IB World Religions 7.2.4. Gender and Ritual: Equality in Principle and in Practice Notes

7.2.4. Gender and Ritual: Equality in Principle and in Practice

The Gurus' teaching on equality

1. Sikh teaching on gender begins from the doctrine of God rather than from a rule about women. Sikhs hold that one jot, divine light, is present in every person, so birth and gender cannot rank one soul above another.
2. Guru Nanak puts the argument directly in Asa ki Var, asking why a woman should be called inferior when it is she who gives birth to kings.
3. The same passage runs through what women do in the social order, from birth to betrothal to friendship, and concludes that from woman comes woman and that without her there would be nobody at all.
4. Guru Amar Das, the third Guru, turned the teaching into policy. He is credited with forbidding sati, the burning of widows, opposing purdah, the veiling and seclusion of women, and encouraging widows to remarry.
5. He also appointed women among the preachers he sent into the districts he organised, so women held teaching authority within the Panth in its first century.
6. The Sikh Rahit Maryada states the principle in modern form, directing that no Sikh is to be distinguished by caste or birth and that women may perform any function in the gurdwara.
7. The teaching reaches ritual directly through the question of pollution. Guru Nanak rejected sutak, the impurity many of his contemporaries attached to childbirth, arguing that if impurity were real it would be everywhere.
8. The practical result is that Sikh women are not excluded from worship by menstruation or childbirth. No purification period keeps a mother from the gurdwara, and the Rahit Maryada records no such bar.

Names and initiation

1. Sikh first names are not gendered. The same names, often chosen from the Guru Granth Sahib, are given to girls and boys alike, and it is the added Kaur or Singh that marks a person as female or male.
2. Guru Gobind Singh gave both titles at the founding of the Khalsa in 1699: Singh, lion, for men, and Kaur, princess, for women.
3. Sikh writers read Kaur as a deliberate break with custom, because a woman keeps it as her own name rather than taking a husband's family name at marriage.
4. Both names also cut across caste, since the surnames they replaced carried caste identity. One device therefore addressed birth and gender together.
5. Amrit sanskar, initiation into the Khalsa, has been open to women from the beginning, and the Rahit Maryada does not restrict the five who administer it to men, though in most gurdwaras they are men in practice.
6. Mata Sahib Kaur is remembered as having added sugar crisps to the amrit at the first initiation, and Sikhs name her mother of the Khalsa alongside Guru Gobind Singh as its father.
7. The naming rite makes the same point. A family opens the Guru Granth Sahib at random and takes the first letter of the hymn as the letter the child's name must begin with, and the procedure is identical for a daughter and a son.

Roles in the gurdwara

1. The Rahit Maryada opens gurdwara office to any Sikh. There is no ordained priesthood in Sikhism, so no role is reserved to a class of men set apart for it.
2. The granthi, who reads and cares for the Guru Granth Sahib, holds an office rather than a clerical rank, and the code allows any Sikh, woman or man, to hold it.
3. Kirtan, the singing of scripture, may likewise be led by women, and women's ragi jathas, singing groups, perform in gurdwaras across India and the diaspora.
4. Ardas may be led by any Sikh present, and in many congregations a woman leads it without anyone remarking on it.
5. Sewa is explicitly open to all. Women and men cook, serve and wash together in the langar hall, and sit in the same rows to eat.
6. Nothing in the code restricts the conducting of an anand karaj, the Sikh marriage, to men, although the officiant is usually a man in practice.
7. Gurdwara management committees are elected, and women serve on them and chair them in many congregations, though the proportion varies sharply from place to place.

The gap in practice

1. Sikh writers and Sikh institutions both acknowledge that practice has not matched the principle. How far the equality is actually manifest is a live question inside the Panth.
2. The office of granthi illustrates it. Women are eligible, but in most gurdwaras in Punjab and in much of the diaspora the granthi is a man, and paid posts are held overwhelmingly by men.
3. The most reported dispute concerns the Harmandir Sahib at Amritsar, where women have not in practice performed kirtan in the inner sanctum. Sikh campaigners have challenged the restriction and the SGPC has debated it repeatedly.
4. Sex-selective abortion in Punjab and in parts of the diaspora has been widely reported, and Sikh bodies treat it as a religious offence rather than only as a social statistic.
5. The Akal Takht has issued directions against the practice, and the Rahit Maryada already listed kuri-mar, those who kill daughters, among the people a Sikh must not keep company with.
6. Dowry is a further example. The Rahit Maryada forbids the giving and taking of dowry, and Sikh commentators report that the custom nevertheless persists at many Punjabi Sikh weddings.
7. Some funeral customs still exclude women. In many families the men carry the bier and light the pyre, though Sikh teaching gives women no lesser standing at a death.

Arguments within the Panth

1. Sikhs disagree about how to read the gap, and the disagreement is itself part of an accurate description of the tradition.
2. The most common Sikh explanation separates the teaching from the culture carrying it, holding that Punjabi social custom, and not the Gurus, produced the restrictions.
3. Critics of that explanation reply that a religion is known by what its institutions do, and that appealing to culture can become a way of postponing reform.
4. Nikky-Guninder Kaur Singh, a scholar of Sikh studies, has argued that the feminine imagery in the Guru Granth Sahib was neglected by generations of male commentators and that recovering it matters for practice.
5. Sikh organisations have pressed for institutional change, and campaigns for women to perform kirtan and sewa inside the Harmandir Sahib have run for decades.
6. Everyone in the argument appeals to the same authorities: the Guru Granth Sahib, the Rahit Maryada and the record of the Gurus. The dispute is therefore about consistency rather than about doctrine.

Variation across the diaspora

1. Practice differs sharply by country, so any general statement about Sikh women and ritual has to be located somewhere in particular.
2. In Britain, Canada and the United States women commonly read from the Guru Granth Sahib at family functions and lead kirtan before the congregation.
3. Several diaspora gurdwaras employ women as granthis, and a number of Sikh student and youth organisations are led by women.
4. In rural Punjab the older pattern persists more strongly, and the roles women hold in the gurdwara are more often in langar and cleaning than at the scripture.
5. Age matters as much as geography. Younger Sikhs in the diaspora report treating parity as normal, and gurdwara committees have shifted as those cohorts have taken office.
6. Sikh women's organisations have grown alongside that shift, running camps, kirtan training and study circles that put women at the front of the hall rather than at the back of it.
7. The result is that the question has no single answer. The principle is uncontested in the sources, and the extent of its practice depends on which Sikh community is being described.