Guru Nanak, whom you can argue with: Delhi launches Kamla K. Kapur’s Awakening with Nanak

An Afternoon with Kamla K. Kapur, presented by The Anad Foundation in association with Bel-la Monde, brought poetry, music and conversation to the launch of her new book from HarperCollins India.

NEW DELHI, 8 October 2026 — The Anad Foundation, in association with Bel-la Monde, hosted the Delhi launch of Awakening with Nanak: A Journey of Self-Discovery by poet, playwright and author Kamla K. Kapur on Saturday, 3 October, at Bel-la Monde, NH-8. The afternoon was the first event co-produced by Anad and Bel-la Monde, marking the beginning of a collaboration the two partners have discussed for several years.

Following the musical opening, Bhai Baldeep Singh and Dr. Gurmeet Singh welcomed the gathering. Dr. Gurmeet Singh, Chairman of Bel-la Monde Hotels and Group, recalled that he and Bhai Baldeep Singh had long discussed bringing music, literature and conversation to Bel-la Monde. “I have always enjoyed bringing people together,” he said, describing the launch as the first jointly organised event with The Anad Foundation and looking forward to many more programmes together in the years ahead.

Presiding over the afternoon, Professor Surinder Singh Jodhka began with Guru Nanak as he knew him in childhood—not a remote figure, but someone encountered through the sakhis his mother told him before he went to sleep.

“Baba Nanak was somebody you could play with,” he said. “Baba Nanak was somebody you could complain to. Baba Nanak was somebody you could sit with and listen to and then contemplate and perhaps also argue with him.”

Prof. Jodhka described Guru Nanak and Bhai Mardana as an exceptional part of human history, belonging not simply to Sikhism or to the subcontinent: “They don’t belong to anyone because they belong to everyone.”

Reading kirat karo, naam japo, vand chhako beyond formula, Prof. Jodhka described kirat as labour—a radical proposition in a caste-ridden society—and vand chhako as an equally radical questioning of possession and accumulated wealth. Guru Nanak, he argued, could not simply be reduced to the founder of another religion; doing so could allow worship to displace the responsibilities his thought places upon those who encounter it.

Central to that responsibility was dialogue. Citing “Jab lag duniya rahiye Nanak, kichh suniye, kichh kahiye,” Prof. Jodhka emphasised the order of the two acts: first listen, then speak. Listening to another person also meant recognising that person’s dignity and treating them with respect. It was through such a dialogical process, he suggested, that new openings could emerge. Even in an age of Artificial Intelligence, human pain remained, as did questions of equality, wealth, state, power and migration.

That idea of Guru Nanak with whom one could speak, listen, disagree and live became a thread running through the afternoon.

Kapur’s association with Bhai Baldeep Singh spans more than a decade, from her reading at Sultanpur Lodhi in 2013 to the Delhi launch of The Singing Guru at the India International Centre in 2015 and the YaarAnad Virtual Baithak Series in 2020. Their conversation at Bel-la Monde continued that engagement, this time around a book in which Kapur turns from narrating stories about Guru Nanak towards examining her own life in his company.

Bhai Baldeep began by asking why she calls Guru Nanak her friend.

“What else can I call him but a friend?” Kapur replied. A true friend, she said, guides, accompanies and instructs; lifts you when you are down and stays with you through the confusion of life. Inherited reverence alone was not enough. Unless she brought Guru Nanak into her own life and developed a personal relationship with him, she suggested, worship could remain distant from lived experience.

The distinction led her to one of the book’s recurring concerns: listening.

Hearing, Kapur said, can be merely physiological. Listening requires something more: “You pay attention. You focus on something, you take it in, you make it yours.” Going to the gurdwara, reciting prayers or listening to kirtan without attending to what is being said was not enough; listening had to become an act of awareness.

Kapur traced that relationship back to childhood. She recalled being about three when her father, then in the army, told her the familiar story of Guru Nanak at Makkah. Near the family’s campsite was a dirty pond, and the child found herself puzzled by the proposition that the Divine could be everywhere: how, she wondered, could Guru Nanak be in that filthy water too?

That night she dreamt that Guru Nanak rose from the muddy pond, his clothes white and pure, and embraced her.

Years later, she came to understand the image through the lotus. “We can have our roots in the mud,” she said. “We grow out of the mud, we are of this earth, we are human. But yet we can bloom, we can grow out of the mud, and we can bloom from it—all of us can.”

