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.
