The evolutionary history of all organisms - individual, tribe, clan, community, race or nation - determines when, where and how such entities come into being, acquire character, identity and name before they are fully commissioned on behalf of a larger humanist dream.

The being and the becoming are, in reality, a question of time and energy, and the dialectic of this process is predicated upon the nature of the primal impulse in question. For becoming involves the massed spirit of a people to overcome the hazards and challenges of reality, a reality often obdurate, intractable and hostile. In that crowning of the impulse lies the secret, the key to the dynamics of its path to recognition - and permanence. To be sure, when we are thinking of large communities with a distinctive religious address, signature and iconography, we may see variations from community to community in their journey even though, in general terms, common features or traits of visionary evolution are fairly evident in each case.

Still, there is, in most cases, a moment of moments when the gathered energies, ordeals and ideals reach the point of criticality, to borrow a convenient concept from nuclear physics. It is then that the dream nursed over a period of time and travail comes of the age of annunciation and song. It is the moment of epiphany and illumination, of beauty and poetry, a moment whose hour has come at last. In short, a moment of sovereignty.

In this preamble to the birth of the Khalsa in its ultimate from in the year 1699, may be seen the raison d'etre of the prodigious effort of he Sikh community to commemorate in great adoration and pride, in great style and form the 300th birth anniversary this year. To be sure, all centenary celebrations of this nature and character need a visible fanfare to affirm their momentous importance, but obviously the mere mounting of ceremonies on a grand scale, or the setting up of commemorative mansions and monuments, or the creation of certain foundations and council etc. will, in the end, remain a splendid and spectacular exercise in which the spirit was lost in the letter. And that is something against which the Sikh scriptures have laid clear injunctions in soulful and heroic numbers. In other words, the year of the tercentenary ought to become a year not only of our renaissance, or the revival of the entire Sikh thought, culture and heritage, but also of a strenuous, agonising and insightful reassessment of the entire Sikh situation today - of its religious lapses, departures and derelictions, of its heroic but often complex and confused polity, of its place in the modern world, of the problems thrown up by the Sikh diaspora, among several other things. A time of soul-searching and 'spring-clearing', in short. Both euphoria and nostalgia are legitimate states of a corporate sensibility also, and the historic moment does inveigle the imagination into the pastures of the past, and into the arbours of the future. All that is natural, but when a great community that had once graduated to a position of power and glory, and then lost a good deal of its earned values and insights en route, such occasions help create a climate of helpful debate or discourse. We, on the other hand, find a whole swarm of doubts invading the Sikh mind precisely because of the tragic loss of vision among the community's leadership. The Sikh Establishment, like all entrenched power groups of` elites and ambitious adventurers, are in the habit of turning everything to commodity - to profit and position. Thus, thoughtful Sikhs are called upon to salvage, refashion and reorient something of the pristine spirit in the context of the millennium in view. And to do so, it is necessary to go back to that moment of moments which as I have said earlier, gave this community its sui generic character.

The Sikh history from the Founder of the creed, Guru Nanak, to the Tenth Guru again may be seen as a very unique journey, unique not in its native energies of will, spirit and sword to meet the assaults of reality - almost all great religions have had to encounter the entrenched orthodoxies of power and idolatry - but in bringing to consummation a dream in an uninterrupted chain of preceptors. For it's the common Sikh belief supported by evidence in word and song that the primal jyoti or light is seen embodied in the nine successive pontiffs as a matter of design whose locus lies outside of our reach and understanding. No wonder, such a progression where each successive Guru composed, sang hymns in the name of the First Master had a touch of the divine about it. In sum, the 200-year journey from Guru Nanak to Guru Gobind Singh who finally closed the institution of succession, and instead invested the Adi Granth with that awesome authority could be regarded as a pre-ordained phenomenon. In "the extinction of personality", and in submission to the imperatives of their inner selves, Guru Nanak's successors affirmed not only the spirit of humility and gratitude, but also the power of the word to become Word, of the message to become mandate, of the vision to become incarnate. It was an illumination that proved in action the grand link of God, pontiff and believer, a spiritual bond of Father, messenger and man. It was a divine wheel come full circle.

