We live in an age that constantly asks communities to “be practical.” To fund the essentials and cut the rest. This reduces culture to a luxury and joy to a distraction. Under pressure, the first things that disappear are often the things that make life livable: song, ceremony, craft, language, poetry, congregational delight, and public color.

The costs are not only emotional. They are political. A community deprived of beauty becomes easier to manage. A people trained to regard joy as frivolous become easier to discipline. A movement that forgets how to sing, gather, adorn, and celebrate forgets how to imagine a future.

As I reflect on Guru Gobind Singh Sahib’s life and Prakash Purab (Illumination Day), I reflect on a life lived within siege conditions. Anandpur Sahib was ringed by hostility and surveilled by power. Yet the Guru did not narrow Sikh existence into a grim fortress mentality. He widened it. He built a culture of resilience where poetry, music, craft, and festivity were not an escape from struggle, but the very means by which Sikh spirit, ethical clarity, and collective courage were renewed. 

Just as the Guru lived under siege, modern life produces its own siege conditions. Surveillance can be digital. Precarity can be economic. Humiliation can be algorithmic and racialized. Exhaustion can be cultural. Yet the effect is similar: we are trained into reactive time, always responding, always scattered, always tired.

In modern political life, especially in activist spaces that treat aesthetics as secondary, Guru Gobind Singh Sahib offers another path: a politics that can fight without becoming ugly, a people that can resist without losing tenderness, a Panth (Sikh Collective) that can remain joyous even while carrying responsibility. 

Bani (the Wisdom) elucidates the principle of Nam (Identification with IkOankar, One Creative and Pervasive Force) brought about by the Founder-Gurus:

A lamp was lit in darkness, freed all in ignorance, via 1-Nam principle. Perfection & Supreme Being was revealed in the entire mansion-world of  Hari, the 1-Light, as votary Nanak.⁵

     Guru Granth Sahib 1385
‍

Nanak established the dominion by raising 
the fort of truth on firm foundations. With the 
might and bravery of the sword of Divine wisdom, 
he gave the gift of life…
That immaculate canopy waves above, as he sits secure on the throne…⁶

     Guru Granth Sahib 966
‍

The permanent and unchangeable sovereign rule of  
the great Guru has been ordained by the Primal Being.⁷

     Guru Granth Sahib 1396

In these sabads (excerpts from the Bani of Guru Granth Sahib) we understand the vision and revolution of Guru Nanak Sahib to Guru Gobind Singh Sahib—the establishment of a Raj (Dominion) founded on truth or eternality, a sovereignty rooted in the eternal One, and steeped in the principle of Nam. It is this principle of Nam, this rootedness in eternality, and this transcendent sovereignty, that manifests in Guru Gobind Singh Sahib’s continuation of the revolution started by Guru Nanak Sahib. We turn now to Anandpur Sahib.

Why Anandpur Sahib matters: Workshop, not backdrop

Anandpur Sahib began as Chak Nanaki, founded by Guru Teghbahadar Sahib, and it sits at the margins of modern Panjab, in the Himalayan foothills. Distance from Mughal power in Lahore and Sirhind created room for Guru Gobind Singh Sahib to consolidate Sikh collective life and to shape the disciplined public formation that would come to be known as the Khalsa Panth (Sovereign order of committed Sikhs). Yet this was never a quiet refuge. Anandpur Sahib stood amid a volatile political terrain, bordered by the Pahari rajas of the Rajput hill kingdoms, whose alliances and antagonisms repeatedly pressed in on the Sikh community. From the Battle of Bhangani in 1688 onward, Sikh life in and around Anandpur was marked by intermittent conflict with neighboring hill polities—a pressure that makes the Guru’s cultural and institutional labor there all the more instructive.

Anandpur Sahib is often narrated as a stage for crisis: threats, alliances, sieges, battles, monumental decisions that reshaped Sikh history. But Anandpur Sahib also functioned as a workshop for shaping Sikh public life. The Guru gathered Sikhs, trained them, taught them, and guided the formation of institutions that could travel through persecution and diaspora. But he also cultivated a sonic and imaginative world that could keep the spirit from collapsing into fear.

A community can be brave for a day. It can fight for a season. The deeper question is whether it can endure. Endurance requires more than discipline. It requires replenishment. This is where aesthetics enters Sikh history as a serious political technology.