Her relationship with Guru Nanak, she said, had itself sometimes resembled a river—visible at times, underground at others. Human beings forget, fail and fall. But whenever she had deeply needed sustenance, Guru Nanak had surfaced again: “sometimes as words, sometimes as kirtan.”

That willingness to show herself struggling is central to Awakening with Nanak. Kapur resisted presenting herself as someone who had arrived at spiritual certainty.

“I’m not a guru,” she said. “I am a human.”

To admit one’s fallibility, she argued, was necessary to learning. “We’re going to continue to fall and rise and fall and rise,” she said, adding that if one remains on the path, one learns to “fail better.” Humility, in her telling, is like crumbling soil in which a seed can be planted.

Kapur distinguished the new work from her earlier books on Guru Nanak. The Singing Guru and Into the Great Heart were narratives—works of spiritual fiction in which story and character carried the reader. Awakening with Nanak became a book of essays because, she said, “I had to learn something from writing these essays,” and she hoped that learning would reach the reader.

“I was hoping that everybody else would also realise their humanity in the book,” she said, “how we fail and how we pick ourselves up.”

Bhai Baldeep widened the conversation from the individual encounter with Guru Nanak to the architecture of the Guru Granth Sahib itself. He described its Bani as a place of convergence, but insisted that the Granth is “not a smelting pot.” It is a place in which distinct voices remain audible and debate can occur—an akhada rather than a space in which difference is dissolved.

“We’ve forgotten how to engage in a conversation with each other,” he said.

For him, convergence did not require sameness: irrespective of where one came from, one had the authority to speak one’s story and then to allow others to question it. That encounter, he suggested, opened the possibility of brahm-vichar—deliberation upon fundamental questions.

Prof. Jodhka developed the point further. Inclusion, he said, did not mean simply putting “everyone together”; there was a particular path, but it was “an open path where everyone is invited, everyone is welcome.”

Chief guest Dr. Sanjeet Kumar, Director, Gandhi Smriti and Darshan Samiti, spoke of Guru Nanak as one who challenged superstition and rose above caste, creed and sectarian divisions to speak for humanity. Reading kirat karo, naam japo, vand chhako as a call to build society, he said no nation could be great while the gap between rich and poor remained wide. Drawing the discussion towards Gandhi, Dr. Kumar spoke of truth as a discipline of life and recalled Gandhi’s willingness to acknowledge his own mistakes. He also dwelt on non-violence as extending beyond physical violence: differences of thought, he said, need not become enmity; disrespect towards another person is itself a form of violence, as are harsh words. Social harmony therefore required people to learn how to speak to one another despite disagreement.

The thought echoed Prof. Jodhka’s earlier emphasis upon listening, dialogue and the dignity of the other: two interventions approaching, from different directions, the question of how difference might be lived without becoming hostility.

The audience exchange brought further readings of Kapur’s book. Guest of Honour Dr. Vanita, who said she had read it in the preceding days, described Kapur as “the new mystic writer poet” who “feels Nanak.” She saw the book as “a deeply compassionate companion” for those negotiating grief, uncertainty and the search for meaning, suggesting that reading it could create a new dialogue “between Nanak and you.”

Dr. Taran Mehndi asked Kapur about vulnerability, pain and surrender: in moments of despair, when does one come to accept hukam, and at what point does dukh become daru? The question prompted one of Kapur’s most personal reflections of the afternoon.

“Dukh will visit us,” she said. “One way to deal with Dukh is not to resist it, but to go into it because Guru Nanak says, ‘Dukh Daru.’ Dukh is medicine.”

Acceptance, however, did not mean passivity. Kapur spoke of seeking medical care and taking responsibility for one’s health while also keeping “your spirit connected with the great spirit.” Suffering could itself become a source of compassion, she said, because “it levels us, makes us equal to every suffering human being in the world.”

“We need Dukh,” she said. “We need kind of pushes from the universe to motivate us into learning from that Dukh,” so that one could emerge from it with greater sukh and shanti.

A quiet prompt from Bhai Baldeep Singh—shukrana, gratitude—opened another strand of Kapur’s reflection. “Oh, Shukrana—don’t get me started on Shukrana,” she responded, before speaking of gratitude as something capable of transforming one’s relationship with tragedy, guilt and regret. “Gratitude changes everything in your life.”

