The Sikhs: History, Religion and Society by WH Mcleod Columbia University Press N.Y $25.00. In view of the controversy this book has generated WSN will carry three reviews beginning this week. Though we are calling them reviews they are more in the nature of in depth studies, hence their great lengths.
By Gurtej Singh
W.H. McLeod’s, book is so blatantly propagandist that it makes no serious pretense of being an academic work. Following features of it readily strike even a casual reader:
- Though it claims to a work on religion, it does not contain even a couple of quotations from the Sikh scriptures and of the 119 pages, it devotes only six to discussion of religion. 2. Its analysis of the present predicament of the Sikhs to which most of the book is devoted, is on all fours with the propaganda being conducted by the Government of India in India and abroad to malign, oppress and finally subsume the Sikh people without anyone in the world getting wind of what is actually happening. In this respect the silhouette of a Sikh saying his daily prayer reproduced on the dust cover of the present work is most significant. The other work which contains the same is a propaganda pamphlet published by the Government of India after the army attack on the Golden Temple and 38 other Sikh shrines.
That is not the only item in common with the powerful antiSikh propaganda machine trained against the Sikhs here an abroad with official sanction. McLeod distorts many established facts in order to blur the differences between Sikhism and so called Hindu Sant tradition. Sikh scriptures begin with the mulmatra or the seminal ideal of scriptures. It describes some of the prominent attributes of God referred to again and again as the ocean of values and the source of all virtues. These attributes are repeated often in the body of scriptures. Inspite of this McLeod insists the God of Sikhism is nearest to the nirguna (attributeless) God of Hindu Sants.
Similarly by stressing the interiorization of religion and his peculiar variety of namsimran, he attempts to drag Sikhism close to Indian Sant tradition. In contrast the practicing Sikhs of all ages have stressed then nam simran is the consistent and positive striving to imbibe the attributes of God while remaining in selfless service of His creation as desired by Him. “True religion is interior” is pure fiction unsubstantiated by Sikh scriptures which insist that one’s deeds in this world and one’s willingness to ameliorate the lot of others, alone matter in final reckoning. What the author wishes to impose on Sikhism is contrary to the message of Sikhism. Sikh concepts of nam simran is totally fresh in Indian tradition and nothing of the sort was known to Sants mentioned by McLeod. In Sikhism nothing more is required for obtaining final liberation than nam simran as mentioned above and leading life closest to the concept of holy living revealed by God through Gurbani.
His inability to comprehend the consequences of Guru Nanak being a prophet of God is the key to understanding the failure of his main formulations, The status of Guru Nanak as prophet cannot be compromised with and his assertions made on behalf of God have to be accepted in to by a scholar if a worthwhile dialogue on his faith is to be initiated. Before stressing interiorization of religion it will be understood that Guru Nanak’s God is a destroyer of evildoers, that he considers resistance to evil an aspect of spiritual living and that for him it is Supreme spiritual activity to court martyrdom in defense of a worthy cause. This is the thread one sees running constantly throughout Sikh history up to the present. One will have to have very effective blinkers to miss it.
Several prominent distortions of the book spring from the above. A prophet of God consciously evolves nothing, no circumstances influence him. He seeks no consensus and his pronouncements are not derived from any other source than his Supreme Lord. He brings to the world something very original, that which is a finished product in ability. In a word he defies the laws of ordinary human intellect and transcends, those of evolution. A careful scholar will observe in Guru Nanak’s pronouncement’s, concepts, which exist nowhere outside. The concept of nam simran has been mentioned in this connection; concepts of Guru and that of equality of man and woman may also be cited. McLeod is going on a wild goose chase of trying to locate origin of Guru’s ideas and of tracing their development in the absence of a proper conceptual framework.
The creeping evolution of idea bug bites him in his interpretation of Janam sakhis also. Particularly lamentable is his inability to interpret the numerous myths and so called miracles formulated as vehicles of very potent ideas by our ancestors. A well trained sympathetic mind sufficiently familiar with eastern idiom knows what they mean to convey. Each one demonstrated has a perfectly rational meaning. He who knows how to milk them, obtains good wholesome food. An impatient unsympathetic person setting out to pick holes inevitably ends up pronouncing them “marvels and miracles,” which they most certainly are not.
