A Bani You Know By Heart But Not By Meaning
Why Every Translation Is an Interpretation
The Four Requirements
Hukam, and the Problem of Syllables
Stages, Not Realms
Oneness Resonates Infinitely
A Script Is Not a Language
When Is a Translation Finished?
I recently sat down with Satpal Singh of Nanak Naam to talk about a project he has been working on, in one form or another, for eight years. A poetic, rhyming translation of Jap Ji Sahib in English. A project I was initially rather sceptical about.
Satpal’s relationship with Jap Ji Sahib started the way it does for many of us. As a child, his mum would comb his hair before school and the rule was that there was no talking while it happened. You recited Jap Ji Sahib.
Satpal and his sister memorised it that way, with a very clear understanding that if you know nothing else, you have to know this. What he said next is something I think a lot of people will recognise:
“You know the verses so well that you somehow convince yourself that you also know what it means, and you never really look into it.”
He was about 30 before that changed. Around 2010, a friend asked him to run a small class so she could learn more about Jap Ji Sahib and he found himself researching each verse for a small group of people meeting weekly in his home.
When he launched the Nanak Naam channel in 2013, that work eventually became his 60 hour lecture series on Jap Ji Sahib, which goes through the bani line by line and often word by word.
The translation project grew out of what the lecture series could not do. A 60 hour series of lectures is, arguably, not something you return to daily and people kept telling him they had to listen again and again because the information would not stay.
What was missing, he felt, was a way of accessing the bani every day in the language many in the diaspora actually think in.
This matters more than it might first appear. As he pointed out, 10-15 years ago you could type “Bhagavad Gita in English” into YouTube and find it, “the Quran in English” and find it, and “the Guru Granth Sahib in English” and find, absolutely nothing.
The first question I put to him was the obvious one, atleast for me. Jap Ji Sahib is poetry and philosophy at once, which means there is no end to the possible readings. Academics argue over single words of the Iliad, a text that is far less sacred. How can he be certain of his choices?
His answer reframed the whole conversation. In the West, he argued, a translation implicitly announces itself as the translation. The Indic tradition works differently for a translation is an interpretation and it is one of many. When he was researching, he would have several commentaries open in front of him, such as Bhai Santokh Singh’s Garab Ganjani Teeka (1829) and Sant Giani Gurbachan Singh Ji Khalsa Bhindranwale’s commentary on Jap Ji Sahib (1900s), where a single line is sometimes given several simultaneous readings, in this worldview the line means this, in that worldview it means that.
“So I became very comfortable with the idea that Jap Ji Sahib doesn’t have a one-size-fits-all translation,” he told me.
“When it comes to me actually producing a translation, I’m very comfortable saying, this is the lens that I’m using, and this is the version that I’m presenting. It’s not to negate all other translations, it’s to add another flavour.”
The lens he chose is non-dual and it is the most distinctive feature of the whole work. There are no occurrences of God, Lord, He, His. Where other translations write “He is,” Satpal writes “It is” a choice he knows will offend some readers. His response to that was one of the sharpest moments of the conversation:
“For some people that’s highly offensive, but for me it’s highly offensive to call God ‘he.’ Why would you lean one way when Gurbani is very clearly saying that God is neither masculine nor feminine? So who’s being offensive?”
The grammatical argument underneath this is worth understanding. North Indian languages assign gender to nouns the way French does, and translators have historically carried that gender into English. Satpal’s position is that the masculine God of the existing translations is partly an artefact of grammar, imported into a language that never required it.
By the end of his survey of the existing translations, Satpal had a list of four things he wanted in a single text:
non-dual language
grammatical accuracy (the spellings in Gurbani change meanings, and he felt many translators had not engaged with Gurbani grammar at all)
rhyming poetry
and modern English, which meant no thee, no thy, no doth.
As Satpal explained,
“I’ve been through the schooling system in England and I don’t remember learning what thee and thy were,” he said. “When I’m reading those things, I’m disconnecting.”
The rhyme deserves its own explanation, because a friend of his, a poet who writes in English, refused to collaborate on the project, warning him that poetry would force too many compromises.
Satpal accepted the trade and made it anyway and his reasoning goes to the heart of what Gurbani is. This is a bhakti tradition and the bani is written to invoke love for the divine. His earliest version did not rhyme, and when he gave it to friends to test read, they did not connect with it at all.
“As soon as you started rhyming it, there is something where, just as you’re reading it, your heart just goes: that’s beautiful.”
The rhyme is not decoration. It is the mechanism by which the text stays with you, the reason a line resurfaces in your head at work, whilst cooking or on the school run.
As the nerdy academic I pretend to be, I wanted to press him on specific words and Hukam was the first. He translates it as “divine law,” some would argue law is cold and precise where Hukam can carry will, command, order and even love, so how did he settle it?
Part of the answer is philosophical. “If you say command, then who’s the commander?” and a commander reintroduces exactly the dualism he was working to avoid. Law carries no lawmaker in modern English. We speak of the laws of nature without imagining anyone controlling the speed of light.
But part of the answer is mechanical and I found this more revealing than any of the philosophy. Command and order are two syllables. He needed one. Gurbani itself is strict about syllable counts and once you commit to poetic metre in English, you inherit the same constraints the Gurus worked within. “Sometimes it literally comes down to that,” he said.
The deeper claim he builds on Hukam is one I have not heard put quite this way before. Ask most people to summarise Sikhi and they will reach for Naam. But Naam simran existed for thousands of years before Guru Nanak, which is precisely why critics could dismiss Sikhi as just another borrowing. Satpal’s reading is that the first question in the Guru Granth Sahib, how do I become truthful, how is falsehood torn away, is not answered with Naam. It is answered with Hukam.
