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. This has prompted the creation of a growing body of literature in English which aims to address the perceived needs of younger generations of Sikhs as well as those from other backgrounds who are drawn to the study of Sikhism as a now well established part of religious studies programmes in university syllabuses as well at school level. 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 nature of the primary Sikh texts has not infrequently been felt to be something a problem by those looking for suitable examples to be used for comparative study alongside the more familiar scriptures of the major world religions. The choice naturally focuses upon texts associated with Gurū Nānak as founder of the Sikh tradition. But most of his numerous compositions contained in the canonical Ādi Granth are crafted as lyrical hymns designed for singing in congregation rather than as systematic expositions of doctrine, while the anecdotes of his teachings contained in the later hagiographies called janamsākhī seem very often too fantastic or too puerile to command much modern conviction.

Apart from the unique Japjī, the highly condensed outline of Gurū Nānak's teachings which opens the scriptures, there is perhaps only one composition which at least partially seems to fit comparitivist requirements quite well. This is the Siddh Gosht, a rather extended piece cast in the form of lengthy responses by Gurū Nānak to questions put to him by the Siddhs, symbolic representatives of the Nāth yogi tradition which was a major religious presence in pre-modern Panjab. It therefore offers a rare example of explicit self-definition, even if it is hardly an example of religious ‘dialogue’ in the modern sense, since the questions of the Siddhs merely serve to introduce extended expositions of the Gurū's understanding of the nature of ‘true yoga’, i.e. the path of loving devotion which is exalted as far transcending the limitations of their ascetic practices. As such, it is unique within the Ādi Granth, where its canonical status has never been questioned. (It may be observed, however, that its crabbed style is rather unlike Gurū Nānak's usual wonderfully fluent poetic expression, and that in genre it is much more like the still very underexplored extra-canonical texts which Hew McLeod has termed ‘heterodox discourses’, and which notably include the Prān Sangalī, also involving Nāth yogi interlocutors, as well as others directed at Muslim opponents like the long Makke Madīne dī Gosht.)

Given its primarily pedagogical purpose, Nayar and Sandhu's book justifiably disregards such questions in favour of a lucid introduction to the Siddh Gosht itself. The opening chapter provides a useful typology of the various patterns of renunciation emphasised in different Indic religious traditions. The next chapters look in turn at the Nāth yogi tradition and at the records of Gurū Nānak's life and teachings, followed by a description of the context of the Siddh Gosht. The following chapters go into Gurū Nānak'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. Readers of the book who then turn to the readable English translation of the Siddh Gosht with which it concludes should thus find themselves well prepared to understand its message.