McLeod has had to eat a humble pie in relation to his jat theory. In essence it holds that the Sixth Nanak took to arms because a whole lot of jats an irrepressibly militant race had entered the fold of Sikhism. Erudite Sardar Jagjit Singh, author of the Sikh Revolution has demonstrated conclusively that all available evidence points to the fact that jats in no way dominated the Sikh panth at that juncture. Indeed there is overwhelming evidence to the contrary. McLeod’s response for a decade was to ignore the existence of this scholarly work. Now he attempts to sidetrack the issue by observing that all he meant to highlight was that the presence of jats made the transit to militarization smooth. That also is not true, it still fails to explain why the militant jats joined the Sikh panth in such great numbers as to have become assertive if they perceived the faith of Guru Nanak to be pacifist? It is possible that they were not well trained in the methodolgy of distorting the truth and recognized Sikhism of Guru Nanak to be a militant creed from the very beginning their conversion to Islam in equally great number indicates. The other pitfall is that an equally great number of jats remaining in the Hindu fold have not been able to bring about the same miracle there as they supposedly brought about in Sikhism.
In the academic field, McLeod’s methods of meeting valid criticism of his formulations have been known to be somewhat un academic and unscholarly. It has been of late noticed that he is directly responsible for generating self-serving arguments regardless of the truth involved. Several such pseudo scholars get his support when concocting arguments like to go in his favor. Two such instances were discussed by the steering committee publishing the proceedings of a seminar and are being highlighted there.
Strangely enough, though it reduces the author to the level of a propagandist, it fails to make a dent in his self-image of an independent scholar. It is a distinct feature of the present work that unscholarly arrogance exudes every page of it. Supreme Court judges and eminent men are projected as treating work with due respect and so on. Such a self-image can only be formed if he is prepared to tum a Nelson’s eye to well documented volumes coming out to intensely criticize his methodology and conclusively demolish his cherished formulations. He does not recognize that there are several men of the same stature amongst his critics, what is more, they are not casual formal speakers before an exotic audience who are under an obligation to kill an hour or so. They are serious scholars of Sikh history and theology. If he persists in bravely charging the windmill inspite of the fact that it has not been possible for him to defend his formulations, skeletons of which are lying about, one may leave him to his understandings.
The extent to which he goes while putting together remarkable arguments can be seen from the assertion that the green revolution in the Punjab gave impetus to a movement for Punjabi Suba amongst jats. He ignores that the Punjab has always been the granary of India in Moghul and British periods and proportionately more jats were farmers then. He refuses to see that the struggle for Punjabi Suba started in 1950 when green revolution was nowhere in sight. He also forgets that it was almost over by 1966 A.D. when the green revolution was just taking off the ground. In fact it is possible to argue that the formation of the Punjabi Suba (albeit motheaten) was one cause which gave fillip to the green revolution.
There is no doubt that Dr. McLeod’s perception about the present and his borrowed vision about the future has influenced his interpretation of the past in the present work. Every page of the book will bear witness to his obsession with the present crisis in the Punjab.
Reading between the lines, Dr. Mcleod’s thesis in this book can be summed up as follows: Guru Nanak’s faith is one of inferiority. Guru was a pacifist and a life negating recluse. Militarization was imposed upon Sikhism by extraneous factors and exigencies and constitutes an aberration. In the present it is disastrous. It ts best for the Sikhs to shun the later imposition and to return to original faith which is nearest to Sant tradition and Hinduism. In fact Sikhism is just an offshoot of Hinduism and the Sikhs must accept that. This is precisely the line being pursued by pro-government agencies wishing to establish that Sikhs are a part and parcel of Hindus and their fate in India concerns nobody else in the world. Insinuation is that the militant Sikhs are deviating from the parent religion and are advocating secessionist ideology which is not sustained by Sikh philosophy or supported by the bulk of Sikh population so goes the argument. This argument is used te camouflage the genocide of Sikhs being perpetrated by and on behest of permanent and overwhelming (86%) Hindu majority. (Sikhs are about 2% of India’s population).
Another strange aspect of the book is that although firmly rooted in the present crisis in the Punjab, it fails to even mention that causes which gave birth to the situation. It should have been the historians business to understand as to what is inevitably pushing the agitated young Sikhs into a corner. One reading the book will never know that the present Punjab requires more water to sustain its agricultural development; and that contrary to all laws, its own river water is being diverted to the neighboring Hindu states of Rajasthan and Haryana by the Government of India, at gunpoint. It also does not mention (as often repeated by the militants) that in the recent past the Sikh honor has been sullied in such a Way by the armed might of a communal state used indiscriminately on unarmed and unsuspecting Sikh peasants, priests, women and old women, that in consequence a lot of Sikh young men do not find the life (of slaves) worth living. One may agree or disagree with the arguments of agitations but one must arrogate the power to suppress their side of the story. This omission makes the authora partisan on the side of oppressors and not an independent observer as he projects himself to be.
To those who have not read the book, I would suggest that they stay as farther away from it as they can, unless Of course if they strongly desire to become familiar with a teal lopsided work an example of what a book on history should not be.
Gurtej Singh
Professor of Sikhism
Article extracted from this publication >> September 15, 1989
