Sikhism

Sikhism began with Guru Nanak, born in 1469 at Talwandi, near Lahore, in a Hindu family. Around the age of thirty, Sikh tradition tells, he disappeared into a river for three days and returned saying: “There is no Hindu, there is no Muslim.” He travelled widely, singing hymns about the one God, and finally settled at Kartarpur, where his followers lived as a community of farmers and worshippers.

Nanak chose a successor, and a line of ten Gurus led the Sikhs until 1708. They built new towns and institutions: the free kitchen, the gathering of the faithful, and Amritsar with its Harmandir Sahib, the Golden Temple. The fifth Guru, Arjan, compiled the scripture in 1604 and was executed by the Mughals in 1606; the ninth, Tegh Bahadur, was executed in 1675.

In 1699 the tenth Guru, Gobind Singh, founded the Khalsa, an order of initiated Sikhs. Before his death in 1708 he declared that the scripture would be the Guru forever. In the 19th century Maharaja Ranjit Singh ruled a Sikh empire from Lahore, until the British annexed Punjab in 1849.

The death of Guru Gobind Singh in 1708 left the Sikhs without a human Guru, guided instead by the scripture and the community of the Khalsa. The decades that followed were among the hardest in Sikh history, and they shaped a strong tradition of remembrance: the daily prayer, the Ardas, still recalls those who gave their lives for the faith.

Banda Singh Bahadur, an ascetic who had met the tenth Guru shortly before his death, led a Sikh uprising in Punjab, took the Mughal town of Sirhind in 1710 and gave land to the peasants who worked it. He was captured and executed in Delhi in 1716, and Mughal governors then tried to crush the Sikhs. Small Sikh bands survived in forests and hills and gradually formed confederacies called misls, which met at Amritsar to take joint decisions as the Sarbat Khalsa, the whole Khalsa. The Afghan ruler Ahmad Shah Durrani, who invaded India many times, killed thousands of Sikhs in 1762 in what Sikhs call the Vadda Ghallughara, the “great massacre”, and blew up the Harmandir Sahib. Within a few years, however, the misls controlled much of Punjab.

One misl leader, Ranjit Singh, took Lahore in 1799 and was proclaimed Maharaja in 1801. He united Punjab into a kingdom that came to include Kashmir and Peshawar, with a modern army and a court that employed Hindus, Muslims and Europeans. He covered the upper storeys of the Harmandir Sahib with gilded copper, giving the Golden Temple its familiar name. After his death in 1839 the kingdom was weakened by struggles over the succession, and two wars with the British East India Company ended in annexation in 1849. His young son Duleep Singh was taken to England.

Under British rule many Sikhs served in the Indian Army, which prized them as soldiers. The Singh Sabha movement, begun in Amritsar in 1873, responded to Christian missions and to Hindu reform groups by founding schools, printing literature in Gurmukhi and setting out a distinct Sikh identity. The Anand Marriage Act of 1909 gave legal recognition to the Sikh wedding rite. In 1919 British troops fired on a crowd in the Jallianwala Bagh at Amritsar, killing hundreds, an event that turned many Sikhs against colonial rule.

In the early 1920s the Akali movement campaigned, largely through non-violent protest, to take historic gurdwaras out of the hands of hereditary custodians, the mahants. It led to the creation of the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee in 1920 and to the Sikh Gurdwaras Act of 1925, which gave an elected Sikh body control of the main shrines in Punjab. A standard code of conduct, the Sikh Rehat Maryada, was published in 1950.

The partition of 1947 divided Punjab between India and Pakistan, and nearly all Sikhs in the west, including those around Guru Nanak’s birthplace at Nankana Sahib, fled east amid terrible violence. Sikh campaigns led in 1966 to a smaller, Punjabi-speaking state of Punjab with a Sikh majority. Tensions over autonomy, river waters and religion grew in the following years. In June 1984 the Indian army stormed the Golden Temple complex to remove the armed militant leader Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale and his followers; the operation, called Blue Star, cost many lives and damaged the Akal Takht. In October the prime minister, Indira Gandhi, was assassinated by two of her Sikh bodyguards, and thousands of Sikhs were killed in the riots that followed, above all in Delhi. An armed insurgency in Punjab lasted into the early 1990s.

Since the late 19th century Sikhs have also built communities overseas, first in Malaya, Hong Kong and British Columbia and, after 1947, in large numbers in Britain and North America. Campaigns for the right to wear the turban and the kirpan have shaped laws on religious dress in several countries. In 2019, the 550th anniversary of Guru Nanak’s birth, the Kartarpur Corridor opened, letting pilgrims from India visit without a visa the gurdwara in Pakistan where he spent his last years.

The scripture opens with Ik Onkar, “One God”: one creator, the true name, without fear or enmity, beyond time and birth. God is present in all creation and can be known through the Guru’s word and loving devotion, not through ritual, idols or asceticism.

Human life is a chance to escape the cycle of rebirth by overcoming the ego (haumaihaumai Self-centredness or ego, which Sikh teaching sees as the root of separation from God. Glossary) and living in harmony with God’s will (hukamhukam The divine order or will of God, to which Sikhs seek to align their lives. Glossary). Guru Nanak summed up the path in three duties: remember God’s name, earn an honest living, and share with others.

Sikhism teaches the equality of all people, regardless of caste, religion or sex. Sikhs reject the caste hierarchy, and every Khalsa man takes the name Singh (“lion”) and every woman Kaur (“princess”).

Sikhs worship in the gurdwaragurdwara A Sikh place of worship, where the Guru Granth Sahib is kept and the langar served. Glossary, “the door of the Guru”, where the Guru Granth Sahib rests under a canopy and is read and sung. Worship consists of kirtankirtan The singing of hymns in praise of God, central to Sikh worship. Glossary, singing hymns to music, readings, prayer and the sharing of a sweet offering (karah prashad).

Every gurdwara has a langarlangar The free communal kitchen of every gurdwara, where all eat together as equals. Glossary, a free kitchen where all, of any faith, sit together on the floor and eat the same meal. Voluntary service (sevaseva Selfless service to others, a core Sikh duty. Glossary), from cooking to cleaning shoes, is a central virtue.

Initiated Sikhs, members of the Khalsa, keep the Five Ks: uncut hair, a wooden comb, a steel bangle, a short sword and cotton undershorts. Many Sikhs, initiated or not, wear the turban.

The Guru Granth Sahib is the eternal Guru of the Sikhs. It contains the hymns of six Gurus and of Hindu and Muslim saints such as Kabir and Farid, arranged by musical mode (raga), in 1,430 pages in the standard edition, written in the Gurmukhi script.

It is treated with the respect due to a living teacher: placed on a throne under a canopy, fanned with a whisk, put to rest at night and carried on the head. Any decision taken in its presence is read as the Guru’s word.