unsayable Word (anhad śabad). Language succeeds.⁹

Language fails when ego remains intact; language succeeds when ego is annihilated. How might we comprehend this paradoxical relationship between language and ego? What kind of language fails—or succeeds—in saying the Unsayable? Who remains to say the Unsayable when ego is annihilated? There is an insistence in these verses that only by annihilating or silencing ego is the śabad revealed. In being revealed, śabad enables us to hear the unsayable word (anhad śabad). This insistence behooves us to more closely scrutinize two intimately connected issues. First, we may consider the emergence of transformed mystic subjectivity (gurmukh) from ordinary subjectivity (manmukh). These subjectivities correspond almost exactly to two radically different forms of language: the one that succeeds (extra-ordinary language or anhad śabad) because it resonates in Nanak’s mind–soul (anhad śabad vajai), and the one that fails (ordinary everyday language). Second, we may consider the meaning of the Unsayable word.

Let us consider these in reverse order. In Guru Nanak’s lexicon, the term for Unsayable is anhad, which also translates as unpulsed, unheard, and incorporeal. Anhad seems to designate a special and paradoxical language (anhad śabad) which resonates in Nanak’s mind-soul (anhad śabad vajai). Nanak can narrate this ultimate experience in words only on the condition that his ego becomes silent. At this “moment” when the word speaks and Nanak’s self is silent, the normal relationship between language and ego is inverted. This inversion of the normal path to subject formation is both complex and traumatic because the mystic refuses to definitively close the boundary between self and other, I and not-I. By keeping open the gap between I and not-I, the mystic exerts an internal violence, a violence inflicted by the self to itself, thus treading an abnormal path that literally “kills” the ego—but without annihilating it.

To kill ego without killing it! Though seemingly absurd, statements like this simply express the paradox associated with the idea of the Unsayable Word (anhad śabad) that emerges from the “death” of ordinary language. What seems to be implied here is that the mystic radically undermines the ego at the very moment in which it says “I am,” by instead saying “I am not.” That is, by asserting the not-I (which signifies absence or negativity) into the ontology of the self, and in relation to the “I,” the mystic’s peculiar form of subjectivity is at once ego and non-ego, self and other, I and not-I. It is simultaneously fused (non-ego) and separated (ego) in a structural unicity that resists socially sanctioned ideals, norms, and logics. This is essentially a state of absolute oneness, a ground state of immediacy—experienced not as fullness (fusion), but as fusion-separation. Sikh and Sufi mystics refer to this non-dual state as biraha, or the ecstatic experience of immediacy—an experience that is registered as non-binary affect, as the blissfulness-pain and sadness-joy of the impossible moment in which the Beloved is embraced, yet in that very embrace, slips away. The temporal structure of biraha is such that each present moment is already divided in the event of experiencing it. The moment passes as soon as it comes into existence in an eternity that is both within time (kāl) and outside of normal time (akāl).

Clearly, the philosophy of language-mind implicit within gurbāni departs radically from the model assumed by Attar Singh’s literary humanism. According to gurbāni, conventional ego (and the kind of language it produces) needs to be radically transformed and replaced with a different psychic structure. References to “killing” ego are not merely metaphorical. They refer to the self-effort required to tap into a reservoir of force immanent within life. Once tapped, it becomes possible to transform conventional processes of ego formation or individuation (haumai) by re-orienting the desire that makes it crave for contracted ego consciousness, and by breaking our attachment to conventional societal symbolic processes. This self-overcoming is required to shift the axis of desire towards the aspects of psyche that society forced it to repress: the non-ego, the world outside of ego, the other, or the infinitely expanded reality of oneness.

In Sikh philosophy, the clearest indication of the psychic transformation of desire is registered through new and creative modes of aesthetic symbolization expressed variously through language and poetics, music, dance, and thought. The agent of this transformation (annihilation/killing/sacrifice) is śabad. In the forgoing analysis, I have translated śabad as Word, language, or sound; in the context of Sikh philosophy, śabad also refers to any or all kinds of resonant vibration. Vibration (nād) or resonance (śabad) refers to that which enables the transformed self (gurmukh) to express itself within, and connect to, the world and to ourselves. The latter connection begins with a re-linking of the self to its own self (individuation), thus suturing the split introduced by conventional symbolization. The idea of resonant vibration (anhad nād/śabad) offers insight into the practical ends of Sikh thought, namely, the achievement of liberation in the stream of life (jivanmuktī). What liberation signifies here is not a freedom belonging to ego, or a freedom of the ego from the world, but rather a liberation of the self from its itself, a freedom that liberates it into the world, so that it is able to make new and more creative connections to beings and non-beings. All this stems from the intrinsically relational ontology of anhad śabad.