One can think of aesthetics here in a broad Sikh sense: poetry that clarifies the inner-being, music that synchronizes the sangat (congregation), ceremonial forms that keep memory alive, crafted objects that carry values, color, and rhythm that teach the body a different relationship to time.

Anandpur Sahib cultivated another time, a Sikh time that refused imperial scheduling and the nervous tempo of reaction. It was congregational time, shaped by the recurring discipline of sangat⁸ and pangat,⁹ where the community gathered to listen, sing, deliberate, and eat together, returning again and again to shared attention rather than private panic. It was seasonal time, marked by cycles of labor, community gathering, and remembrance that oriented Sikh life to continuity and transmission, not merely to the next crisis or decree. And it was ceremonial time, structured through practices that rehearsed ethics in public, where Bani, kirtan,¹⁰ and collective rites turned memory into habit and commitment into something embodied and repeatable. Bani names this larger temporality with particular clarity, reminding the community that what is most real is not what is most immediate:

True in the beginning, true throughout the ages. 
Is true now, and Nanak states, will always be true¹¹.¹²

In other words, Sikh time is anchored in what remains true, or eternal. across beginnings and endings, which is precisely why the violences of any given moment, however real, are never permitted to claim final authority over Sikh consciousness or communal horizon.

Picture Anandpur Sahib at dawn: the gathered sangat listening and singing, breath settling into shared rhythm, the day beginning with sound that refuses panic. Under conditions designed to isolate and intimidate, congregational listening becomes a political fact. It trains steadiness.

Then the ordinary ethics: pangat in langar,¹³ bodies seated without rank, food served as shared dignity. A siege tries to turn people into desperate individuals. Pangat and sangat turns them back into a community, practicing equality as habit and teaching the body what the mind can forget under pressure: that Sikh life is not organized by scarcity, status, or fear, but by shared obligation, mutual care, and the disciplined refusal of humiliation.

Professor Puran Singh’s insight: Art as personality, not decoration

In “Notes on Art and Personality from the Sikh Viewpoint,”¹⁴ Professor Puran Singh advocates, in his own intense and lyrical way, that art is not simply skill or surface. It is the outflow of personality shaped by spiritual orientation. Art reveals what a person and a people are becoming.

Prof. Puran Singh insists that aesthetics are never neutral, “Art must agitate our souls. It must churn the blue ocean and, out of it bring a new sun and a new moon for the human race.” The forms a community makes and repeats train its inner life. A people’s art is a record of its ethics and its metaphysics.

From that vantage point, Anandpur Sahib’s cultural life is not incidental color around military and political struggle. It is a field where the Sikh personality, collectively understood, is cultivated. The Guru’s project was not only to repel external threats, but to grow an inner capacity: Chardi Kala (Rising Power) as a lived practice, not a mere slogan. The term Chardi Kala is articulated at the end of the Sikh supplicatory prayer, the Ardas: Nanak Nam Chardi Kala, Tere Bhane Sarbat da Bhala.¹⁵

To follow the house of Guru Nanak Sahib is to begin where Sikh life actually begins: with Nam, with identification and attunement to IkOankar (One Creative and Pervasive Force, the One, 1Force). Chardi Kala does not emerge as self-generated optimism or personal willpower. It rises as a consequence of alignment. When the self is brought into relation with the One, a different kind of power becomes available, not the power of ego, but the steadiness and clarity that comes from living in sync with Hukam (the Command).

From that alignment follows its ethical outgrowth: Sarbat da Bhala, the desire and commitment to the flourishing of all. This betterment is not produced by our striving alone, as if human effort could manufacture liberation by sheer intensity. It is the fruit of orientation. As we identify with the One in the house of Guru Nanak Sahib, we rise into a steadier power, and that power expresses itself as benefaction, as responsibility, as a widening of concern beyond the self toward the whole of humanity.

In the sections that follow, we will explore poetry, sound, color, craft, Anand (bliss), and celebration as powerful tools used by Guru Gobind Singh Sahib to cultivate the Sikh personality—creating a resilient Panth in a period of great turmoil and sacrifice—a community that insists on beauty and vastness even as the environment around them seeks to shrink and atomize.  

