The Song of the Night

Every night, before sleep, Sikhs around the world recite one short prayer: Kirtan Sohila. It is five songs long — three by Guru Nanak, one by Guru Ram Das, one by Guru Arjan — and it takes only a few minutes to say. Yet the great teachers of the faith have spent whole lifetimes inside those few minutes. This book gathers what ten of them found there. They are the kathakars — the storytellers and scholars of the Guru's word — sants, gianis, and bhais who taught in Punjabi to sangats across a hundred years, from Sant Gurbachan Singh of Bhindran, recorded on fragile tape in the 1960s, to teachers who are still giving katha today. Almost none of their teaching has ever been available in English. This companion was written so that what they heard in the Song of the Night is no longer locked behind a language.

Begin with the name. Sohila means a song of joy. In old Punjab, sohile were the songs women sang at a wedding — songs for the night before the bride goes to her new home. Giani Sant Singh Maskeen, the most beloved kathakar of the twentieth century, opens his own talks on this bani with that plain fact: the word means 'songs of gladness, songs of blessing.' And then he lets the surprise land. This wedding song is the prayer Sikhs recite at a funeral. It is the last bani sung over a body before it is given to the fire. A song of joy — at the edge of the grave? That, Maskeen says, is not a mistake. It is the whole teaching. 'Life should be counted a success,' he says, 'on the day death becomes a joy.' The Gurus named the night prayer after wedding music because they meant us to meet the end of the day — and the end of life — the way a bride meets her wedding: prepared, adorned, and expected.

How did this bani come to belong to the night? The old accounts say it was not always sung at bedtime. Sant Gurbachan Singh Bhindranwale — whose line-by-line katha of the whole Guru Granth Sahib is one of the treasures of recorded Sikh teaching — tells the story this way. At Kartarpur, Bhai Lehna, who would become Guru Angad, was pressing Guru Nanak's feet in the middle of the day when he saw fresh scratches on them, as if the Guru had been walking through thorns. But the Guru had not left the house. When Lehna asked, Guru Nanak answered: a goatherd is out grazing his flock in the thorn scrub, and as he walks he is singing my Sohila with his whole heart. 'You were reciting in a state of love among the thorn bushes,' the Guru said, 'and I was walking behind you, keeping the thorns from you — look, I have taken them in my own feet.' Wherever this song is sung with love, the Guru is present beside the singer. The goatherd was called in, and lovingly told: sing this bani at night, before you sleep. Giani Thakur Singh of Patiala, who tells the same sakhi in his katha of the daily prayers, draws out its meaning: the time was changed not to limit the song but to give it a watch of its own — the hours when a person is most alone and most defenceless.

A second old story explains the shape of the prayer itself. Sant Gurbachan Singh tells of a horse trader in the time of Guru Arjan whose animals kept being stolen on the road. The Guru told him: recite Kirtan Sohila before you sleep, and an iron fortress will stand around you through the night. It happened just so — until one evening the trader, tired and careless, hurried the prayer and left it incomplete. That night the wall stood incomplete too, and the thieves came through the gap. When he rose, washed, and recited the bani fully, the fortress closed — with the thieves inside it. By morning the astonished men wanted only one thing: the 'mantra' that had built the wall. They went to the Guru, and became Sikhs. The kathakars tell this sakhi with a smile, but its point is serious and practical: the protection of the bani is the protection of wholeness. Say all of it, with your heart in it. Giani Thakur Singh adds a story from our own time — a devout Sikh of Patiala who rose one night to hear two watchmen in Sikh dress saying to one another, 'It is day now; the Singh has done his Nitnem; he is awake — we can go.' Whoever sings the Sohila, the Guru's own watch stands over their sleep.

The five songs of the Sohila are not five separate thoughts. The kathakars read them as one journey, and this book follows their map. The first song, 'Jai ghar kirat akhiai', finds the house where the Creator's praise is sung, and tells the soul to sing its wedding song there, because the day of the great meeting is already written. The second, 'Chhia ghar chhia gur', looks out at the world's many schools and teachers — six systems of philosophy, countless paths — and sees one Teacher wearing many robes, one sun turning through many seasons. The third, 'Gagan mai thal', is Guru Nanak's arti: the whole sky become a worship-platter, the sun and moon its lamps — sung by the Guru at Jagannath Puri when he was asked why he would not join the temple's arti. The fourth, by Guru Ram Das, walks into the city of the body, 'brimming with desire and anger,' and shows the one company in which those walls come down. And the fifth, by Guru Arjan, is the friend's voice at nightfall: the time to serve the saints is now, this life is the one trading-visit you get, ask for the dust of their feet. Evening of the day, evening of the life — the bani holds both at once, and the kathakars move between them freely, because that is how the Gurus built it.

One more thread runs through everything the saints say about this prayer, and it is the one Maskeen states most boldly. We think of death as the opposite of joy, and so we push it out of our minds. The Gurus did the opposite: they set a remembrance of death into the last minutes of every ordinary day, and dressed it in wedding clothes. Maskeen teaches that relationships do not live on blood; they live on remembrance — 'rishte yaad de hunde ne' — and so to forget the Giver of breath is already a kind of death, while to remember is already a kind of union. Bhai Pinderpal Singh, teaching the same bani a generation later, puts it with a companion's gentleness: the wedding party of death is already on its way to every house; sing your own sohila before it arrives. None of this is morbid. It is the opposite of morbid — it is how fear is dismantled, one night at a time, until what remains at the end is not dread but a bride's readiness.

A word about how this companion was made. Each chapter that follows takes one song of the Sohila. The Gurmukhi is given exactly as it stands in the Guru Granth Sahib, with our own English rendering beneath it, and the commentary weaves together what the kathakars taught — always named, so you know whose insight you are hearing, and often in their own words. Where they tell a sakhi, we retell it as they told it. Where they differ, we let them differ; the Gurus' word is deep enough to hold more than one true reading. The closing chapter introduces each voice and lists every recording this book was drawn from, with our thanks to the sevadars who preserved them. The saints gave this teaching freely, to whoever would listen. We have tried to pass it on the same way.