The Search for God

My eyes awoke before the rays of the sun touched the dewed leaves of the fields of Punjab. The sound of religious hymns filled the air with its beautiful sounds of god and mellifluous verses that talked about the relationship with a higher being and morality. My mind immediately acquired a calm state as I thought about my visits to the temples as growing up. So pure was this feeling when listening to the Sikh holy book of the Guru Granth Sahib that I was entranced and my heart swelled with happiness.

After a minute the loudspeaker found another companion that was slightly off, resembling the reverberation of an echo. As I struggled to keep the two voices apart and encapsulate the purity of the sound another two other voices joined in and the sound now became a cantankerous jumble. The mingled words reminded me of the chaos of screeching cars and the chatter of impatient rickshaw-wallahs in Delhi. Unable to sleep I woke up and decided to investigate. I soon found that the reason for this was the social evil of caste politics.

While the village of Navi Daroli (New Daroli) as a whole is representative of a certain religion and caste, diversity has increased in the residents. While one Sikh temple enough to serve the village, the caretakers of this shrine took exception to castes separate from the Rajputs. This apparently lower caste (classified by the state as Scheduled Caste or SC) undertake professions whereby they skin dead carcasses and eat meat, and are thus considered impure by the upper caste priests. As a result the denied group built their own temple. Soon among the SC members there was a division; for though classified as one caste on paper and official records, there was some internal permutation in lifestyles that set one group higher than the other based on keeping a turban and eating lifestyle. The result was dissension and building of another temple.

Geographically the village is like a small city in the sense that it is divided by small streets or gallis. Originally meant to be 6 to 8 feet wide a lack of regulation on buildings have resulted in the gallis becoming delimited and small. With people having lived by each other in the same street for generations there is a certain subculture of togetherness that has come about over time. Thus instead of traveling (hardly another 300 meters to the next gali) there was decisions to make an organization of their own. The results were but of course more temples.

Thus in a village with a few thousand people there are now a total of seven Sikh temples. From my conversations this is apparently not a unique case for it is an occurrence taking place in many villages all over Punjab as economic freedom and remittances are now allowing for an excess of cash that are being used for various purposes. As all the voices reach heaven in the mornings, I am sure even God would have difficulty thinking exactly where does the devotion belong.