Poetry as training: Imagination that refuses humiliation

Guru Gobind Singh Sahib is remembered as a warrior and a leader, but also as a poet whose compositions shaped the Sikh imaginative universe. Even when debates arise about attribution and compilation around particular texts, the larger truth remains: under the Guru’s guidance, poetic articulation was treated as central to Sikh formation. Anandpur Sahib, in particular, was not simply a fort under pressure, but a literary and intellectual workshop. The Guru gathered a Kavi Darbar, a courtly assembly of poets, scholars, scribes, and translators, and cultivated conditions where language itself became a form of community training and political refusal. Within that milieu, translation mattered as much as composition. Renderings of older Indic and West Asian learning into accessible vernacular registers were part of the work of making Sikh life durable and shareable, while the court’s multilingual energy, including Braj alongside Persian and Punjabi, signaled a sovereignty of thought that did not depend on Mughal cultural permission.

Why would poetry matter under siege?

Because humiliation is one of Empire’s main weapons. It attempts to shrink one’s sense of self, to make one feel that their existence is contingent, tolerable only on the state’s terms. Poetry interrupts that shrinking. It expands inner space. It gives a community words for dignity, metaphors for justice, and narrative forms that do not rely on imperial recognition.

Poetry also teaches discernment. It trains the mind to hold complexity without surrendering ethical clarity. It teaches that strength is not merely force, but composure. This matters when fear is a constant climate.

A Sikh politics without imagination easily collapses into reactive life, where the horizon is set by whatever the state, the empire, or the dominant order does next, and where community energy is spent mainly on response rather than on formation. In that condition, even righteous struggle can become narrow, brittle, and exhausting, because it is tethered to the opponent’s tempo and categories, rather than rooted in a Sikh moral universe that can name reality on its own terms. It can even become a mirror of the oppressor’s worldview, only inverted. 

Guru Gobind Singh Sahib’s poetic world insists on something else: a Sikh does not merely resist oppression. A Sikh cultivates a sovereign interiority that oppression cannot colonize, an inner discipline shaped by Nam, by memory, and by aesthetic practice, where dignity is not granted by power but anchored in Akal Purakh (the Timeless Being), and where the capacity to act arises from steadiness, clarity, and Chardi Kala rather than from panic or rage.

Sound as community architecture:
‍Kirtan, rhythm, and the shared breath

Sound is one of the fastest ways communities synchronize. A room full of strangers can become a sangat through shared listening and shared voice. Kirtan is not only worship. It is a social formation that is capable of revolutionary change, both internally and within society. It is through the singing of kirtan in sangat that transformation occurs.

Guru Arjan Sahib asks in the first rahau¹⁶ from this sabad in Rag Gauri, how we can be transformed and find inner peace. 

O truth-oriented beings, show me that comfort,
That will quench my thirst and satiate my mind.¹⁷

In the second refrain of the same sabad, Guru Sahib provides the answer:

Obtaining the wealth of Hari, the Fear-Eliminator, brings peace.
Through the Grace of the Divine Owner, I have joined the sangat of the truth-oriented ones.¹⁸

How then does one obtain this wealth of the Divine One? In the last line of the sabad, Guru Sahib gives an explanation: 

Through grace, the truth-oriented ones have told me the Truth.
I have obtained all comforts and bliss.
In the sangat of the truth-oriented ones, I sing the praises of Hari, the Fear-Eliminator.
Nanak states, I have found this through great fortune.¹⁹

     Guru Granth Sahib 179

Guru Arjan Sahib teaches that when the Divine One is praised in the gathered sangat, sung as a community, that shared act becomes a transforming force, one that reorients the self and the community toward anand, toward joy and bliss—made durable through collective practice.

The sonic life around Guru Granth Sahib is a kind of public pedagogy. It trains attention. It trains humility. It trains the body to breathe with others. In a world that fractures attention and privatizes feeling, Sikh sound gathers feeling back into collective form.

Under Guru Gobind Singh Sahib, this sonic architecture mattered for resilience. Where Empire produces anxiety, congregational sound produces steadiness. Where imperial power isolates, sangati (of the sangat) sound produces togetherness. Where violence attempts to reduce life to panic, kirtan returns life to meaning.

