Guru Nanak's Message of Peace Through Music at the Barbican

This was an unprecedented event. A whole day (April 6) was spent celebrating Guru Nanak, culminating in a five-hour concert organised by Darbar Festival, who have recently begun a partnership with the Barbican Centre.

Guru Nanak (1469–1539) was the founder of Sikh Dharam who travelled extensively around the subcontinent and beyond with Bhai Mardana, a Muslim rubab player who set his spiritual verses to music. To this day, the sacred texts by Guru Nanak and others in the Guru Granth Sahib scripture are endlessly performed to music. The essential message is that we are all one, and there is no difference between Hindu, Muslim and Sikh. “Every human being is unique. No one is like another. Therefore we have to celebrate diversity,” said Professor Bhai Sahib Mohinder Singh Ahluwalia OBE, a spiritual leader, saint and the principal volunteer (Mukhi Sewadar) of the Guru Nanak Nishkam Sewak Jatha.

To demonstrate that oneness, the concert included not only two Sikh singers (kirtania) but also Muslim singer Zeeshan Ali from Pakistan and Hindu vocalist Aruna Sairam from south India. This meant plenty of musical variety with the singers alongside five Sikh and Hindu-practitioning musicians playing mridangam, tablas, ghatam pot, and the exquisite sarangi player Momin Khan interweaving his melodies between the singers’ phrases.

Aruna Sairam (photo by Rehmat Rayatt)

Zeeshan Ali sang several texts frequently performed by qawwali singers. Yet this wasn’t qawwali, as there were no backing singers; it was kafi sung solo in Ali’s lively and flexible voice. Aruna Sairam has a deep and absorbing alto voice; she is simply one of the greatest spiritual singers in the world. She began with Guru Nanak’s ‘Mool Mantra’, a Punjabi text on the nature of God, which she’d never performed before. It was followed by Hindu poets creating great waves of sound in a glowing sonic vibration. Amrita Kaur is a young Sikh singer from New Zealand – a rising star – with a gorgeous silky voice singing her shabad (texts) or kirtans. Then came Anantvir Singh, a highly respected singer who has performed in the Golden Temple in Amritsar, with a slight air of oily complacency. They all joined together for a spectacular finale of Aruna Sairam leading a call and response to Nanak’s ‘Aarti’, a meditation on the nature of God. At the end, Nanak inserts himself, as South Asian poets so often do, saying: ‘Oh Lord, bless Nanak the thirsty songbird with the water of your mercy that he may dwell in your Name.’

When Sikh music is so glorious, I can’t understand why it isn’t more widely performed in secular contexts like this.

Anantvir Singh (photo by Rehmat Rayatt)