I totally agree that the first step is to understand the life and times of the contributors to Sri Guru Granth Sahib Ji so we understand the messages they where trying to get across.
Well said, sign of a good student [Sikh]. OK Ishna, with regard to the understanding and the interpretation of Gurbani, one must know something of the authors, social, environmental, cultural and biological background to ascertain their character, disposition and personality.
For example, let us assume that you, Ishna G [IG] is a judge presiding over a certain court of law and after a night of considerable incidents within a small town, you have to deal with several cases of serious domestic assaults. Most of these cases look straightforward, but two of them turned out to present particular difficulty. One involves a husband who tried to strangle his wife; the other a wife who went for her husband with a kitchen knife. Both assaults were deliberate, and neither was in self- defence. The court’s resident
psychologist has uncovered interesting evidence, which seem to provide the basis of strong pleas in mitigation (less blameworthy).
In the first case it turns out that the man was conscripted (compulsory) during a recent war and put through intensive training designed to
condition him to attack on the slightest provocation. Before that time his character had been quite different, and violence had been completely alien to him. In the second case it turned out that the woman was at the time suffering [
condition] from unusually severing pre-menstrual tension and that at other times of the month she is known to everyone as a model of calm and restraint.
IG would accept the argument [because you yourself was a living example of hormonal imbalances ?] from the defendants counsel that such things as
conditioning and
hormones can influence character and behaviour?
Suppose now then, you having accepted that these two defendants were not responsible for their actions and therefore should not be punished and have now before you the counsel for the remaining eight. How might they argue for leniency on behalf of their clients?
Well, one of the Solicitors might say to you “IG, if an action can be explained by environmental influences, such as military training, then the soldier is not blameworthy for his behaviour and likewise the woman did not choose her hormonal constitution and therefore is not at fault. It then flows from this argument that in the case of my client, Miss X who is charged with a violence offence, is a woman brought up in a violent family [
social] where she was never taught to control her temper and, had she been brought up in a different family, she would have acted quite differently and would not have committed this crime. She obviously has to be let off for the same reason as the soldier and the woman. And in fact similar arguments apply to the rest of the cases of all the defendants. All my clients are the products of their
physical make up (hormones and the likes) and their
environment, and those factors all entirely beyond their control provide the explanation of all their actions”.
It seems then, that you face a difficult problem. On the one hand it does seem quite unfair to hold people responsible for actions that were caused by influences entirely beyond their control. And on the other hand, once we start to allow this kind of excuse to kick in there seems no reasonable point at which to stop.
The moral of it is, the
conditions [social, environmental! cultural and biological] operating at the time of the Banikars lives plays a significant role in the way they behaved, thought and acted - and produced Gurbani. With this information, both the reader and the interpreter are best placed to draw the right conclusions, inferences and correct interpretations.