Even the non-liturgical²⁰ sounds of community life matter: the nagara (war drum), the cadence of collective movement, the rhythm of labor, the spoken recitations of Bani²¹ that stitch days together. These are not “extras.” These are ways  Sikhs keep themselves from dissolving into private despair. Add, too, the sound of collective supplication and remembrance through ardas, where the sangat stands as one body, moving through shared memory and shared petition, and where the voiced “Vahiguru” gathers scattered lives back into a single cadence of responsibility. In that same register is the call and response of a jaikara (war cry of victory), a communal cry that is not mere volume but a rehearsed unity, a moment when the community speaks in unison and feels its own coherence, converting private fear into shared resolve.

Color, craft, and material ethics: Visible sovereignty

Aesthetics also live in what is worn, carried, crafted, and displayed. The Sikh tradition is not embarrassed by materiality. It demands that values take substantive form, in objects and practices that discipline the body and make commitments visible, such as the visible discipline of the panj kakars (the 5Ks)²² and the daily habits they imply, or the Nishan Sahib²³ marking a space of collective presence and obligation, not private piety alone. If we say dignity matters, our public life ought to look like dignity. If we say collective responsibility matters, our spaces ought to invite collective participation.

This is where Anandpur Sahib’s visual culture becomes instructive, even if we only glimpse it through histories and memory. A community under pressure still invests in craft, adornment, and the visibility of identity. Not as vanity, but as a declaration: we will not be made invisible.

Consider what it means to sustain craft in a time of threat. Craft requires patience, care, and transmission. Craft assumes a future. Every trained artisan, every maintained practice, every preserved form is a refusal of the imperial message that says: you will not last.

Here, aesthetics is future-oriented labor.

In Sikh life, this can include textiles, weapon craft, calligraphy and book binding, which can be  understood as disciplined responsibility, Nishan Sahib and insignia as communal markers, architectural forms that center congregation rather than hierarchy. These material forms teach the body and the eye what Sikh sovereignty feels like: a poised collective life, not domination.

Anand: Joy as discipline, not mood

Anand (bliss), is often reduced in casual speech to happiness (see the Guru Granth Sahib Project’s definition for details²⁴). But Sikh joy is not a consumer mood. It is a disciplined orientation grounded in a relationship with Akal Purakh, the Timeless Being, expressed through humility and service, and maintained through collective practices that resist despair.

As Guru Amardas Sahib explains about Anand in the seventh stanza of Anand Sahib, 

Everyone says, ‘it’s blissful,' ‘it’s blissful,' but bliss can only be realized through the Wisdom (Guru).
True bliss can only be realized through the Wisdom, but that being who is graced by the Wisdom realizes it.
The being who has been enlightened through the Wisdom has all transgressions removed.
Worldly attachment is removed from within, and the mind is adorned.
Guru Amardas states: This is bliss; this bliss can only be realized through the Wisdom²⁵.²⁶

Guru Gobind Singh Sahib’s cultivation of joy ought to be read in this deeper sense. Joy becomes a training in non-collapse. It is a refusal to let fear become the governing emotion of the community. Yet this refusal is not powered by bravado. It is rooted in anand as connection with the Timeless One, a relationship that re-sizes the world. When consciousness is oriented toward the Eternal, the dominations of the moment do not become unreal, but they are defanged. They lose their claim to be final. Time-bound violences, decrees, and humiliations are revealed as temporary forces that cannot name ultimate reality, cannot determine the meaning of Sikh life, and cannot own the community’s horizon. Empire wants each individual’s inner life to be dominated by anxiety, to make reactive time feel like the only time there is. Anand resists that domination by returning the self and the Panth to a larger temporality, where oppression is faced directly, but never granted the authority to rule the inner-being.

Why does this still matter? Because modern life has its own forms of siege: algorithmic anxiety, economic precarity, racialization, surveillance, and a constant feeling that the future is thinning. In such a world, joy can be politicized in unhealthy ways. It can be commodified into “good vibes,” it can be dismissed as naivete or individualized as self care that feeds atomization rather than collectivity. Sikh tradition offers another possibility: joy as an ethical practice that strengthens the capacity to act.

Celebration as governance: The community rehearses itself

Ceremony and celebration are ways a community rehearses its values. They are repeated forms that transmit memory without requiring every generation to reinvent meaning from scratch.

