Heard Every Morning, Worldwide

The daily hukamnama read at the Golden Temple in Amritsar each morning has become, since the arrival of internet broadcasting, a practice millions of Sikhs worldwide participate in simultaneously despite never travelling to the site, in a way the original practice could not have anticipated. The reading taken at the Golden Temple's morning ceremony is photographed, transcribed and published daily on the temple's official channels and widely shared across Sikh community websites, apps and social media within minutes, so that a Sikh household anywhere in the world can read and reflect on the same randomly opened passage the Golden Temple's reader received that same morning, effectively synchronising a devotional practice originally local to one gurdwara across a global diaspora community. This modern broadcast use sits alongside the practice's older and distinct second meaning, the written edicts historically issued by the Gurus themselves to congregations at a distance, a form of authoritative communication that continues today through the Akal Takht, the seat of Sikh temporal authority located across from the Golden Temple, which issues hukamnamas on matters of communal conduct and religious practice that Sikh institutions worldwide are expected to observe, giving the same word a devotional sense, the daily random reading, and an institutional sense, a binding directive from the Panth's highest authority, operating side by side without either displacing the other.