The passage of Sikhism through fire and flame, through sacrifices and martyrdom, through a sustained, relentless struggle for survival in the face of the massed might of the Moghul empire, and of their local royal Hindu stooges and satraps of all manner is too well-known to need another recital here. It is well-chronicled in history and sakhis, in our fables and folklore, and in our documents and diaries. And this indeed is an archetypal journey - nearly all religions face such ordeals of spirit and will - though in the case of the Sikhs the relative swiftness of events, the transparent annealing of their corporate psyche under stress and strain, and the marks of a community on the upswing, maintaining a state of equipoise and serenity in the midst of storms, and hoisting a flag of the spirit to announce its definitive identity and arrival, a flag of the spirit to announce its definitive identity and arrival, was something that no known community in the world has to show. Which reminds me of a little poem in Punjabi called Sikhi or 'Sikhism' written by Mohan Singh in the early thirties of this century:

Sikhism is verily a tree
That puts out its blossoms
In each place and clime,
– in wastes and wilderness,
In stony and rocky soils:
And the more you prune it,
The more it flourishes
In that majesty and measure.

This brings us, then, to that ultimate hour towards which the community drawing the milk of nourishment from its scriptures and stories has been marching resolutely, waiting, as it were, for its date with destiny. That day is now at hand, and there's a masterful hand to put the seal of finality upon it. To put it differently, we have the classic conditions that the French critic Taine's trinity stipulates regarding the birth of a great idea, or a great work of art: the coming together of the man, the moment and the milieu. That day in the spring of 1699, March 29-30 or the 1st Baisakhi 1756 BR (now celebrated each year on April 13), found the Tenth Master supremely primed for the historic mandate, and the conditions and the airs and the ambience ripe for the test and the consummation. Shakespeare uses two visionary ideas in his tragedies, Hamlet and King Lear - "Readiness is all" and "Ripeness is all" - to describe the state of a heroic soul on trial. In this case, the analogy is chiefly a linguistic extension, though the spirit in agony and triumph and the readiness to give battle to the forces of evil and tyranny he speaks of shows the ripeness of spirit to which the Sikhs had been brought by the preceding preceptors. Let it be affirmed, inter alia, that this hour of the enfranchisement of the community as a commonwealth of the Khalsa was adumbrated in the divine vision and hymns of the First Guru himself. And during the days of the succeeding Gurus, and the proclamation of Guru Hargobind of the twin doctrines of miri and piri or "the temporal sovereignty" and "the spiritual sovereignty" earlier had, in no uncertain terms, spelt out the destined march of the faithful towards a goal perceived in advance. This kind of prescience is vouchsafed to all such as are elected by the Lord to carry His Word, and become the instruments of His Will. The "third eye" is a divine endowment.

So, the intervening two centuries or so could be seen as a period in which the Sikh spirit was born, nursed, imbued with purpose and courage, filled with the lore of dharma or moral vision, and then set on the road that looked wards the far horizons in view. The day of baptism, of the administered amrit by the Master himself, was thus a day that hearkened back to Guru Nanak who lived in India at a time of utter political and moral chaos. The Hindu society in which he was born had become a moribund body of disparate and demoralised, degraded elements under the onslaught of Islamic rule and monolithic, absolutist theology which put to sword all that came in its way of spiritual suzerainty and territorial lust.

Indeed, to reach down to the grid of the energies that galvanised the engines of soulful and moral action on a grand scale, we may have to interpret the symbolic story of the Tenth Guru’s own nativity and its contextual coordinates. Thus the hermeneutics of his composition Bachitar Natak or ‘The Wondrous Drama’ (1698) which he wrote in the plentitude of his poetic power and vision, would suggest not only the rationale of his birth, and the story of his previous life, but also a whole range of possibilities posited in it. A ministry of moral and mystic symbiosis is commissioned. A religion now fully armed in spirit, complete with a body of inviolate scriptural verse, theological formulations and a socio-political world-view is set to take off, waiting as it were for the Great Engineer. From the birth of the star over Patna in the year 1666 AD and the ordained arrival on the scene of the Sufi Saint, Bhikham Shah, to bless the infant Gobind and pronounce him divine (reminiscent of the Bethlehem Story of Jesus Christ’s nativity and the journey of the Magi) to the tempestuous saga of his life and muses we may see the making of a great mission. His sovereignty in the process assumes awesome majesty, and his poetry a magnificence in consonance with the imperatives of his splendid personality. The royal mien, robes and accoutrements reflect how matter impregnated with the spirit of divinity becomes an instrument of mandate and message. However, unlike other prophets and divines, he never claimed the station of God. On the contrary, he condemned all those to hell who called him Ishwar or Akalpurkh. Talking of the Guru’s divine ministry, I am reminded of the Greek concept of Kairos or “the right time”. As Paul Tillich in The Eternal Now puts it, “All great changes in history are accompanied by a strong consciousness of a Kairos at hand”. Taken thus, the advent of the Tenth Master had its locus in time and divinity at once.