Under Guru Gobind Singh Sahib, Sikh public life included forms of gathering that strengthened communal bonds and clarified purpose. Festivals and commemorations, like Vaisakhi²⁷ and Hola Mohala,²⁸ become moments where the community sees itself, renews commitments, and trains the young into shared memory.

This is also where langar must be understood beyond mere charity. Pangat is an aesthetic and ethical form. The line, the shared sitting, the shared food, the shared labor, the ordinary dignity of eating together—all of it builds a sensory education in equality, a practice Guru Nanak Sahib established to confront caste hierarchy by placing bodies without rank into a shared order of dignity, a lesson that remains painfully necessary given how persistently caste continues to surface, even in Sikh spaces today.²⁹

Empire organizes bodies into ranks. Pangat reorganizes bodies into shared life.

Even the simplest repeated forms become potent under pressure: how we greet, how we share space, how we hold a room, how we listen. These are micro-aesthetics of a moral order.

Joy without denial: Grief held inside Chardi Kala

Some people hear “joy” and assume denial. Denial of grief, of struggle, of pain. That is not Sikh joy. Sikh joy does not require pretending there is no suffering. It requires refusing to let suffering become the final authority.

Guru Gobind Singh Sahib’s life contains immense loss and conflict. His father, Guru Teghbahadar Sahib, sacrificed his life for religious plurality when Guru Gobind Singh Sahib was just nine years old. His mother and children were lost after the Siege of Anandpur Sahib. The Guru fought in more than a dozen battles across his Guruship. A shallow celebration that cannot hold grief would be disrespectful to the historical record. The point is more nuanced: Sikh joy holds grief inside a larger horizon. It makes room for lament and remembrance, but it refuses to hand the keys of the inner-being to despair.

This distinction is crucial for modern communities navigating trauma. There is a popular temptation to perform pain as proof of seriousness. There is also a temptation to suppress pain for the sake of functioning. Sikh aesthetics offers a third way: build forms where grief can be named, held, and transmuted into collective care and responsibility. As Guru Nanak Sahib states in Asa ki Var (Song of Hope), 

Suffering has become medicine, and happiness or comfort a disease;
In suffering, the Creator is remembered³⁰.³¹

This is why poetry matters again. Poetry gives grief shape without letting it drown the community. It gives sorrow a language that can be shared, rather than privatized.

The political stakes: Why beauty threatens empire

Empire does not only fear weapons. It fears ungovernable meaning.

A people with a strong aesthetic world are harder to assimilate, because assimilation requires not only legal compliance but emotional surrender. It requires a people to find the colonizer’s world more compelling than their own.

A people who can gather joyfully without state permission, who can celebrate without imperial validation, who can sing their own memory, who can craft their own symbols, who can teach their young to feel dignity in their bones, become difficult to rule through humiliation.

Beauty also builds trust. Communities fracture when trust evaporates. Shared aesthetic life is one of the most effective ways to regenerate trust because it creates shared experiences that are not purely transactional. This is why even small cultural practices matter: kirtan programs, poetry circles, gatka³² training understood as disciplined embodiment, art workshops, exhibitions, and storytelling nights. This shared aesthetic life also extends to the visible discipline of the panj kakars, not as costume or uniform, but as gifts of the Guru that bind inner cultivation to outer practice, making identity a lived commitment that continually communicates responsibility, belonging, and ethical readiness. These practices must not be reduced to “display” or “shows,” and they do not replace political work. They make political work sustainable.

Diaspora implications: Rebuilding Anandgarh 

Sikhs today live far from the geographic Anandpur Sahib of the seventeenth century. The more urgent question is whether we can build Anandpur conditions, the social and spiritual architecture that makes Sikh life resilient, coherent, and future-facing under pressure. Of the five forts that Guru Gobind Singh Sahib built at Anandpur Sahib, Anandgarh, the Fort of Anand, functioned as a center of planning and deliberation, where the Guru and the Sikhs gathered to shape strategy and organize collective action. We must build a new Anandgarh, not as stone and mortar, but as shared institutional capacity: spaces where imagination and discipline meet, where the Sikh community can think together, train together, and plan with clarity rather than panic. Where we can move to action from reaction.

Anandgarh conditions mean:

• A shared cultural world that trains courage and tenderness together.
• A community infrastructure that makes joy repeatable, not occasional.
• Institutions that treat art as a vehicle for ethics, not a status object.
• Education that links aesthetics to seva and to political responsibility.