“That is Guru Nanak’s thesis,” he said. You cannot have a direct relationship with something infinite that you cannot see or touch, but you can have a relationship with what it is doing and that thread of divine law runs as the spine of his whole translation, including the questions he added. Which brings me to the most interesting choice in the book.
Satpal has inserted a question before each verse, something no other English translation of Jap Ji Sahib does. The justification is that the commentary tradition has always read Jap Ji Sahib as a Q&A. The questions Guru Nanak received at religious centres across his travels, answered, with only the first verse retaining its question in the text itself. Other banis, like Sidh Gosht, keep the questions written down. Jap Ji Sahib leaves them implied. Satpal’s questions are an attempt to bring that structure to the surface for an English reader who otherwise finds the bani jumping between topics, which, he admitted with some care, is exactly what his test readers experienced.
But surfacing implied questions means interpreting, and nowhere does that show more than in his translation of khand as “stages” rather than “realms.” I pushed him on this one for personal reasons. For me realms implies a cosmology, an actual order of worlds where as stages implies a path.
His defence came from the sequence of Jap Ji Sahib. The verse before the khands says that, there are steps on this path, climb them to unite as one. The khand verses, read as the answer to “what are these steps?”, become stages of development rather than a map of the cosmos.
Take a step further and behind that sits his larger claim: “I fundamentally don’t believe Guru Nanak is presenting a cosmology. I believe he presents a philosophy that works regardless of your cosmology.” Guru Nanak did not ask Muslims to adopt reincarnation or ask Hindus to abandon it, he worked with the worldview in front of him and applied his teaching on top of it.
Then Satpal took the argument somewhere current. We worry loudly about conversion in Punjab, he said, while missing the conversion that has already happened in our own homes: “The atheist conversion is happening right now, and it’s not being done in an evangelical way, so we don’t see it.”
If Sikhi requires a 17th century cosmology to function, it dies with the generation that holds it. If Guru Nanak’s philosophy works under any cosmology then nothing is lost. That, he argues, is what the bani has always been.
Of every line in the translation, his rendering of Ik Oankar bucks tradition and provides a translation that is long overdue “Oneness resonates infinitely.”
The standard translation is “there is one God,” which treats the Ik as a counting exercise, not two gods, one. Satpal’s reading goes back to Bhai Gurdas, who does not describe Oankar as one God but as oneness in its unfolding, before creation there was the non-dual state and from it the expanse poured out. On this reading Oankar is closer to a verb than a noun. It’s not the one but the oneness, happening.
I put the hardest question I had to him here. Doesn’t One God create a horizon, a destination, to aim towards. On the other hand, if you lead with oneness, the listener is arguably already at the destination. What stops someone concluding they need do nothing at all?
He granted the danger, then turned it over. A distant God produces its own laziness, the painting you ritually cover in incense on weekends while everyday life happens elsewhere. Oneness, by contrast, relocates the divine into every interaction you have.
“If God is here, do you engage with everything as though it is God? You can no longer kick someone down, because they are part of that oneness as well. You can no longer commit genocide. Who are you going to lie to, when you’re speaking directly to God?”
Both framings can be abused. Only one of them changes how you treat the person in front of you.
The criticism this project will attract is predictable. Gurbani should not leave its original language.
Satpal’s response dismantles the premise. Gurbani was never in one language. The Guru Granth Sahib contains many languages written in one script, and Gurmukhi is the script, not the language. In the same way Spanish, French, German and English all share an alphabet without being the same tongue.
“Gurbani isn’t Punjabi,” he said flatly. “We have to get people away from that.” He added that plenty of fluent Punjabi speakers do not understand Gurbani either, because Gurbani is its own vernacular with its own embedded meanings.
Therefore translating into English is not a departure from the Gurus’ practice. The Gurus were attacked in their own time for teaching divine knowledge in the people’s language rather than Sanskrit, and the answer given was that Sanskrit is an ocean, deep and closed, while Gurbani is the rain, falling on everyone.
Guru Nanak spoke the language of whoever stood in front of him.
“I am willing to stake my life,” Satpal said, “that if the Gurus were actively creating bani today, they would not hesitate to do it in English.”
Translations are coming regardless. Ernest Trumpp began this a 150 years ago and in the process is still condemned for it to this day.A Spanish translation of the Guru Granth Sahib already exists and dualistic English translations scroll across screens in every gurdwara which we install proudly. The question is not whether Gurbani will be translated. It is whether we do the translating ourselves.
My last line of questioning came from other stubborn revisers. Marx reworked Capital for decades. Wittgenstein sat on the Philosophical Investigations. Tolkien translated Beowulf and never published it at all. With a text held more sacred than all of those combined and more, how did Satpal know his fourth version was the one to release?
His answer had no grand theory in it. The fourth version read well, carried the emotion, survived his reviewers and at some point the desire to give people something outweighs the limitations of anything you could give them.
He knows there are layers he saw and could not include, because a translation must pick one layer and hold it consistently. He expects mistakes to be found, the way he has found blatant ones in translations he still respects, because anyone who translates the whole of Jap Ji Sahib has done something enormous.
He is also direct about his own position,
“I’m not a poet. I didn’t study English literature. A lot of people will say, who are you to translate this? I’m absolutely nobody.”
There is more in the full conversation than I could fit here including, the words he refused to translate and why the divine bull stayed a bull, what he found when he compared the Faridkot Teeka’s framework against the tradition it claims to serve, the discussion of agenda and propaganda in our historical texts and what he wants this to become next.
I have to admit many of my assumptions about this project did not survive the two hours we recorded for so watch it and let me know what you think.
The full episode with Satpal Singh is on the channel now.
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