Women and Leadership: Sri Guru Amardas Ji's Manji & Piri System
The Importance of Female Outreach
If you are a Sikh woman, it is crucial that you know about Sri Guru Amardas Ji’s Manji/Piri system.
Keep reading until the end!
Sri Guru Amardas Ji played an important role in the expansion of Sikhi.
While Sri Guru Nanak Dev Ji had chosen to travel far and wide to remote places in order to spread Sikhi, Sri Guru Amardas Ji chose to settle at a base and expand outwards using preachers and community leaders. Guru Sahib put into place two systems to organize and mobilize these community leaders.
The systems were:
The Manji System
The Piri System
They were two branches in Sri Guru Amardas Ji’s overall outreach strategy.
The Manji System was an administrative branch that oversaw large regions where newly converted Sikhs lived. In order to help these communities stay ideologically connected and unified, a “Dharamsala” (religious centre) was built in each region. The regions were called Manjis.
Each Manji had assigned “Manjidars” who were to oversee the administration of the Dharamsala, and to collect funds in order to run services such as the Langar.
In total, there were 22 Manjis.
Bibi Amro Ji (Guru Angad Dev Ji’s daughter) was one of the Manjidars in charge at Basarke. Another female Manjidar was Bibi Sachan Sach, who Guru Sahib had liberated from a life of oppression at the hands of a backwards-thinking husband.
The second system was the Piri system.
This was the “Parchaar” branch. In this system. Guru Sahib hand-picked Gursikhs to preach Gurmat and spread the message of Guru Sahib.
In total there were 146 Piris, out of which 52 were women.
For that time period - a period in which women were so oppressed that they were forced to burn themselves alive if their husband died before them - a collective force of 52 female preachers was not only enormous, it was revolutionary.
A large aspect of the Piri system was in-fact female outreach. Guru Sahib recognized that women faced certain barriers to Sikhi, and chose to focus their resources on overcoming those particular barriers.
It showed that Guru Sahib saw past gender and optics and instead looked at the needs of individual souls.
This begs us to question:
Are we at a point in history where we can once more benefit from female-focused Parchaar?
Do we need to recreate the Piri system and have more female Parchaariks who can fill the gap for outreach to women?