In practical terms, this can look like investing in intergenerational transmission: kirtan training that teaches meaning, Panjabi and Gurmukhi literacy tied to lived practice, creative writing and spoken word that draws from Sikh principles without becoming mere branding, visual arts that engage Sikh history beyond token motifs.

It can also mean refusing the false choice between “culture” and “justice.” If we want Sikh public life to withstand modern pressures, we need cultural infrastructures that prevent burnout. We need spaces where the spirit is fed.

Some practical implications

• For Gurduara (Sikh place of learning and worship)³³ committees: treat kirtan education, Panjabi, Persian, Braj and Gurmukhi literacy, and arts programming as core infrastructure, with stable annual budgets.
• For youth work: pair gatka, music, and poetry with seva and political literacy, so discipline is never separated from care.
• For diaspora institutions: invest in poetry circles, artist residencies, and archive projects that prioritize transmission over spectacle.
• For Sikh media and public discourse: create space for long-form reflection and remembrance, not only reactive commentary.
• For museums and cultural organizations: interpret Sikh objects as practices of resilience and ethics in form, and build interpretation with the sangat, not over it.

What follows from this

If we read Guru Gobind Singh Sahib only through the register of battle and political crisis, we risk misunderstanding the deeper architecture of Sikh endurance. The Guru’s genius was not only in confronting external threats, but in cultivating a Sikh interior and a Sikh public culture that could not be crushed into fear.

Anandpur Sahib becomes a lesson for our time: do not surrender beauty when you are under pressure. That is precisely when you need it most. Build soundscapes that gather the scattered. Build poetry that enlarges inner life and moral imagination. Build ceremonies that transmit memory. Build craft traditions that assume a future. Build joy that is disciplined, not naive.

A community that can celebrate with integrity has not been conquered. A Panth that can sing while carrying responsibility has not been reduced to mere survival. This is the politics of aesthetics under Guru Gobind Singh Sahib: joy as refusal, beauty as governance, and imagination as a form of sovereignty.

Notes on sources

This essay is shaped primarily by Sikh conceptual vocabulary and by a broad reading of Sikh historical memory around Anandpur Sahib and Guru Gobind Singh Sahib’s cultural and institutional project, rather than by a single historical chronicle. The interpretive emphasis here is on aesthetics as ethical and political infrastructure.

Prof. Puran Singh’s “Notes on Art and Personality from the Sikh Viewpoint” is used as a light conceptual reference point, especially his insistence that art is not neutral decoration but an expression of inner formation, a making of personality, and a spiritual orientation that becomes visible in form. I have not leaned on his text as a comprehensive authority for Anandpur Sahib’s historical details. Instead, I use his insight as a lens to read why Sikh cultural life matters under pressure: art as formation, not ornament.

Where readers want further grounding, a productive next step is to pair Prof. Puran Singh’s aesthetic philosophy with a focused historical account of Anandpur Sahib and a careful engagement with Sikh textual traditions.

References

¹   Talib-o-Matlub may mean the seeker and the sought, the student and the teacher, or the love or the Beloved; Harinder Singh, Guru Gobind Singh Sahib: Life, Vision & Wisdom, Sikh Research Institute, 2025.  ^‍

²   Translation by Harinder Singh, Guru Gobind Singh Sahib: Life, Vision & Wisdom, Sikh Research Institute, 2025.  ^‍

