ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses a pivotal set of transformations that occurs in the understanding of sevā or service in the context of the Sikh tradition in the early modern and modern periods. At the centre of the notion and experience of sevā in early Sikh tradition is the Guru and his crucial role as both community leader and object of devotion. In the period of human embodied Guruship, service was therefore centred on the Guru himself. Early on, however, such service had social implications. This social rendering of personal service is at the centre of this chapter, in the context of the Sikh tradition but with resonance beyond. We argue that it is through the idiom of service more generally that relationships and communities were articulated in the crucial post-Guru period, in relation to a Guru present now in textual and not embodied form, and in memory of the human Gurus of the past. At the same time, sevā to the community, rather than the individual/leader/Guru, also took shape in this period. This practice of sevā in relation to an emergent idea of the social finds a corollary in a broader notion of sevā that emerges in the colonial period, when “service” was radically reconfigured across South Asian religious traditions; for Sikhs, this discourse is articulated within the period of Sikh reform in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century known as the Singh Sabha Movement. The chapter traces these processes to describe the transformation of service to the Guru into a fundamentally social project, and at the same time articulate the multiple meanings of sevā in relation to changing notions of the social and the self, such that the discourse of reform was tied to both ideas of self-transformation and action in the public.
