A gurdwara is not merely a place of worship, it is where history, faith, architecture and hospitality meet, veteran journalist and author Roopinder Singh said at the launch of his new book, ‘Gurdwaras-Abodes of the Guru’.
Event Context
The book traces gurdwaras across geographies – from Punjab to the migrant congregations in the United States, United Kingdom and Japan, reading them as spaces shaped as much by memory and community as by brick and stone.
Player Focus
The book’s publisher, Rajiv Daswani’s message was read out earlier in the evening by Aradhika Sharma, who recalled that the book had originated from a single email proposing the idea to Singh. The evening opened with a musical performance on the Afghan rebab by Gurdeep Singh tracing the instrument’s journey from Iran and Afghanistan into Punjab and Kashmir.
Team Analysis
In conversation with Padma Shri winning theatre director Neelam Mansingh Chowdhry, at Hyatt Regency, on Tuesday, Singh explained how gurdwaras evolve without losing their character – a contrast with European church patronage. Recalling his visit to a church in Valencia, Spain, built and left unfinished for years between patrons, Singh said Sikh institutions worked differently – it is the ‘sangat’, not an individual patron, that comes together first, and it is the sangat that then builds, and sustains the gurdwara. Architecture may change with geography and local influence, he said, but the intent behind it does not.
He pointed to two American examples from the book to illustrate the idea. A gurdwara in New York, he said, was a former church repurposed for the Sikh congregation, its stained glass windows still intact even as Gurbani was recited within.
A gurdwara in Maryland, he added, had taken up ecological work, developing Guru Nanak forests as an extension of community service. He also cited the Stockton gurdwara in California among the oldest in the US, which, soon after being built, had set up a scholarship to send Indian students to study at Berkeley.
Singh, who spent close to three decades as a journalist, said he had never separated his reporting instincts from his engagement with Sikh history and scholarship, having written on the subject through his career alongside his primary beats. He credited his parents’ scholarly work in the field as the foundation for the book, while describing his own contribution as the journalistic reconstruction of institutional histories that most gurdwara committees themselves no longer document beyond living memory.
Match Outlook
Asked what a reader unfamiliar with Sikh faith should take away from the book, Singh reached for a line from Guru Gobind Singh’s Akal Ustat- “Manas ki jaat sabhe eke pehchanbo” (recognise the entire human race as one). That, he said, was the idea at the heart of the gurdwara – a recognition that all people are creations of the one creator, however differently they come to interpret Gurbani or live by it. It is this understanding, he said, that makes the gurdwara inclusive by nature, a place that welcomes all, and one where people arrive not for a single reason but for many, from seeking shelter during a protest one day, to langar and support the next.