³   Bhai Nand Lal, Ganjnama, “Sultanat Daham: Vahiguru Jiu Sati,”  Translation by Harinder Singh, Guru Gobind Singh Sahib: Life, Vision & Wisdom, Sikh Research Institute, 2025.  
Original text as follows: 
ਫ਼ਾਇਜ਼ੁਲ ਅਨਵਾਰ ਗੁਰੂ ਗੋਬਿੰਦ ਸਿੰਘ  ਕਾਸ਼ਫ਼ੁਲ ਅਸਰਾਰ ਗੁਰੂ ਗੋਬਿੰਦ ਸਿੰਥ ॥ ੧੦੯ ॥
ਆਲਿਮੁਲ ਅਸਤਾਰ ਗੁਰੂ ਗੋਬਿੰਦ ਸਿੰਘ  ਅਬਰਿ ਰਹਿਮਤ ਬਾਰ ਗੁਰੂ ਗੋਬਿੰਦ ਸਿੰਘ ॥ ੧੧੦ ॥
ਮੁਕਬੁਲੋ ਮਕਬੂਲ ਗੁਰੂ ਗੋਬਿੰਦ ਸਿੰਘ  ਵਾਸਲੋ ਮੌਸੂਲ ਗੁਰੂ ਗੋਬਿੰਦ ਸਿੰਘ ॥ ੧੧੧ ॥
ਜਾਂ-ਫ਼ਰੋਜ਼ਿ ਦਹਿਰ ਗੁਰੂ ਗੋਬਿੰਦ ਸਿੰਘ  ਫ਼ੈਜ਼ਿ ਹੱਕ ਰਾ ਬਹਿਰ ਗੁਰੂ ਗੋਬਿੰਦ ਸਿੰਘ ॥ ੧੧੨ ॥
ਹੱਕ ਰਾ ਮਹਿਬੂਬ ਗੁਰੂ ਗੋਬਿੰਦ ਸਿੰਘ  ਤਾਲਿਬੋ ਮਤਲੂਬ ਗੁਰੂ ਗੋਬਿੰਦ ਸਿੰਘ ॥ ੧੧੩ ॥
ਤੇਗ਼ ਰਾ ਫ਼ਤਾਹ ਗੁਰੂ ਗੋਬਿੰਦ ਸਿੰਘ  ਜਾਨੋ ਦਿਲ ਰਾ ਰਾਹ ਗੁਰੂ ਗੋਬਿੰਦ ਸਿੰਘ ॥ ੧੧੪ ॥

⁴   Sikh scripture, the Guru’s Wisdom.

⁵   ਬਲਿਓ ਚਰਾਗੁ ਅੰਧ੍ਯਾਰ ਮਹਿ ਸਭ ਕਲਿ ਉਧਰੀ ਇਕ ਨਾਮ ਧਰਮ ॥
ਪ੍ਰਗਟੁ ਸਗਲ ਹਰਿ ਭਵਨ ਮਹਿ ਜਨੁ ਨਾਨਕੁ ਗੁਰੁ ਪਾਰਬ੍ਰਹਮ ॥੯॥

⁶   ਨਾਨਕਿ ਰਾਜੁ ਚਲਾਇਆ ਸਚੁ ਕੋਟੁ ਸਤਾਣੀ ਨੀਵ ਦੈ ॥…
ਮਤਿ ਗੁਰ ਆਤਮ ਦੇਵ ਦੀ ਖੜਗਿ ਜੋਰਿ ਪਰਾਕੁਇ ਜੀਅ ਦੈ ॥
ਝੁਲੈ ਸੁ ਛਤੁ ਨਿਰੰਜਨੀ ਮਲਿ ਤਖਤੁ ਬੈਠਾ ਗੁਰ ਹਟੀਐ ॥

⁷   ਸ੍ਰੀ ਗੁਰੂ ਰਾਜੁ ਅਬਿਚਲੁ ਅਟਲੁ ਆਦਿ ਪੁਰਖਿ ਫੁਰਮਾਇਓ ॥੭॥

⁸   Sikh congregation.

⁹   Institution of dining together in a Langar: the Sikh institution of serving free food to those in need. Langar is a radical act of egalitarian principles being put into practice

¹⁰   Divine music, the sung recitation of Sikh scripture.

¹¹   Translation by the author.

¹²   ਆਦਿ ਸਚੁ ਜੁਗਾਦਿ ਸਚੁ ॥ ਹੈ ਭੀ ਸਚੁ ਨਾਨਕ ਹੋਸੀ ਭੀ ਸਚੁ ॥੧॥

¹³   Langar is the Sikh institution of serving free food to those in need. Langar is a radical act of egalitarian principles being put into practice.

¹⁴   https://sikhsiyasatnews.net/notes-on-art-and-personality-from-the-sikh-viewpoint/

¹⁵   ਨਾਨਕ ਨਾਮ ਚੜ੍ਹਦੀ ਕਲਾ ॥ ਤੇਰੇ ਭਾਣੇ ਸਰਬੱਤ ਦਾ ਭਲਾ ॥

¹⁶   The literal meaning of ‘rahau’ is to pause, stay, remain steady, or rest. The stanza preceding the word rahau acts as a refrain or chorus, which is repeated after every other stanza while singing a composition. In most cases, the stanza of rahau contains the central idea of a Sabad. For further details, please check this link.

