By Siddharth Mehrotra–
On a bright and sunny day, clear and beauteous after a week of gentle rains, I had the privilege to attend the Nanaka Ive Janie: Contemporary Janamsakhi Paintings exhibit, and hear it interpreted by its curator, Sonia Dhami, before a small audience mostly of the local Punjabi-American community, who came to see and learn something new and old traditional matters.
The matter itself, the subject of all the paintings, antique and modern, was of course the life and times (Punj. Janamsakhi) of Guru Nanak, founder of the Sikh faith. All visitors had reason enough not to be disappointed.
The books and paintings were well-laid-out, with each symbol in them meticulously explained (on the wall, or by the esteemed curator, or both) for the naive visitors.
Surely nothing could be clearer than these bright-shining illustrations, all juxtaposing those most universal of preoccupations, beauty and sorrow: the beauties of the world, of Punjab and its people, of wild animals and flowering trees, even of the sorrows themselves: those of Guru Nanak at hard rejections of his message of compassion, of his sister who comforts him, of his wife left at home without him (artist: Keerat Kaur), of Nanak again, were he to see the ruin and desolation of Punjab today (artist: Avtar Singh).
The style of the modern paintings is very like that of their precursors of 200 years ago, presented alongside them (artist: various, mostly Alam Chand), but the meaning of the new paintings and poems is both older and younger than the antique models: it is the Guru’s love for the world and its most helpless, then as now neglected and mishandled, and the need not for worship alone, but for practice of that love: not feeling alone, but action, an action few people dare to take, and therefore requiring a Guru, or in this case the memory of one to bring about.
The taking of such action was emphasized and explained about that same afternoon in a musical lecture by author Valarie Kaur and her travelling band of tabla and harmonium players; their theme, the origin-story of Bandi Chor Divas (“Liberation Day”), the great festival of the Sikh tradition, commemorating the release from prison of Guru Hargobind Sahib, sixth of the Gurus, and how that story has been, and may be an example to us today.
The lecture and its accompanying music stirred every listener’s heart; the lecture universal and indeed revolutionary, the music splendid and exciting in the true Punjabi fashion, familiar and well-beloved to most of the audience since their earliest years. Like most of them, I felt inspired and awestruck by it all.
The only fault to be found with the Loyola Marymount University’s hospitality, is, the signs and announcements of this event were very few and small, and so a very few and small number of the students, staff, and faculty take notice of this exhibit, or any of the other wonders and interests to be found, with even the slightest glance, in this beautiful library.
