Holy Cow! an Indian Adventure

by Sarah Macdonald

  Sikhs are urged to worship early in the morning and I’m up before the sweat, filth, exasperation and exhaustion of a typical Indian day can build up. A cool wind blows through almost empty streets lined with the humps of beggars under blankets. En route to the Golden Temple my rickshaw cyclist sings softly under his breath and a light mist swirls around his skinny ankles as the bitumen starts to warm with the early summer sun. We pass squat square shops paying tribute to the ten Sikh Gurus who founded the faith. There’s a Nanak Tailor a Har Krishnan Secondary School, a Hargobind Car Parts and a Tegh Bahadur Guest House. Nanak is the most popular name; he was the first Sikh Guru. Born in 1469, when there was much violence between Hindus and Muslims, he urged Indians to worship one God whose name was truth.

  At the end of a warren of dark narrow alleys we come to the bright white walls of the Golden Temple. This is the Vatican of Sikhism, the most important gurdwara in the world. After removing my shoes, washing my feet and covering my head, I walk through one of the gates just as the fat fireball sun plops over the horizon. It kisses the faces of Sikhs washing the marble walkways with milk, and ignites the Golden Temple Sanctum which sits in the centre of the sacred pool. The rippling tank waters turn orange, shimmering like the sacred nectar (or amrit) that gives the town its name. A knot of nervous men gather on the stairs, all dressed in bright white turbans, their deep blue tunics teamed with gleaming silver swords.

  I ask an official-looking man with a nametag what’s going on. Temple officer Subedar Dalbir Singh is only too happy to help me; a jolly, rotund man in a safari suit, he proudly congratulates me for arriving on a special occasion. His Punjabi-accented English is a punchy bombardment delivered at break-neck speed with strong nods of his hair-heavy head. I think he explains that Sikhism doesn’t really have a ministry as such, but at the Golden Temple four men, or granthis, are paid to recite the entire Sikh bible off-by-heart in the sanctum, and today two new granthis will be ordained. These guys are starting an important job. Before he died, the tenth Guru, Guru Gobind Singh, told his people there would be no more living gurus and they must follow the Granth Sahib, which consists of more than one thousand pages of poetic meditations on God, guidance to good living and hymns. This book is not just a bible, it’s more a living saint – every morning it’s carried in a procession to the sanctum and put to bed at night with just as much reverence.

  I follow the new granthis and their pushy families across the narrow bridge to the Golden Sanctum for a rare glimpse of the book in daylight. The silent crowd of Sikhs gasp as we watch the unwrapping of a birthday present from God. Two men fold back beautiful orange felt that’s intricately embroidered with gold flowers. They carefully peel away five more layers of felt, followed by layers of white cotton. Finally, the Guru Granth Sahib is revealed. Beautifully handwritten curved script travels over thick massive sheets. The new granthis nervously begin their recitation. I can’t understand it, but the communal singing, or kirtan, they lead is divine. I have to stop myself from crying out ‘Alleluia!’, for these Sikhs seem to be the only Indians who understand that music sounds better if it’s not making ears bleed. In shops, movies, restaurants, festivals, weddings, temples, train stations and parties music is always distorted beyond all comprehension, but here the harmonium and tabla are soft and clear, and the human voices rise unadulterated by sound systems. Influenced by the Sufi hymns, the music is designed to prompt a particular devotional mood or emotion. I feel sweet joy, a sense of a shared serenity within the human spirit.

  The sound of huge kettledrums signals the end of the ceremony and reminds Sikhs of their most fundamental religious practice – sewa or service. Subedar shuffles along beside me muttering, ‘Doing duty serves God and rids us Sikhs of selfishness, ego and misery.’

  We head towards the gurdwara’s communal kitchen where aluminum dinner trays tower high, and massive cooking pots bubble on fires large enough to bake an elephant. Top-knotted boys peel piles of potatoes and carrots, and about fifty women squat rolling dough.

