A study of social discourse in the bani of Guru Nanak, Kabir and Sant Ravidas: a Bakhtinian perspective

Abstract

What makes the literature of the Guru Granth Sahib a novelized phenomenon is its sociological consciousness and secular interpenetration of different and pluralistic thoughts and experiences of its contemporary reality. Paradoxically as a scriptural canon, the Guru Granth does not lose the secular spirit of dialogue, linguistic and cultural multiplicity and contemporization of socio-historical reality. To explore the historical dynamism and the interspersing of contemporary social voices, the present study has employed Mikhail Bakhtin’s novelistic categories of heteroglossia/polyphony, carnival/laughter and chronotope to foreground the contesting sites of socio-ideological mulitiplicity and the historical dynamism of the Bhakti period within the Guru Granth Sahib. The introduction explicates the general and historical characteristics of the Guru Granth Sahib and Bakhtin’s theoretical postulates of heteroglossia/polyphony, carnival/laughter and chronotope by extending these novelistic categories as the subsequent and catalystic phenomenon of European literary history which ultimately manifests the overlapping phenomenon of socio-cultural struggle of people, races, cultures and languages. The introduction outlines the general characteristics of novelization and stipulates the objectives of examining important human voices of the Guru Granth Sahib from the dialogic theories of heteroglossia/polyphony, carnival/laughter and chronotope. The introduction also explicates the historical profiles of Guru Nanak, Kabir and Sant Ravidas and puts forth the various reasons of making particular selections of the bhakti personalities as subjects of this study. The second chapter employs the key theoretical formulations of Bakhtin like heteroglossia, polyphony and dialogism to interpret and evaluate the multivoiced and heteroglot sociality of the Guru Granth Sahib. The chapter aims to establish that the bani (voices) of Guru Nanak, Kabir and Sant Ravidas in the Guru Granth is socio-ideologically stratified and inheres polyphonic and heteroglot elements within its poetic compositions. The chapter further points out the ideological limitations in Bakhtin’s premises on poetic formulations and contends that the poetic discourse of Guru Nanak, Kabir and Sant Ravidas in the Guru Granth Sahib is multivoiced and dialogic as against the Bakhtinian postulates of dogmatic, monologic and authoritarian nature of poetic genres. The idea of chapter three is to foreground the popular overtones of laughter and carnivalesque subversions 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. There are plenty of instances in the social discourse of Guru Nanak, Kabir and Sant Ravidas where laughter and its ironic double along with its carnivalesque decrowning emerge with new connotations and configurations. The public settings and dialogic orientation of discourse display the everyday crudities and pettiness of life through humorous and laughing images of Guru Nanak, Kabir and Sant Ravidas. Chapter four explicates the Bakhtinian analysis of various literary and real chronotopes employed to manifest the historical multi temporality as part of socio-ideological dynamism of that historical period. The voices and writings of Guru Nanak, Kabir and Sant Ravidas contain authentic historical material which reflects a contact of particular and personalized spaces necessary to propel the historical timeline and its evolving multitemporality. Their journeys, encounters, meetings, experiences, participation and dialogic engagement were not personal and private enterprises, rather they moved out of their personal zones and entered the social zone by participating and externalizing the private everyday world of the people into the public domain of literature and real public spaces

The concluding chapter puts forth the important and productive findings and interpretation. The foremost finding of this project is to claim that the Guru Granth Sahib, despite being poetic in form, is an anti-canonical and anti-authoritative discourse. Thus Bakhtin’s contention that all poetry is monologic has its basis in Western literature, and is not equally applicable to the Indian text of the Guru Granth Sahib. The study comes across substantial limitations in Bakhtinian methodology as far as Bakhtin’s postulates on poetic formulation and authoritative discourses are concerned. However a study of the Guru Granth suggests that not all poetic formulations are formalized or dogmatized language of individual poets or singers. Social heteroglossia and subverting ideologies of the Guru Granth stand contrary to Bakhtin’s postulates of monologic tone of the authoritative discourse and poetic forms. In sum it can be stated that these theoretical models and their analytical applications in the bani (discourse) of Guru Nanak, Kabir and Sant Ravidas in the Guru Granth Sahib productively contributed in exploring the new dimensions of the Guru Granth Sahib from a Bakhtinian perspective.