The greatest quality in the hymns of Guru Nanak us his ability to bring alive the most profound expenences of God and the self in a very immediate direct and simple manner Working within a romantic framework of writing his poetry touches the most tenner strings of the heart because it speaks of the joy the ecstasy the pain the agony and the divine expectation of the experience of God in most practical and real terms.
“Bara Mah” is such a collection of hymns. Traditionally many poets before Guru Nanak and after him have sung of the seasons and tried to co-relate them with the human world. Nature beauty the abundance or the rigors of the cycles of summer autumn winter and spring form the main link between man his soul his being and the external world which is a part of his sense perception In “Bara Mah the mere descriptions of Nature have a healing quality because they find are objective co-relative in the human needs as they rise and vary ultimately they lead to a search within oneself and this search ends in the realization that God and liberation and love are within oneself and not in the outside world.
The search of a lonely soul caught in the frenzy of a world which is sometimes hostile and sometimes beautiful is held in a sustained metaphor of a wife waiting for a husband to return and the agony she has to suffer when looking around her she finds no solace for herself. The same agony is experienced by the soul which is in search of the Lord:
“If the husband comes not home how can a wife find peace of mind? Sorrow of separation waste away her body”.
The beauteous bumble-bees of Chet along with the sweet singing of the koel in the mango-groves bring as much pain as does the scorching sun of Ashad when “the earth burns like an oven”.
In the happy month of Sawan when the lord is gone to foreign lands the lightning strikes at the heart which is pining for him and in the reason of merry making Bhadon “what comfort is it to the wife left alone?” It is only after a life-time after experiences of all extremes of sorrow have broken the mind and exhausted the body and wearied of the spirit that the devotee comes back to himself and understands that while I have been searching the whole world for salvation and for my Beloved. I needed to have only looked within my-self in order to discover him:
Bring among the last of Gurus writings it is but natural for his entire vision of life lo get crystalized into a single statement which like a seed about to sprout contains the entire tree of knowledge within its hard walls. It is only true experience of the totality and the insight into the futility or both sufferings and happiness that brings the knowledge that all the beauty of the world is as unreal as all the tortures that one has to undergo that to get final bliss one does not have to go to the comforts of a luxurious life or to try and escape the turmoil’s of a struggling life that it is in vain for us to search for light in the external world because it is within us. “God is in me” the man who understands this much is “a bride welcomed in the Masters mansion” one who “hath found her true Love and Lord”.
The Sikh Review
Article extracted from this publication >> March 1, 1991
