Paper short abstract:

This paper will examine how the Sikh Guru is constructed as a "holy man" or saintly figure, and how this construction--and the ways in which devotees related to him--reveal the religious and cultural contact zone that comprised the Guru's community.

Paper long abstract:

This paper delves into the ways in which the Guru and communities around the Guru are described in the eighteenth century gurbilās literature, which describes the lives of the ninth and tenth Gurus of the Sikh tradition and the community that followed them. The paper takes as a starting point Purnima Dhavan's recent observation that one way to understand Sikh cultural production in the eighteenth century--which reflects a wide range of courtly and religious influences and diverse religious orientations--is to see the diverse content of the gurbilās texts as reflecting their participation in "a mutually enobling love," a set of "complex affective ties of patronage and devotion that had begun to weave disparate groups within Panjabi society into an emotional community devoted to Guru Gobind Singh." (Purnima Dhavan, _When Sparrows Became Hawks_, 150-152). In doing so, the paper examines the idea of the holy man that these texts mobilize--a model that speaks to various religious communities--as well as the ways the texts describe the community's relationship with the Guru as holy man, and how the webs of connection of the "affective community" are so constructed. In so doing we see that the Gurus themselves, as "holy men," stand in a kind of "encounter zone," the intersection of traditions, forms of devotions, and devotees..