If their home is large enough for a separate worship room, a family may gather there in the morning to recite hymns together. Fathers pray while picking up bedding, cleaning, or gardening. Mothers recite stanzas from the Jap as they prepare breakfast or comb their children’s hair. Morning prayers reverberate through a Sikh home as family members go about their activities. They may recite or read them alone, with their families, or with congregation in Gurudwaras (Sikh shrines). The everyday routine ( nit nem) of the Sikh involves the recitation of several hymns. All rites of passage take place in the sound and sight of this text: The newborn baby is named in its presence, the marriage ceremony entails walking around it four times, and death in a home is followed by a reading, often continuous, of its 1430 pages. The Guru Granth is the sole visual and aural icon and main source of their daily prayers. Reading their sacred verse, hearing it, singing it, or sitting in its presence constitute the core of Sikh ritual.

In Sikh life, normal activities are validated each and every routine action is imbued with spiritual significance. The immutability of Truth is not rendered through some ceremonial formulation but through the mundane task of ‘sewing’ – “Truth is eternal once sewn, It never gets ripped asunder” (Guru Granth: 955). Dyeing fabrics and stitching them, acts of dressing up and applying makeup, and working in a smithy or churning butter at home symbolize complete devotion and single-minded attachment with the One. The artistic images that express union with the Divine in Sikh scripture therefore emerge from everyday chores. A hymn by the Fifth Guru categorically states that “liberation is attained while laughing, playing, dressing up, and eating” – “hasandian khelandian painandia khavandian vice hove mukti” (Guru Granth: 522). Guru Nanak denounced external actions and rites that were empty and oppressive and also all kinds of austere and ascetic practices.

Elaborate forms of worship, rituals, and ceremonies are rejected. Sikh scripture loudly affirms that ultimate freedom is attained in active engagement in our daily tasks.

Singh, in Encyclopedia of Applied Ethics (Second Edition), 2012 Integration of Religious Rituals and Daily Routine

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