Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa
False-mindedness is the drummer-woman. Cruelty is the butcheress. Slander in your heart is the cleaning-woman. Deceitful anger is the outcast-woman.
What good are the ceremonial lines you draw around your kitchen when these four women are seated right inside with you?
Make Truth your self-discipline. Make good deeds the lines you draw. Make chanting the Name your cleansing bath.
Nanak says: those who don't walk in the ways of sin will be exalted in the world hereafter.
Social inversion as spiritual critique
Guru Nanak takes the elaborate system of ritual purity — the clean kitchen, the ceremonial lines drawn around it to prevent contamination from lower-caste people — and turns it inside out. The real contamination is not from the outside. It is from the inside.
Four negative qualities are personified as "impure" women seated inside your supposedly pure kitchen:
- False-mindedness (kūṛ amuṅgī) — the inner dishonesty, the deceiving of yourself and others
- Cruelty (kādhaṇī) — the harshness, the hardness of heart
- Slander (par nindā) — speaking ill of others in the heart
- Deceitful anger (chhaliā krodh) — the wrath that is wrapped in deception
These four sit in your kitchen, regardless of the ceremonial lines. The lines protect against nothing that matters.
Alternative purification
Sach āhārā kariā, sat saṅgat nāmu japā'i* — "Make Truth your self-discipline, and make good deeds the lines you draw; make chanting the Name your cleansing bath." The alternative to external ritual purity: interior truth, ethical action, and Name-chanting. These are the real purifications — not the ceremonial kind but the substantive kind that actually changes what is inside the kitchen of the self.
This Shalok is one of Guru Nanak's most pointed social critiques, embedded in the middle of the Vaar's closing movement.
*What 'impurities' do you have on the inside that your external presentations don't show? And what is the real cleansing that could address those?*
Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa·How we use AI