¹⁷   ਸੋ ਸੁਖੁ ਮੋ ਕਉ ਸੰਤ ਬਤਾਵਹੁ ॥ ਤ੍ਰਿਸਨਾ ਬੂਝੈ ਮਨੁ ਤ੍ਰਿਪਤਾਵਹੁ ॥੧॥ ਰਹਾਉ ॥

¹⁸   ਜਾ ਕੈ ਹਰਿ ਧਨੁ ਸੋਈ ਸੁਹੇਲਾ ॥ ਪ੍ਰਭ ਕਿਰਪਾ ਤੇ ਸਾਧਸੰਗਿ ਮੇਲਾ ॥੧॥ ਰਹਾਉ ਦੂਜਾ ॥੧੨॥੮੧॥

¹⁹    ਕਰਿ ਕਿਰਪਾ ਸੰਤਨ ਸਚੁ ਕਹਿਆ ॥ ਸਰਬ ਸੂਖ ਇਹੁ ਆਨੰਦੁ ਲਹਿਆ ॥
ਸਾਧਸੰਗਿ ਹਰਿ ਕੀਰਤਨੁ ਗਾਈਐ ॥ ਕਹੁ ਨਾਨਕ ਵਡਭਾਗੀ ਪਾਈਐ ॥੪॥ 

²⁰   Meaning, not related to public religious practice: rituals, rites, or ceremony.

²¹   Sikh scripture, the Guru’s Wisdom.^‍

²²   The five articles of faith that initiated Sikhs wear upon themselves.

²³   The flag of the Guru that flies outside of every Gurduara.

²⁴   See The Guru Granth Sahib Project’s definition

²⁵   Transcreation by Guru Granth Sahib Project

²⁶   ਆਨੰਦੁ ਆਨੰਦੁ ਸਭੁ ਕੋ ਕਹੈ   ਆਨੰਦੁ ਗੁਰੂ ਤੇ ਜਾਣਿਆ ॥
ਜਾਣਿਆ ਆਨੰਦੁ ਸਦਾ ਗੁਰ ਤੇ   ਕ੍ਰਿਪਾ ਕਰੇ ਪਿਆਰਿਆ ॥
ਕਰਿ ਕਿਰਪਾ ਕਿਲਵਿਖ ਕਟੇ   ਗਿਆਨ ਅੰਜਨੁ ਸਾਰਿਆ ॥
ਅੰਦਰਹੁ ਜਿਨ ਕਾ ਮੋਹੁ ਤੁਟਾ   ਤਿਨ ਕਾ ਸਬਦੁ ਸਚੈ ਸਵਾਰਿਆ ॥
ਕਹੈ ਨਾਨਕੁ  ਏਹੁ ਅਨੰਦੁ ਹੈ   ਆਨੰਦੁ ਗੁਰ ਤੇ ਜਾਣਿਆ ॥੭॥

²⁷   The Indic harvest festival. Since the time of Guru Amardas Sahib, Vaisakhi and Divali were used as two days of national gathering for the Sikh community. Where the far-flung sangat would come to the Guru, to learn from the Guru and each other. 

²⁸   Guru Gobind Singh Sahib started the festival of Hola Mohala as an alternative to the Indic festival of Holi. Instead of throwing colours on each other, at Hola Mohala, Sikhs would gather and engage in martial arts, sword fighting and horse riding competitions. 

²⁹   See the SikhRI’s State of the Panth Report on Caste and Race for more information. 

³⁰   Transcreation by Guru Granth Sahib Project.

³¹   ਦੁਖੁ ਦਾਰੂ ਸੁਖੁ ਰੋਗੁ ਭਇਆ  ਜਾ ਸੁਖੁ ਤਾਮਿ ਨ ਹੋਈ ॥

³²   Sikh martial tradition.

³³   Literally, door of or via the Guru. Gurduaras (often romanized as Gurdwara) are a place where Guru Granth Sahib can be accessed and where Sikhs can gather, worship and organize. See The Guru Granth Sahib Project’s State of the Panth Report on Gurduara.