Howard Burton - Exploring the Sikh Tradition: A Conversation with Eleanor Nesbitt

When I had the opportunity to chat with Eleanor Nesbitt for Ideas Roadshow, I was very excited for several reasons. Not only was she an obviously thoughtful and penetrating thinker whose impressively interdisciplinary approach straddled religious studies, educational theory, ethnography and even poetry, but her specialized knowledge of both Hindu and Sikh culture would make her the perfect addition to round out our Religions collection that already included different perspectives on Islam, Christianity, Protestantism and Judaism. Indeed, as the author of the Very Short Introduction to Sikhism, Eleanor seemed the perfect guide to add Sikhism to the Ideas Roadshow mix.

Well, yes and no.

Because as I quickly discovered, in Eleanors view, Sikhism, as such, isnt really the right way to look at things at all. In fact, it is a word that she describes as being really allergic to.

Isms really agitate me, because youre immediately into misapprehensions. India didnt have any things called isms until Europeans arrived and terms like Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and so on were coined by Westerners to encompass, to mean, what they perceived as religions, which they assumed in some way to be parallel to what they knew better, which was Christianity.

So you have this pattern thats assumedand its been assumed for generations now in the West, at leasta pattern of a founder and a scripture and a calendar of festivals and an ethical code, and so on and so on, as if youve got these very similar bundles: ones got the name Christianity, ones got the name Buddhism, but theyre going to have comparable ingredientstheyre going to have rites of passage, which of course are going to include something to do with birth, something to do with death, something to do with marriage, and something to do with initiation or coming of age.

So you then get a very widespread assumption when people are asking about the Sikh tradition, that when people are initiatedwhen, as Sikhs would say, they take Amritthat thats somehow going to happen at about the age that somebody might be confirmed in the Anglican church or might be having their bar mitzvah.

Whereas it isnt like that. A Sikh is quite likely to say for many years, and maybe all his life, that hes not in a position to observe the discipline thats required if you take Amrit, if you become a member of the core community of Sikhs who have the outward uniform, if you like, and who follow a strict code. Even somebody who is devout and very respectful of the tradition may decide never to take Amrit, or it may be that parents say, Look, a child cant possibly observe whats required of them. Its better that they do this as an adult. And then as an adult, if you break one of the ruleslike, willingly or unwillingly some hair is removed from your body, you shave your beard or whateverthen it would be appropriate to take Amrit again, which isnt the way, generally speaking, people view, say, a bar mitzvah.

And when it comes to the scriptureyes, okay, Sikhs have got a scripture, the Guru Granth Sahib. The word guru is a giveawaythe scripture is the living guru, the living spiritual teacher. And so behaviour around the scripture is different from whats expected in many Christian contexts, for example, around the book that is the Bible. In another way, the language thats used to talk about the scripture is much more similar to the language thats used about the elements of Holy Communion in the Roman Catholic Church, for instance. For example, instead of talking about a page of the scripture, Sikhs may talk about an Anga limbof the scripture, because this is the body of the guru. Youre much closer to the This is my body language than you are to the words that are usually used for describing, say, the Bible or the Koran.

So having these parallel isms very easily leads into a way of thinking thats equating things, parallelling phenomena and experiences, and blurring the distinctiveness of them, blurring the concepts that underlie them.

And suddenly, what I had thought would be a wonderful opportunity to simply expose myself to another culture, tradition and set of values became far more than that. By immediately bringing me up short on my knee-jerk ism orientation, Eleanor did far more than simply change the working title of her Ideas Roadshow conversation. She made me think very hard about what any religion or tradition actually is, convincingly demonstrating how dangerously natural it is for all of us to subconsciously interpretif not actually downright judgeother peoples unfamiliar traditions and practices in terms of what we know, rather than to simply appreciate them on their own intrinsic merits.

Because its not just that by doing so we will miss the opportunity to deeply appreciate and understand where theyre coming fromalthough its certainly that as well. By unreflectively framing other peoples experience through our own pre-established categories, we minimize the opportunity that a new experience presents itself to actually understand ourselves better.

Something which has come to be more and more important to me is the key notion of reflexivityrecognizing that, certainly in research, we change what we research and we are changed by what we research. Thats actually ongoing in life as a whole. And being an ethnographer it is actually just being a human being: youre using observation, and particularly listeningyoure using the faculties that we use in the whole of life. And if in the whole of life we become just a little bit more reflective and reflexive, I believe thats a better way forward than necessarily becoming more committed to a particular philosophy or a particular religious path.

So, talking with Eleanor certainly increased my knowledge of the Sikh tradition, as expected. But it also gave me some particularly valuable insights into how to be a better person. And that rather took me by surprise.