Before we turn, finally, to the Sikh values, vision and Weltanschuuang and to the future of the Sikhs as we see it today, a fanciful resurrection of the Great Day that saw the baptism and enfranchisement of the Khalsa as a sovereign community at Anandpur Sahib ('The Abode of Bliss') becomes a part of the grand tapestry. There are several accounts of that fateful day, and it is the imagination of loving and reverence, and the imagination of frolic and revelry that come simultaneously into play. Imagine then the scene – a cool morning of late March with the spring breezes laden with the fragrance of myriad flowers, and of the good green earth, the schools of birds chirping in happy thankfulness, the aroma of ripe corn and the songs of harvesting, the village belles, “our queens of curd and cream” at their morning chores, the music of the Persian wheels and the splendour of the surrounding Shivalik hills beneath which Anadpur Sahib rests as a place of peace with a distinctive “call”! And Guru Gobind Singh is seated on the gaddi in full regalia, sporting a plume and a hawk on his hand, and he surveys the assembled believers and faithful with an eye of keen insight and compassion. And then, amidst a congregation charged with high emotion and a dream of high destiny, the Master rises to announce the birth of the Khalsa in their finished form, and the ceremony of amrit is enacted after a symbolic act of trust and sacrifice. For that’s the meaning of the 5 goats slaughtered inside the tent to initiate the five pyaras or “The Beloved Five”, who had at the Guru’s command offered their heads. It was truly a unique order of baptism – a baptism of blood and sword. The steel had, so to speak, entered the spirit of the Khalsa, and given it a keen edge and power. However, the great moral of that symbolic episode was that the new Commonwealth of the Khalsa knew or recognised no distinctions of caste, colour or creed. ‘The Beloved Five’ represented the entire spectrum of the then existing society – from the high-born to the lowly artisans.

This flowering of the Sikh spirit around the time of the Baisakhi month – a month of joyous felicites brings forth that joie de vivre which is a characteristic feature of Punjabi life, and which springs from a deep-rooted attachment to the soil – the blessedness and bounties of corn, milk and curds. It’s these virtues which the Master’s providential act brought to full fruition. The idea of sada vigas or unfailing high-spiritedness thus got structured into the Sikh sensibility.

Since the doctrine of the consecrated sword was then apotheocised at the time of the ceremonies associated with the moment of the Khalsa, there has always existed an element of question, of doubt about it in the minds of those outside of the faith. It was made mandatory by the Guru himself that the Sikh sword would only be unleashed or lifted against those tyrants and evil persons who had blocked all avenue of peaceful resolution. It was to affirm the principles of universal justice and moral law under all conditions and all circumstances. In his historic Zafarnamah or ‘The Epistle of Victory’, addressed to the Moghul Emperor, Aurangzeb, a couplet in Persian loosely rendered, read thus:

When the situation is past all measures and persuasion,
It’s thy rightful duty to life the sword.

In any account of the enfranchisement of the Khalsa as a body of men and women sworn to the highest ideals of the creed brought into being by Guru Nanak, and expanded, expounded and finalized by the later pontiffs and made ready for the charismatic stewardship of the Tenth Master, it is important to understand the drift of moral energies, the humanistic vision and the ultimate goal of God-realisation which the preceding generations of Sikh devotees had imbibed from their history, scriptures, given tenets, edicts, rules of governance, polity and so on. In a most comprehensive way, all these sources got subsumed in a grand metaphor of the Khalsa itself – a term that at once suggested multiple ideas and images of dharma and karma, and of sewa and sacrifice, of commitment and candour, of truth and righteousness, of divine acceptance and submission and, above all, of the mystery and mystique of martyrdom. Thus to sport the insignia of the Khalsa was to proclaim, in a way, the very essence of one’s being. For that’s how corporate images get laminated into one strong unforgettable imago in the Jungian sense.

To be more specific, the moral tradition of Sikhism from which we find both the leaders and the laity grievously alienated today in some ways, particularly since the wave of hedonism and consumerism in the country, there is a whole sum of values strong enough o suggest a residual, inviolate base. For the Sikh Gurus treated the world of the senses as dharmasal or “the house of moral conduct”. Ironically, while the vile politics of power seems to have soiled the governance of the gurdwaras both in India and abroad, the concept of dharamsal (a term still in common use in the countryside) abides. And the moral values the concept implies includes, among other things, humility and extinction of haumain or ego, pity and compassion, service and sacrifice, hospitality and magnanimity, courage and valour and, above all, a vigilant concern for truth – the highest virtue in Guru Nanak’s own words, higher even than right conduct. For truth is God’s own attribute and, therefore, a transcendent value—supreme, immaculate, inviolate.