  A beautiful young girl with a plait down to her bottom stands up, grabs my hand and pulls me down into the chapatti circle. The chapatti is the basic foodstuff of north India – round hot bread that starts as a blob of dough and is then pinched and rolled into a perfect circle with a series of deft wrist actions. Through sign language and giggles, the girl shows me, her mother shows me and her mother shows me; but the three generations fail. My chapattis look like the playdough failures of my childhood – wonky wrinkled and torn. Grandma snatches my rolling pin and pushes me away. Sacked, I walk out amid gales of high-pitched hysteria.

  The communal kitchen is the Sikh faith’s ‘up yours’ to the Hindu notion of caste. Hindu Brahmins will not eat with lower castes or let them touch their food, but in the Sikh dining room all eaters are equal – beggars, western tourists, Hindu sadhus, pilgrims and school kids eat spicy chickpeas, vegetables and perfectly round chapatti with their hands.

  But while the Sikhs can dish out food, they usually won’t take it or anything else. Subedar shows me the Akal Takhat Sahib, the Sikh parliament that was destroyed in a 1984 shoot-out between the government and separatists wanting a Sikh state. He gruffly growls, ‘The government rebuilt the building and we knocked it right down and built it again ourselves.’

  ‘Why on earth did you do that?’

  Subedar puffs out his chest.

  ‘We are not beggars, dependence leads to guilt and shame. You will never see a Sikh beggar ever.’

  He’s right, I never have.

  Subedar pushes me towards the museum, looks at his fob watch and bustles off.

  The Sikhs are the Irish of India, portrayed as the fools, the losers and the clowns. The latest gag I’ve heard involves a game show host asking a Sikh contestant, ‘Sadarji, what is your name?’ The Sikh stumbles, ponders and then responds, ‘What are the options?’

  But Indians also have a deep respect for the Sikhs, believing them to be honest, tall, tough and not to be trifled with. Perhaps that’s because the Sikh faith has been hard won with bravery and blood. The community calls itself the Sikh Khalsa – the Army of the Pure – the long hair, knives, bracelet, boxer shorts and comb is its uniform. Hair is never cut so the God-given form remains intact, and the comb keeps it tidy. The knife symbolises a willingness to fight in self-defence or to protect the weak. The bracelet handcuffs a Sikh to God, and the boxer shorts, which are long and baggy, show modesty and restraint.

  The first Sikh Gurus were allowed to propagate their new faith during the rule of the most tolerant of all Mogul leaders, Akbar the Great; but when Akbar died in 1606, the fifth Guru, Arjan, backed the wrong son in the war of succession and Sikhism was punished. In the temple’s museum a huge painting celebrates the first Sikh martyr by showing him calmly sitting on a red-hot pan while burning hot sand is poured over his lap. Another large work shows the ninth Guru’s comrades being boiled alive and sawn in half; the oil painting beside it shows their master beheaded. Other gorgeous exhibits show Sikhs hanging, dragged behind horses, rammed on the head, shot from cannons, knifed in the mouth, scalped alive, turned on spiked wheels and run over by trains. Special reverence is given to Baba Deep Singh, a warrior who was almost decapitated but somehow held his head on and kept fighting to get to the Golden Temple. Children’s comic books of gore are on sale. The captions are curt: ‘There is hardly a mode of torture, which the Sikhs have not suffered, and not one has cried in pain or relented.’

  I’m not the only one gasping in horror. Beside me an extraordinary creature stands still, a hand to her mouth. She’s a fragile, delicately boned girl with ivory skin, wearing a white turban, a white flowing headscarf, a white salwar kamiz and a huge knife in a black holster. I ask her if she’s all right and she whispers, ‘Yes.’

  We leave the museum to sit and watch the calming waters of the pool together. Her name is Keval and she is a western Sikh. In a Texan drawl she tells me that a couple of years ago she was a normal nineteen-year-old all-American girl
who drank too much and partied every night. But one day she took a Kundalini yoga class. The teacher was an Indian Sikh called Yogi Bhajan. Her face flushes a light pink with the memory.

  ‘As I was walking up to him I was the happiest I’ve ever been. It was total relief, comfort and peace. It was like we had known each other forever and I’d been missing him for so long.’