Historian Simar Singh returned to the afternoon’s recurring theme of self-discovery, describing Guru Nanak as a matter of “realisation.” The spiritual quest, he suggested, need not be imagined as a distant destination requiring extraordinary austerities. “Paramarth toh pehchan ki baat hai”—the spiritual quest is a matter of recognition. He said young people in particular could draw inspiration from the book.

Sachin Sharma, Publisher at HarperCollins India, approached the book from another direction: its ability to carry a reader unfamiliar with Sikh tradition towards Baba Nanak without becoming doctrinal. The book, he said, was not only about Sikhism or Guru Nanak for those who already knew the tradition.

He drew attention to the decision not to place an image of the Guru on the cover, allowing the book to serve as an initiation for a non-Sikh reader. His analogy was the spoonful of karah prasad received in a gurdwara—a small but complete taste, a “perfect sampler” that leaves you wanting more. Every Sikh, he suggested, should gift the book to a non-Sikh friend in that spirit: as a sampler rather than a sermon. He added that after more than two decades in publishing, reading the book had left him with a desire to read the Guru Granth Sahib for himself.

The afternoon had opened with a recital of The Mridang of Sultanpur by Parminder Singh Bhamra, with Sandeep Singh on the taus. With Prof. Jodhka presiding over the proceedings, the programme centred on the conversation between Bhai Baldeep Singh, Founder and Managing Trustee of The Anad Foundation, and Kamla K. Kapur; the formal release of the book by chief guest Dr. Sanjeet Kumar; and the subsequent audience exchange.

The gathering was co-hosted by Anuradha Sharma for Bel-la Monde and Dr. Bahadur Singh for The Anad Foundation. Dr. Gurmeet Singh, Dr. Vanita, historian Simar Singh, Dr. Taran Mehndi and Sachin Sharma were among the guests who contributed to the afternoon.

In his closing remarks, Bhai Baldeep recalled the continuing association with Kapur from Sultanpur Lodhi in 2013, through the India International Centre and the YaarAnad Virtual Baithak Series, to the present gathering. He thanked Prof. Jodhka for presiding and guiding the audience exchange; Dr. Gurmeet Singh for opening Bel-la Monde to the collaboration; Parminder Singh Bhamra and Sandeep Singh for the musical opening; HarperCollins India, particularly Nandini Tripathi, who coordinated with Anad on the launch arrangements, and Rajeshwar Prasad, who coordinated the book-sales arrangements for the afternoon; Anuradha Sharma and Dr. Bahadur Singh for co-hosting the programme; Tarinder Kaur for assisting with the outreach; and the teams at Bel-la Monde and Anad who had worked behind the scenes.

Recalling that discussions with Dr. Gurmeet Singh about curating programmes together had begun several years before the Covid pandemic, Bhai Baldeep said he was particularly pleased that the first collaboration should centre upon a conversation around Baba Nanak.

“I look forward really to what we shall create together,” he said.

High tea and a book signing with Kamla K. Kapur followed the formal proceedings.

Awakening with Nanak: A Journey of Self-Discovery is published by HarperCollins India.

About Kamla K. Kapur

Kamla K. Kapur is a poet, playwright and author. Born and raised in India, she studied in the United States. Her poetry and prose have appeared in Parabola and The Sun, and she divides her time between the Indian Himalayas and San Diego. Her books include Awakening with Nanak: A Journey of Self-Discovery (2026), The Privilege of Aging (2024), Into the Great Heart (2018), Rumi: Tales to Live By (2017), The Singing Guru (2015) and Ganesha Goes to Lunch (2007).

About The Anad Foundation

The Anad Foundation is a New Delhi-based not-for-profit organisation dedicated to the conservation, study, transmission and contemporary understanding of India’s intangible cultural and knowledge traditions. Its work brings together research, archives, pedagogy, publications, performance and practice, with particular attention to endangered and inherited traditions and the knowledge embodied in their practitioners.

About Bel-la Monde

Bel-la Monde Hotels, chaired by Dr. Gurmeet Singh, is a New Delhi-based hospitality organisation. Alongside its hospitality activities, Bel-la Monde is developing a programme of cultural and intellectual engagement, creating space for music, literature and conversation. Its collaboration with The Anad Foundation began formally with An Afternoon with Kamla K. Kapur on 3 October 2026.

Photographs

Photographs for publication (8×10 in), free to use with credit to Gurjot Singh, can be downloaded here: Delhi launch photographs. Full-resolution photographs are available on request.