“Truth is higher than everything else,
But higher still is the living by truth.”

The question of Rahetnamas or ‘Epistles of Conduct’ issued or enunciated by various saints, scholars and scribes has to be understood in the context of their origin and circumstances. Of course, the ethical vision of Sikhism will always remain central n relation to he scriptural values, though it was natural to see certain new proprieties and protocol evolved in the course of history as a kind of helpful grammar. It is in this way that Sikh ethics came to be institutionalised. It may be observed, however, that the Guru vision never permitted or envisaged an institutionalization which could degenerate into a mindless orthodoxy. For that vision is at once fundamental and resilient, universal and contingent. One may go on to describe such a phenomenon as an example of visionary ambivalence. It appears, then, that the three key principles that emerge as a grid of Sikh moral energies are:

Nam Japna or the recitation of the Name,
Kir-karna or a life of fruitful labour, and
Vand Chhakna or the sharing of life’s fruits and riches and other bounties and blessings.

All other virtues, in a way, stem from this ethical trinity.

To trace and analyse the moral life of a community is, in a manner, to talk of its origin, evolution and arrival as an organic entity on the one hand, and to understand its spiritual urges, its existential concerns and its humanistic dreams, on the other. In this interaction of the numinous and the divine lies the locus of all value systems. And where a community has been trained on a diet of vast human aspirations as in the case of the Sikhs, its moral being or character achieved in action and engagement is integrally related to its world-view. It’s thus that the word becomes flesh, or the thought consumed in praxis. In other words, the text of history and the sub-text of faith and belief combine to produce a moral order. And the entire foregoing argument returns us thus to that moment of moments when through the vision and deeds of the Final Master a community’s full life – of the senses, of the mind and intellect, and of the eternal mystic longing for the life beyond was given its first full expression.

If the moral values and the Sikh world-view found their profound consummation in the life and poetry of Guru Gobind Singh, it only proves that in the Guru’s view there was never to be a hiatus between the ideal in view and the action involved. The meaning of his own life – the sacrifice of his own noble father, Guru Tegh Bahadur, and the consequential martyrdom of all his four young sons in the name of dharma, truth and faith – a quartet of martyrdom unparalleled in the history of world religions – assumes a meaning beyond meaning. Where a life, a pen and a sword come together to form a paradigm of spiritual power of awesome magnificence, surely a divinity of purpose is a work. And when the ordained mission had been brought to its logical conclusion, and a brotherhood of the faithful established, the Master gave yet another meaningful and far-reaching turn to the great drama. He accepted amrit, the water of baptism, from his own commissioned Sikhs, “the Beloved Five”. The moment of resurrection of a people fallen and gone astray was thus crowned with a regal act. The Guru and the Chela became an inseparable entity, and the Master’s memorable utterance reminds us today of his ministry in this manner:

Khalsa mero roop hai khas
(The Khalsa brotherhood is cast in my own image).

No wonder, one recalls with awe that memorable couplet:

Wah, Wah, Guru Gobind Singh
Apey Gur Chela
(All praise be to Guru Gobind Singh,
The Preceptor’s also an acolyte).

And, finally, when we talk of the Sikh Weltanschauung or world-view, in a way, we are only summing up in a portmanteau German expression all that the Khalsa fraternity stands for – from its origin and tempestuous history to its visionary voyage through the Sikh scriptures, hymns, discourses and works of exegesis. The encyclopaedic character of the exercise involves a very large extended discussion. However, for our purposes here, the Sikh world-view implies a few major, definitive and unvaried features of the community: its creed and culture, its polity and praxis, its style and stance, among other things.