  Soon after, Keval dropped out of university, started a yoga ashram and was given her new name according to her numerology. She says she’s one of ten thousand western Sikhs and Yogi Bhajan has converted them all. I know that Indian Sikhs don’t really get into yoga and the only thing I’ve heard about Kundalini yoga is that it’s great for sex. Keval is anything but sexy, yet I am fascinated by her. She is intriguingly self-contained, so pale she’s almost translucent, and despite the strange outfit and her bright beaming face, she’s somehow bland and vacant. I find it amusing that ten thousand Americans are dressing themselves up in a religion that has such an Indian look and character, and I can’t help but further question her about her life. When Keval invites me to a nearby school for western Sikhs, I quickly accept; I’m keen to see if her kin are as strange as she is.

  The Miri Piri Academy squats low in the green flat fields where the sixth Guru, Hargobind, was born. A pale, skinny and acne-scarred American with a stringy ginger beard comes to meet me at the office. He’s the school’s Academic Director, his name’s Kirpal and he’s happy to show me around. In the late sixties Kirpal was one of America’s long-haired army of the impure – the baby boomer hippies who were dodging military service, rejecting discipline, authority and weaponry to worship drugs.

  ‘I was doing every drug under the sun as an avenue of opening up my consciousness, but I was just creating knots in my psyche. In the first yoga class I experienced uplifting inspiration that was clean, there was a sense of transcendence.’

  He stares into the distance with watery blue eyes and sighs. I guess what’s coming – Kirpal met Yogi Bhajan and found a guru who got him high on Kundalini yoga and addicted to love.

  This is obviously not your average American school. The bell rings for assembly and the kids come out of class in a calm and orderly manner. The boys are wearing blue tunics and the girls are wearing pants, all of them wear turbans and huge side knives. This must be the only American school in the world where the children are ordered to carry a piece and punished when they don’t. They form a lineup and stand at stiff attention, except a tiny little girl who makes soft groans as she does pushups for punishment. Just when I’m thinking it strange that former peace activists are running a military academy with strict discipline, the children break assembly for cuddles and a game of soccer.

  As I watch them kick the ball around lazily in the heat, the few hairs left on my head stand up on end. The children all seem to have blue eyes, lily-white skin and are strangely self-possessed and reserved. They remind me of the telepathic alien children in the movie Village of the Damned. One little girl with her turban slightly askew approaches to hand me a tube of thirty-plus sunscreen.

  ‘Here, you must have sunscreen, you have to wear it everyday to keep your skin pale and unwrinkled.’

  These white Sikhs are more obsessed with pale skin than most Indians! I feel calmer when a woman with freckles and sun damage joins us. She is Kripal (Kirpal’s wife).

  ‘These children are very different, aren’t they?’ I understate the obvious. She stares at me unblinking.

  ‘Yes, they are very special, they’re on a mission, you could say.’

  ‘A mission?’

  ‘Yes, in the seventies, Yogi Bhajan started working with us women, we went to power-raising camps where he told us we had to give birth to the new generation. We worked towards raising our consciousness to attract souls that will transform the planet. It was very lofty, we were idealistic hippies. We got married, had babies and these are the children we wanted to do all the work.’

  I’m not sure this is going to get my hair back. Yet it’s an entertaining diversion and I marvel anew at the different kinds of people that India attracts.

  I attend a class of final year students who will soon be sent out on their divine mission. Their guest teacher is Guru Singh and he is obviously a hero; the kids sit around him and practically pant with happiness. I whisper to a girl next to me, ‘Why is he so famous?’

  ‘He’s the first white Sikh,’ she whispers back.

  Guru Singh is so pale his edges blur in a ghostly hue. His sharp, emaciated face falls into a snowy-grey beard that straggles thinly into his lap. His delicate pink fingers softly pluck his guitar as he tells us about these ‘dark times on earth, the Kali Yurga’. From what I’ve heard, most Hindus and Buddhists believe we have centuries left of these dark ages, but Guru Singh predicts it’ll all end in 2012.

  ‘This will be the Age of Aquarius, a golden age of truth, but the transition period will not be easy. All the conditions that rule this age will lose their dominance and they’ll lead to mind distortions and freak-outs. There’ll be insanity on the streets and we will be like the Red Cross.’

  The kids sit rapt, straight-backed and cross-legged, almost holding their breath in excitement. Guru Singh lifts his voice louder.

