Guru Nanak's Transcendent Aesthetics

‘This is a richly referenced, authoritative, forceful, and long-overdue response to the exceptional poet, Guru Nanak – to whom, also, Sikh tradition owes its initial impetus and vision – rather than, as is usually the case, an account of Guru Nanak as the ‘founder’ of the Sikh religion (with only more occasional mention of his poetics). Professor Singh rightly identifies this significant gap in the scholarship to date, and her work is a landmark in Sikh Studies as well as in the literature on the poets of South Asia. Singh’s text is distinctive in being both joyfully exuberant and academically innovative, relating Guru Nanak’s compositions to Plato and more recent and contemporary philosophers, literary critics, activists, environmentalists, and novelists. It also provides a setting in the older janam sakhi literature and the words of Bhai Gurdas while successfully drawing out connections with the much older Indic context – including the Jain and the Buddhist, alongside the ‘Hindu’ – as well as with Sufi and more general Islamic tradition. The author’s attention to the foregrounding of female experience in the Guru Granth Sahib helps redress gendered imbalance in both commentary and exposition. Taken as a whole, her book is delightful and fascinatingly illuminating. Eleanor Nesbitt, University of Warwick‘This is a thought-provoking and powerful study of Guru Nanak’s poetry. It effectively brings Guru Nanak’s poetry into conversation with a wide range of sources from classical rasa theory to various Western studies of aesthetics. It shows how earlier scholarship in India and the West has flattened or diminished the full scope of Guru Nanak’s expression and elucidates elements of the poetry that many have missed. It is a very enjoyable, well-written, and engaging read for anyone in Sikh Studies.’ Robin Rinehart, Lafayette College

Nikky-Guninder Kaur Singh is Crawford Professor and Chair of Religious Studies at Colby College in Waterville, Maine. A celebrated authority on Sikhism and Sikh Studies, she has received numerous awards for her previous publications and scholarship. Recent books by Professor Singh include Poems from the Sikh Sacred Tradition (Murty Classical Library of India, Harvard University Press, 2023), Janamsakhi: Paintings of Guru Nanak in Early Sikh Art (Roli Books, 2023), and The First Sikh: The Life and Legacy of Guru Nanak (Penguin Random House India, 2019). Her earlier and groundbreaking study The Feminine Principle in the Sikh Vision of the Transcendent (also published by Cambridge University Press) appeared in the ‘Cambridge Studies in Religious Traditions’ monograph series in 1993.