The Guru Granth Sahib, as a sacred text of the Sikhs, holds a key distinction of being both sacred and secular (social) at a time. Contemporaneous to its surrounding, the Guru Granth Sahib does not merely stand as a poetic aesthetic, but as a completely self-conscious text which, apart from explaining the theological and cosmological reality of the universe, comments on the social ontology and sharpens its social tone of laughter with ironic and subverting intonation. The idea of this paper is to foreground the popular overtones of laughter and carnivalesque spirit which Mikhail Bakhtin identifies in all epochs where people collectively unleash their popular expressions or consciousness against all normative or serious formats of human life. The Guru Granth Sahib, apart from its canonic status, enriches its semantic sites with contesting and contradicting voices of the Bhakti era where Nirguni thoughts, represented by its preceptors like Guru Nanak, Kabir, and other mystics, manifested unconventional unity of the sacred and the secular. Unlike other dogmatic belief systems, the social consciousness of the Guru Granth Sahib unravels the laughter and humorous aspects of its social dealings and public experience. There are plenty of instances where laughter and its ironic double along with its carnivalesque spirit emerge with renewed energy and synergy. The public settings and dialogic orientation of discourse reflect the everyday crudities and pettiness of life through humorous and laughing images of Guru Nanak and Kabir in the Guru Granth Sahib. Guru Nanak’s direct laughter and ridicule of orthodoxical and degenerating thought systems and Kabir’s direct satire and lampooning profusely manifest the combination of the sacred and the secular facets of the Guru Granth Sahib. All such forms of laughter and carnivalesque connotations are profoundly important to earmark the change and renewal of new human consciousness and social world. The subaltern speeches with ridiculing and satiric consciousnesses were set in a new climate of change and popular vision. Scholars have interpreted this contesting spirit of the sants as part of poetic “secularization” (Kumar and Garg 2013, 171), which is partially true as it contains all heteroglot forces of contests and social encounter through popular language and rejection of higher forms: |