  ‘That’s why you’re going to school. Your generation is at its most creative point right when the age is shifting.’

  He strums stronger and rocks, raising his voice again.

  ‘The frequencies of the universe are rising. You are the arrow-head. We are here to help you, but you have to burrow through time and space, it’s going to be fun.’

  He rocks faster and points wildly up in the air.

  ‘It’s going to be in your face, Mr White man, Mr Politician and Mr Organised Religion.’

  The students breathe out, lean back and grin. I almost choke. I know teenagers need their egos pumped up but isn’t this going too far? They’ll be thirty in 2012 and very pissed off if no-one calls their emergency number.

  After the class I ask some if they feel special, they all quietly say ‘yes’, but can’t explain why, except for pointing vaguely at their turbans. Many seem just ordinary kids wearing a strange costume; they come late to class and giggle in the corridors. But there are too few signs of rebellion for me. Kripal says more than forty have even volunteered to get up at two-thirty in the morning for forty days to wash the Golden Temple floors. I wore red stockings and Doc Martens to school for a year in a futile attempt to stand out and be different; these kids are western students who embrace strict rules, a uniform and a path in life as saviours. But perhaps my reaction only shows my own prejudice. India’s young don’t rebel much – Razoo is the most radical under-thirty I’ve met so far and she believes that because Indians are raised with a strong identity they don’t need to experiment much or reject what their parents believe. Perhaps the identity these children get from being Sikh might be giving them a strength and self-confidence they wouldn’t get in the west where children are overloaded with options. But then again, maybe they are brainwashed dags. I’m not really sure.

  The new white Sikhs train for their divine mission in life with intense three-day meditations and Kundalini yoga, both of which are intended to open up their chakras, or energy points, in the body. I’m invited to join a Kundalini class and curiosity wins out over cringe. We start sitting cross-legged and circling and grinding our pelvises while sighing. I feel pathetic, if not a little perverse, with pubescent children pelvic-thrusting and moaning and groaning all around me. Guru Singh drawls directions.

  ‘You’re barely getting into it, be creative, you are unique, FUUUUULFIIIIIL yourselves.’

  I try to let go, but I’m not the only one feeling silly; some kids are chewing gum and looking down. This seems a cruel command for adolescents.

  Finally we are fulfilled enough to sit with our arms up in the air for ten minutes and pant. After a few minutes of hyperventilating, I begin to feel happy, dizzy and lightheaded, but I’m not sure it’s God, I think it’s oxygen saturation. Gur
u Singh starts strumming his guitar, and with our hands on our heart chakras we chant:

  I am what I am that is me,

  I am what I am that is me,

  I am what I am that is me,

  Thank God I am.

  A student joins in with tabla and Guru Singh strums louder and louder yelling at us to, ‘Siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiing it out.’

  It’s ‘Young Talent Time’ meets Christian holiday camp. We send out all our loving by lifting our hands over our heads and shaking them down chanting:

  May the long time Sun shine upon you (arms up),

  All love surround you (arms up),

  And the pure light within you

  Guide your way on.

  And we finish with a long drawn out, ‘Sat nam’ – which means ‘truth is the name’.

  For a time my cynicism is suspended and I’m in on the group high. The singalong of self-love has created a New Age ring of confidence in the room. Guru Singh oozes happiness in himself, his faith and his music. He gives me a CD of songs he’s made with Seal, called Game of Chants, and shows me references by Jane Fonda and Pierce Brosnan. I tell him Courtney Love said sat nam at the MTV Awards and showed me some Kundalini yoga moves when I interviewed her at Triple J, but I can’t resist adding that she then put her cigarette out in my coffee. (Obviously the oxygen-induced high is fading and I can’t help challenging his confidence – smoking, drinking and other drugs are not welcomed amongst New Age Sikhs.) The song and panting stuff may be kind of fun but I’m skeptical of this form of yoga; mainly because the first Sikh Guru was critical of the practice and believed service to others was a better way to God. This new version of Sikhism seems to be a synthesis of age-old knowledge and modern self-loving Americanism – its saccharin, self-absorbed smugness is a bit much for me.