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SIKHISM 101: A YOUNG AND BOLD WORLD RELIGION
This piece was originally written in November 2001 immediately after the city of Providence, Rhode Island, had dropped concealed weapons charges against Mr. Sher Singh, who was taken off an Amtrak train and arrested on September 12. Apparently, in the wake of 9/11 tragedy, he was mistaken for a Muslim and/or an Arab and viewed as a security threat.
Amritjit Singh
Now that the City of Providence has decided to drop the charges against Mr. Sher J. B. Singh, maybe we could learn a bit more about the Sikhs and their identity. Who are the Sikhs? When, where, and how did their faith originate? How is Sikhism different from Hinduism and Islam, the other two religions with significant South Asian populations in the U.S. today?
While the majority of Sikhs, like most other Asians, have arrived in Canada and the U.S since the immigration reforms of the 1960s, Sikhs have lived in these two countries for over a century and number close to a million today in North America. In California, early Sikh immigrants took to farming in the Imperial Valley and married Mexican women (since women from India were not allowed to join them) and to this day quite a few of their hybrid descendants live in El Centro. The first Asian American Congressman, Dalip Singh Saund, was a Sikh, and he was elected as a Democrat to three successive terms in the House of Representatives from 1957 to 1963 from Orange and Imperial counties in California. In recent years, Sikhs have been quite visible on Canada’s political scene. From February 2000 to June 2001, Ujjal Singh Dosanjh served as the Premier of British Columbia as the elected leader of the National Democratic Party. In the past decade, quite a few Sikhs have been elected to the Canadian Parliament and to the provincial legislatures in Alberta, British Columbia, and Ontario. Sikhs have for some time held cabinet-level positions in the federal government in Ottawa. Sikh congregations are now common throughout North America, and include a dozen each in Vancouver and Toronto; half a dozen each in metropolitan New York and the Bay Area; and three in Massachusetts – in Milford, Millis, and Somerville, respectively.
While well over 25 million Sikhs today live in and have places of worship in dozens of countries on all continents, most of them can trace their origins to the Punjab, one of the two states that were bifurcated in 1947 by the British between India and Pakistan. Well over 85% of the Sikhs still live in the Indian state of Punjab, the most prosperous section of the country. It is in the Punjab’s farming villages and small towns that Sikhism developed as a distinct faith, between 1469 - the birth year of the first Sikh master, Guru Nanak Dev - and 1708, the year the tenth Master, Guru Gobind Singh, passed away. In shaping a bold response to the relentless attack on religious freedoms by some but not all Mughal emperors, the ten Gurus responded to the needs of a demoralized Hindu community. Thus, while the historical formation of the Sikh identity took place against the clash between Hinduism and Islam in medieval India, Sikhism represents at many levels a radical break with the basic tenets of both.
Traveling widely throughout the Indian subcontinent and in the Middle East, Guru Nanak Dev (1469-1539) attempted to disengage his fellow beings’ relationship to the Creator from the mumbo jumbo of the priestly, Brahminic class by focusing on three simple precepts – make an honest living; share your earnings with others who are needier than you; and keep a check on your ego (haumai) by remembering always that God is in-charge, not you. In his hymns, the Guru gave a powerful voice to the downtrodden masses. In rejecting asceticism as the preferred means to spiritual salvation, the Guru placed family commitments at the center of human life, which, he saw along with other forms of Creation, as a manifestation of the Divine. He railed against the mindless brutality of Muslim invaders and other exploitative rulers, exposed the futility of empty rituals and the inhumanity of caste system among the Hindus, and made a passionate plea for female equality: “From the woman is our birth, … The woman is our friend, and from the woman is the family; If one woman dies, we seek another, ... Why call woman evil who gives birth to kings?” (Guru Granth Sahib, page 473).