To begin with, the reality of this world-view is grounded in two other realities of a higher nature – the reality of God and the reality of the world as we see it. It becomes necessary to emphasise the latter, since the Sikh scriptures in consonance with some aspects of Hindu thought do speak of this world as maya or illusion, as “a dream” and “a bubble” (as in the soulful numbers of Guru Tegh Bahadur, to quote only one example), but a deeper and wider reading of all such references in the hymns of the Gurus, and in those of other divines does suggest certain subtle variations. There are, indeed, clear statements within the sacred texts to treat human life as something unique and rare, and the world of nature, earth and animals as a place of wonder, enchantment and beauty. It is because divinity suffuses the given reality of this world and, indeed, is created by the Lord as “playground” for His own great lila or pleasurable game. No wonder, then, the sacred and the profane are equally worthy of our adoration. In fact, Guru Nanak regarded the human body as “a temple of God”, and if we abuse it or desecrate it, it only shows how far we have traveled from the spirit of Sikhism.

Similarly, woman qua woman has received a most compassionate, soulful and reverential treatment in Guru Nanak’s hymns, as indeed in the bani of the later Gurus, for she symbolises the eternal principal of creation. And woman, the spouse, is a recurring constitutive metaphor in the Adi Granth where man’s relation with his Maker is conceived in corresponding terms and idiom. So the man-woman relationship has a divine, mystic base, and any affront to woman as such is an affront to the Lord Himself. That’s why anand-karj or marriage in Sikhism is regarded as a fulfillment and a consummation in more than one sense.

A world-view that comprehends the sublimity of human relationships is necessarily egalitarian, democratic and socialistic in essence. It regards equality of men, equality of religions and equality in the eyes of law as fundamental values whatever its uniqueness – and Sikhism has a distinct character – that uniqueness is never used as a means of aggrandisement, of aloofness, of proselytisation in a militant manner. This could best be illustrated when we consider the composition of the Adi Granth by the Fifth Guru, Arjan Dev. It carries scores of hymns from Muslim sufi poets, Hindu divines, Harijan bards and bhaktas, and the languages used cover a vast variety of dialects in addition to the classical languages and vernaculars. This order of catholicity of the spirit and mind remains a singularly unique phenomenon in the world of religious scriptures or literatures.

Again, Sikhism, though recognising the ‘royalty’ of the human spirit does not recognise any kind of social hierarchy, any kind of elites. Guru Gobind Singh’s own example, and his hymns, full of compassion for the lowly and the dispossessed, show what the Sikh world-view can suggest to a world driven by conflicts, clashes and schisms of all manner. The Sikh scriptures again are full of what in the German language is called Weltschmerz or ‘world-pain’.

It remains, in the end, to ponder the future of Sikhism in the century ahead of us. It is true, apostasy in Sikhism has been, of late, on a large scale, what with the Sikh diaspora and the new forces of global ‘culture’ mentioned at the outset. At the same time, it is also true that some of the Sikh scribes who predicted “the demise” of Sikhism in its original form by the end of the century now remain to regret the rashness of their view. For, it is now being realised even abroad that not only is Sikhism a vibrant world religion with a distinct identity, but is also a faith that has endless possibilities for mankind.

And this point brings up the question of Sikhism and modernity. It has often been averred by the new generation of Sikhs in India and abroad that the Sikh image, practices and symbols militate against its acceptance in its present form. There’s only some element of truth in it, for this thesis is not sustainable in so many other ways. Besides, there is, so far as India is concerned, no other community more wedded to the spirit of modernity than are the Sikhs. Their very life-style, their whole-sale acceptance of western scientific farming, technology, education and the conditions of an advanced industrialized, entrepreneurial society would be able to sustain the Sikhs amidst all manner of challenges. There is an organic, inherent energy in them, and all we need is to adapt ourselves to the requirements of the changing world without losing our true heritage and our vision. How best this could be effected is a matter that requires a vigorous insightful debate and deliberations. Among the vexing and complex problems that continue to bedevil the Akali party politics, and cause painful embarrassment to the community in India and abroad are the problems of the office and jurisdiction of the Akal Takht Jathedar, and the question of mandatory edicts, orders and punitive actions associated with that high office. The effects of authority, of late, compels us then to ponder the problem in agonising earnestness. In sum, the moment of celebrations is also the moment of reassessment, readjustment and redefinement.

Assuredly, the moment of the Khalsa is best suited to give the coming generations a direction, an agenda and a machinery for action. The dialectic of the moment compels us to do so.

Dr Darshan Singh Maini

Dr. Darshan Singh Maini, formerly Professor of English with the Punjabi University, has written extensively for a variety of journals, magazines and newspapers in India and abroad since the early fifties. His work includes scores of papers, literary essays, poems, reviews, critiques, columns and commentaries.

Dr Maini was a Fulbright Visiting Professor at New York University (1988-90) and a permanent member of the Henry James Review editorial board.