The most evident mark of this self as pure relation is the change in its mode of expression, that is, the nature of its poetic consciousness or literary output. It expresses itself through affective modes—poetics, melody, rhythm—and also through thought that is not shorn of affect and sensation. In its expressions, the self displays its paradoxical nature: the self is neither thing nor no-thing. Its formal state of existence is between thing-ness and no-thingness. In other words, the self is pure resonance, pure vibration, uncaused sound or speech, spontaneous effortless vibration. These references to vibration and resonance are ways of describing the nature of the self as a focal point of resonant intensity that enables it to make new connections, intersections, relations—among all things in the world. As a point of resonance, the self is a fundamental opening internally into the self, and externally to other things, beings and non-beings, such that the duality of self (near, here) and world (there, far) is merged into the all-pervasive and ever consonant resonance that gurbāni calls nām. In modernist Sikh theology, nām is narrowly translated as the “name of God.” A better and more helpful way of thinking about nām is to consider it as the ultimate signifier of reality, as the fundamental tone or vibration of reality. Nām is the residence of that which connects everything that exists, and expresses the true nature of reality as One.

4. Conclusion

If the metaphysics of anhad śabad is closer to the way I have described it above, then it would seem that the secularist framing of gurbāni as medieval, pre-modern, theocentric, non-worldly, is not simply mistaken but serves a broader intellectual and political agenda whereby scholars created a distinct identity for modern Punjabi literature (MPL). Poetic forms such as gurbāni became a necessary foil for the emergence of the intellectual movement of modern Punjabi literature in parallel with the political movement of Punjabi Marxism. In one sense secular literary humanism can be seen as a positive development in so far as it provided resistance to neo-traditional religious orthodoxy, irrespective of whether this was Sikh, Hindu or Muslim in orientation. Socially, it provided a domain in which Sikh and non-Sikh writers were free to draw upon gurbāni, quissa poetry and other forms of Punjabi literature unencumbered by the ever present forces of communalism.

On the other hand, however, unbeknownst to many Punjabi literary humanists, the historicist and comparative frame of what they designated as truly secular poetry, created a narrative which imported and implemented a philosophical orientalism. It is through this orientalism that secular literary humanism preserved one of colonialism’s key legacies, namely, the epistemic disempowerment of indigenous ontologies by maintaining their segregation from the philosophical discourse of modernity.¹⁰ Its narrative is that pre-modern literature represents an enchanted, magical realist universe which must be disenchanted in order to say anything meaningful about the world. This narrative constitutes a radical narrowing of a pluralist ontology into an epistemic standpoint that views the world as an image and object. If we learn to loosen the hold of the philosophical orientalism embedded within modern knowledge systems, genres such as gurbāni defy straightforward identification with the categories “premodern,” “modern,” “secular,” and “religious.” If so, might it be possible for gurbāni to be considered post-secular, post-modern, or post-human?

A note of caution needs to be sounded here. For many critics of secularism the very idea of the post-secular continues the historical legacy of the Enlightenment¹¹ and in this sense it will always be haunted by specters of teleology and historicism, that is, with a notion of time that remains nihilistic.¹² Yet, there may still be a glimmer of hope for hospitably receiving and hosting non-Western concepts and genres such as gurbāni within the term post-secular. This is possible if we understand the post-secular as signaling, if not effecting, a shift in consciousness. This shift of perspective would be away from reductive oppositional dialectics, as exemplified by Attar Singh’s Secularization of Punjabi Poetry, and towards an affirmative image of thought. We may view this image of thought as an “open domain” for conceptual encounters, as seen in the writings of Puran Singh. Such an affirmative plane of consciousness is one whose logic is non-oppositional and non-dualistic. This is a plane that spontaneously associates conceptual oppositions with one another, oppositions such as theism/atheism, existence/nonexistence, affect/rationality, sacred/profane, and asecular/secular. This particular understanding of the post-secular can include what William Connolly calls a “pluriformity of being” conducive to “multidimensional pluralism,”¹³ a diversity that is inscribed at the ontological level. It is this fundamentally plural ontology that is expressed in gurbāni and the praxis of living it fosters.

Footnotes