Sikhism is a monotheistic faith that sees God as immanent, and Sikhs, like the Muslims, do not worship images and idols. Sharing its rejection of caste and ritual with both Buddhism and Islam, Sikhism does not attack or condemn any other faith - only elements of hypocrisy, intolerance, superficiality, or externalism that all organized faiths are vulnerable to. Again, Sikhism does not claim an exclusive hold over truth, nor does it entertain similar claims by any other faith. While the doors of a gurdwara, a Sikh house of worship, are open to all regardless of their religion or “race” and while one may choose to join the faith over a period of time, Sikhism does not favor proselytizing. In fact, Sikhism expects all individuals to remain within their own faith and continue the struggle to finesse their humanity. Our enemies are not the members of another faith, nation, or group, but our own hard-to-conquer human proclivities – kam (lust), krodh (anger), lobh (greed), moh (attachment) and hankar (pride). All human beings have the ability to distinguish between good and bad and choose an appropriate course of action.
Sikhism may, in fact, be legitimately viewed as an ultimate expression in South Asia for what we know today in the U.S. as our First Amendment rights. The 300-year history of Sikhs from the late 15th to the late 18th century documents the struggle of the Sikh Gurus and other leaders not only to stop the forcible conversations of Hindus to Islam, a religion for which the Gurus otherwise showed a deep respect, but also for Sikhs’ own right as a relatively small band of followers to grow and practice their faith. The Sikh Masters established a peace-loving, God-fearing community, but many contemporaneous rulers, big and small, Muslim and Hindu, saw a threat in the Sikhs’ growing influence. The Mughal emperors executed the fifth and the ninth Masters. Guru Nanak Dev, the first Master, lived and preached his simple and uplifting message before, during and after the barbaric rule of Babur, the first Mughal emperor (1526-30). The tenth Master, Guru Gobind Singh, some two centuries after Guru Nanak Dev, was compelled to fight a long and hard guerilla war against Aurangzeb, the last major Mughal Emperor (1658-1707). Guru Gobind Singh (1666-1708) - who lost all his four sons in this fight against religious intolerance - declared that when all other methods had failed, it was not unreasonable to raise the sword in one’s defense.
On New Year Day, April 13, in 1699, in the middle of his battles against despotic rulers, Guru Gobind Singh created the Khalsa (“the pure”), a band of sant-sipahis (saint-soldiers), who were directed - after taking an initiation ceremony (amrit pahul) - to follow a code of spiritual conduct and wear the five symbols of the faith, the five K’s: kesh (unshorn hair), kirpan (sword), kara (a steel bracelet), kangha (comb), and kacch (a pair of breeches). Collectively, the five K’s symbolize a life of spiritual discipline, dignity, and self-respect. The saint-soldier ideal is very much in keeping with the goal of experiencing the Divine in human life, the commitment to family and children, a belief in social equality for all men and women, and the readiness to fight for fairness and justice for all that had shaped the Sikh tradition from its beginnings. The names “Singh” (lion) for all males and “Kaur” (princess) for all women were mandated effectively to eliminate the negative consequences of a deeply-seated caste system. The concepts of sangat (the congregational community) and langar (the congregational meal prepared by the sangat) reinforce the egalitarian impulses of the faith.
The tenth Master also directed the Sikhs not to follow a human Guru after him and to seek all guidance in the holy book, Guru Granth Sahib, a 1430-page book that comprises hymns composed by six of the ten Sikh Gurus and by 26 Hindu and Muslim contemporaries. The work of compiling the Granth had been virtually completed in 1604 by the fifth Master, Guru Arjan Dev, and today this holy book is the centerpiece of worship and prayer at all Sikh congregations. A typical service in a gurdwara is comprised of recitation and singing of holy verses from the Granth (the Sanskrit word for “book”) by lay members, preachers, and cantors alike. Today, Sikhs are energetic members of diverse communities throughout the globe and while not all of them wear turbans and beards or are fully initiated members of the faith, they feel a strong connection to the rich history and evocative simplicity of their faith.
Amritjit Singh, a Sikh, teaches English and African American Studies at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. He has published over a dozen books, including Postcolonial Theory and the United States: Race, Ethnicity, and Literature (2000), Collected Writings of Wallace Thurman: A Harlem Renaissance Reader (2003) and Interviews with Edward W. Said (2004).