The Socially Involved Renunciate: Gurū Nānak's "Discourse to the Nāth Yogis"

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.) Successive waves of migration from India and the countries of East Africa over the last fifty years have resulted in the permanent creation of a substantial Sikh diaspora in Britain and North America. The book under review, whose principal author Kamala Elizabeth Nayar is a college lecturer in British Columbia, may be seen as an interesting contribution to this literature, catering for an audience without the language background needed to approach either the Sikh scriptures in the original or the copious exegetical and other studies written in modern Panjabi. The following chapters go into Guru Nanak's teachings with a particular emphasis on the Sikh ideal of combining a virtuous worldly existence with the practice of inner devotion, here defined as the life prescribed for 'the socially involved renunciate' as opposed to the yogis' ascetic rejection of the world.