Carnivalesque motifs and dialogic laughter in the guru granth sahib: a bakhtinian evaluation of guru nanak and kabir

Abstract

The idea of this paper is to foreground the popular overtones of laughter and carnivalesque subversion in the Guru Granth Sahib, which Bakhtin sees as an indispensable part of all human history where people collectively express their consciousness against all normative or dogmatic forms of human life. The paper centers on the writings of Guru Nanak and Kabir to manifest the popular and subverting consciousness which substantially point to the Bakhtinian notions of carnivalesque ambivalence. Bakhtin finds that laughter and carnival celebrate equality, freedom, and change. It suspends all distant zones and dogmatic forms which centripetal forces of time try to create or impose on the people. The Guru Granth Sahib, apart from externalizing the divine understanding of various medieval mystics, also enriches its semantic sites with contesting consciousnesses and socio-historical contradictions of the Bhakti era where Nirguni thoughts, represented by its preceptors like Guru Nanak and Kabir, manifested unconventional unity of the sacred and the secular. There are plenty of instances where laughter and its ironic double along with its carnivalesque decrowning emerge with displacement of the old world and creation of the new people-oriented consciousness.