Teaching My Own Religion

I just finished teaching a class on Guru Nanak. It was an intensive course, a whole semester packed into two weeks. It was a lot of work for everyone, me included. We met for about four hours each day. After class, we spent hours going through our assigned readings for the next day. And if that wasn’t enough, students had until midnight to submit reflection papers about their assigned readings.

Don’t feel bad for my students though. Anyone who signs up for a graduate seminar knows what they’re getting into. And don’t feel bad for me either. This class was one of the most rewarding teaching experiences I’ve had.

My position at Union Theological Seminary is in Interreligious Histories. I teach courses on the history of Islam and the history of Buddhism, and more recently, the history of religion in the United States. I’ve loved the role and feel grateful for the chance to help people of faith better connect with the past. This was my first time teaching a course on Sikhi, though, and there’s so much I gained from the experience.

Our seminar was made up of a diverse set of students, including a Sikh woman from California, an imam from Kazakhstan, and a Buddhist monk from South Korea. The day before the class, I realized that this isn’t exclusively a history class like some of the others I teach, or even just a class about religious studies. Teaching in a seminary means that I could center theology and lived experience. And when it comes to Sikhi, what better way to do that than to listen to bani.

We began each session by listening to people singing from Guru Nanak’s writings. We started with nitnem—Japuji Sahib, So Dar Rahiras, and Sohila. Then we did his longer writings, like Asa ki Var and Siddh Gosti, and from there, we listened to shabads that he wrote, sung by various ragis and musicians. Some of it was in classical raag, and some of it was in contemporary styles. All of it gave us a chance to get to know Guru Nanak Sahib through his own words, and to experience his writings in the ways that Sikhs have for centuries. Sitting on the ground, eyes closed, letting the music wash over us.

Next, we would spend some time discussing key ideas from his teachings. We used the beautiful new translation of Guru Nanak’s bani by Nikky Guninder Kaur Singh. I highly recommend the volume and am linking to it here. Sometimes, we would go deep into discussing specific ideas. Other times, we would find ourselves appreciating the literary aesthetics and imagery of his work. As the course went along, we made more and more connections across different writings by Guru Nanak. It was a wonderful way to get to know Guru Nanak Sahib, again through his own words, preserved in his nearly 1,000 shabads in the Guru Granth Sahib.

In the second half of the class, we would return to our tables in the classrooms to discuss the other material we read for class. We spent time every day exploring the earliest account of Guru Nanak Sahib’s life—the Puratan Janamsakhi. We would read a few sakhis in English translation, and we would ask different questions about the text. What was it trying to convey? What does it tell us about the time in which it was composed? How did these stories about Guru Nanak stories circulate in Punjab? What do the different characters in the sakhis represent? What do we make of the immense amount of Gurbani woven into the anecdotes?

Asking different questions led us to develop different perspectives on the Puratan Janamsakhi, and each of them gave us different ways of deriving value from it. It felt meaningful to move beyond the standard question that most people typically ask (“Did that really happen?”). It also felt exciting to realize that in the course of two weeks, we studied and discussed more primary sources about Guru Nanak Sahib than many Sikhs get to read in their lifetimes.

In the final hour of each session, we discussed secondary scholarship on the life of Guru Nanak. We read from different books and from different articles, each of which took a different view on his life and teachings. We read from colonialist scholars who were former Christian missionaries, and we read from Punjabi Sikhs who were trained in history and philosophy. We read works commissioned by the British, and we read works commissioned by Sikhs. We read original scholarship, and we read critiques of scholarship. All of these created opportunities for us to understand the ways Guru Nanak has been read and understood, and how these understandings have shaped popular conceptions of him. They also laid groundwork for us to consider why these interpretations matter and how these interpretations impact our lives today.

On the last day of the class, one of the students asked how teaching my own religion differed from teaching other religions as I typically do. My honest reflection was that I found it more enriching and more rewarding than anything I had taught before. It felt different to have skin in the game, even when I had zero interest in converting or convincing. I loved the experience of bringing the tradition I love into the classroom and share it freely. I also loved being able to extend beyond historical methodologies and to lean into the richness of religion.

I also shared the other side of the coin. That to teach my own religion meant I was even more aware of my biases than I typically am in teaching other religions. On the first day of class, I expressed the strangeness of my position: that I was a Sikh teaching about Sikhi, and that while I’m trained to recognize that my version of Sikhi is not the only version, my students might take my word for it by virtue of my authority. He practices Sikhi and he has a PhD in Sikh History. And besides, he’s in charge of our grades. Of course we’re going to accept whatever he says about Sikhi.

I was hyper-aware of this tension and tried to address it whenever I could. When explaining an idea, I would regularly point out that this was just my view and that other Sikhs would interpret it differently. I also brought in guest speakers to the class to share their perspectives, and while their reflections demonstrated some continuity among our perspectives, they also demonstrated the diversity within the tradition. In a way, it was a live view into the challenges of constructing history.

The question also made me reflect on how I grew as a Sikh through the class. I loved the emphasis on experiencing the bani each morning, listening to different renditions of it and just sitting with it. I especially loved exploring compositions I don’t know as well as others, like Siddh Gosti and Dakhni Oankar. Having people of other traditions in the room stretched me too, because they often shared different ways of thinking about ideas or poetry that I hadn’t considered before. One thing I’ve learned about teaching is that preparation is key. I spent hours for each class preparing, which meant that this course pushed me to read more about Guru Nanak, reflect more on his life, and think more about his legacy in our world. Isn’t that such a gift?

I think my students benefited similarly. They had the chance to learn about a significant religious figure who was largely unknown to them, and many of them shared how studying Guru Nanak’s life and teachings helped them understand their own traditions and philosophies better. I love that. I also loved that many of them simply enjoyed reading and listening to his bani. There’s something so moving about being able to share what you love with the people around you.

Overall, the class was as rewarding as it was challenging. It felt like the good kind of effort, where one feels more energized after putting in work. I gained new insights, made new connections, and made new friends. It was a wonderful experience, and I hope to have more opportunities to teach about Sikhs and Sikhi at Union in the future.