Exploring the Sikh Tradition - A Conversation with Eleanor Nesbitt

Howard Burton

• Publisher: Ideas Roadshow
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781771701556
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Religiones asiáticas

This book is based on an in-depth conversation with Eleanor Nesbitt who is Professor Emeritus of Education Studies at University of Warwick and a poet. Eleanor Nesbitt is an expert on Hindu and Sikh culture and her interdisciplinary approach straddles religious studies, educational theory, ethnography and poetry. After inspiring insights about the time Eleanor Nesbitt spent in India and her academic path, this wide-ranging conversation provides a detailed exploration of the Sikh tradition: the history, religious tenets, other people's misconceptions about it and more.This carefully-edited book includes an introduction, Isn'ts, and questions for discussion at the end of each chapter: I. Looking To Connect - Eleanor explores the worldII. Historical Overview - The first ten gurus and the Guru Granth SahibIII. Identity - Turbans, Five Ks and evolving perspectivesIV. Towards Deeper Understanding - On all sidesAbout Ideas Roadshow Conversations: This book is part of a series of 100 Ideas Roadshow Conversations. Presented in an accessible, conversational format, Ideas Roadshow books not only explore frontline academic research featuring world-leading researchers but also reveal the inspirations and personal journeys behind the research.

The Conversation

I. Looking To Connect

Eleanor explores the world

HB: I’d like to start at the beginning and ask you to trace your trajectory that led to you becoming an expert in Sikh and Hindu studies. I imagine that is quite an interesting story.

EN: Well, one way to describe things is that I basically never left school: I carried on, doing what a theologian friend of mine once described as climbing up a tree, slithering along various branches, and then when a twig turns into a branch that will support me, moving onto that one, but not having a view at the beginning of necessarily which tree I was going to climb or where the branches were going to be or which ones I was going to go out on. So, one thing has followed another; and there’s been quite a lot of intuition in it.

I started off on the south coast of England, going to school in Bournemouth, and being interested in the diversity around me. I was particularly intrigued by the fact that some friends were Jewish; some people in the locality were Roma or Romani—gypsies—others were French language students, and so on.

I also knew from very early on that I was going to study Latin and Greek. There was something about the rather academic secondary schools I went to that directed me that way, but also perhaps the knowledge that my father had been studying Greek during the months before I was born? I don’t know.

There was also, increasingly when I got to university, a sense that I was going to go to India. It was never a decision that I remember taking. It was more, Yes, the next thing I’m going to do is go to India. One can find all sorts of reasons for going to India in 1974. There were people going out as hippies. There was a general idea that people on a spiritual search went to India. I suppose people could analyze that in different ways, but I just knew that I had an overwhelming sense of being directed towards going there, even though my tutor at Oxford, where I was doing my teaching course, strongly advised everyone against going overseas and urged them to take a job instead, because jobs were becoming more difficult to find.

And I always tell my own students when they come to me for advice, “If you haven’t got any dependents who need to be considered, then follow your hunches and do not follow what your tutor says to you.” That leaves them with a dilemma.

HB: Indeed. How many of them then promptly tell you, “Therefore, I’m not going to listen to a word that you’ve just said”?

EN: Well, that’s right. But nobody has said that yet—I suppose I’d have to explain it to them.

HB: I’d like to back up a little bit. You said something curious about your father studying Greek right before you were born.

EN: Yes, it was New Testament Greek, because he was very embedded in the Church of England: he was a lay reader; and actually, during my time as an undergraduate at Cambridge, he was ordained as a priest. And I had never been able to understand what it was to be a member of the Church of England—I only remember feeling uncomfortable and out of place and questioning about it.

And so there was a sort of crunch that game when he was ordained and I was in this wonderful space in Cambridge where I could explore all sorts of religions and philosophies and try to find out who I was at the age of 18 or 19 or whatever. And there was my father being ordained as a priest in the Church of England; and I couldn’t even say the creed.

HB: How did he feel about that?

EN: Well, I don’t suppose he knew that I couldn’t say the creed. I wasn’t quite as open as George Eliot was. I’m based at Coventry now, and our most noted writer—certainly our most noted novelist—is George Eliot. And when I take people to Holy Trinity Church, I show them the plaque that commemorates the fact that her father, Robert Evans, was a sidesman there; and then I tell them about the letter that she wrote to her father—because she couldn’t bear to tell him face to face—explaining that she could no longer with integrity worship the church with him because she no longer believed in the inerrancy of scripture. And that dilemma that she outlines in the letter is just so much the dilemma that I had, right the way through my teens and into my 20s.

HB: Had your father been involved in the Church of England throughout his entire life?

EN: Yes. His church life had been central—basic to his existence—right from his own boyhood, and certainly all the way through my childhood. I knew the importance of it. He was a telephone engineer—he was working in telecommunications—and it was only when he was able to envisage retiring from that, that he could take on the responsibilities of a more in-depth theological training and eventually ordination.

HB: I read an interview with you when you spoke about how, even when you began your undergraduate years at Cambridge in classics, you had also listed “oriental studies” as one of your interests, even though you had never been to Asia or seemingly had any real type of contact with the Asian world. That struck me as quite odd. Why did you do that?

EN: Well, that’s a very difficult question to answer. Maybe at the time I had some awareness, but looking back, I have no idea why I put “oriental studies” on my form. And the fact that when I got to interview at Girton College in Cambridge I had no idea which “oriental study” I was thinking of, rather suggests that it was just one of those things that came from deep inside me somewhere but hadn’t been worked out in my head.

HB: So, how did that go exactly? You’re there at the interview; and the person says, “I see you put down ‘oriental studies’. What is it about oriental studies that interests you?” And you say, “I have no idea”? Was it like that?

EN: The senior tutor who interviewed me actually had an interest in Egyptology, so she steered the conversation by showing me some statuette, or something, which she had in her room, and exploring a bit of that with me, because I think Egyptology must’ve been covered by Oriental Studies at Cambridge.

HB: So she had wanted to subsume you in her orbit, as it were?

EN: She was actually a classicist, but she was trying to find out, I think. And it was not unknown for people to arrive with their credentials in Latin and Greek and then start studying Turkish and Arabic, like one of my friends did, or some other language.

So, although I might have appeared clueless, it was also regarded as perfectly natural to start from scratch in some new language.

HB: Right. Was there also something about French?

EN: Well, it was simply that, whilst I was studying in Cambridge, I came to know that I was going to head off to India; and I knew that the only way I could support myself for a significant length of time and be reasonably useful was as a teacher. And so I did my post-graduate certificate in education in the Department of Educational Studies in Oxford. And it was with a view to the future that I thought, Okay, I’ve been studying Latin and Greek and then theology, but what about my A-level French? I enjoy French. It would be good to have some training in French as well as religious education. So that’s what I did.

HB: I see. So even as a classics undergraduate at Cambridge you had begun planning to go to India, taking various tactical steps in order to do that?

EN: Yes. I was registered in classical studies because I quickly realized that it was much better to start off with languages that I’d all ready got a grounding in, rather than to be starting in something else. And I moved into theology with the feeling, Well, this is the Middle East, and it also helps me to explain to myself perhaps how my father’s spiritual and intellectual journey had gone.

HB: And when did you decide to focus even further east and say to yourself, “I’m going to go to India”?

EN: It must’ve been my second year, possibly my third, year in Cambridge. There would have been conversations with friends who had been to India or were g...