By Prof. Puran Singh
Our Master, Guru Gobind Singh, called us to death and extinotion, for he felt that it was no use living at all without the sense of liberty aglow in us. He gave such a vital and martial timbre even to our prayers that we, for the first time in the history of India, saw that the great love to which our Master was calling was not a prayer of the crushed people, but a prayer of the victorious. Guru Nanak, the first True King, had called us not to love the Beautiful God-Persons of Nature and Creation, but to be so beautiful as to be loved by Him.
The Bhatki feelings of our devotion to God are not of the miserable man who in his utter smallness dares rise to evolve systems by which to perfect himself as a lover, as a saint, as a seer, but we wait in intense activity to be loved by Him, Few understand this silent revolution of ideals. To the terrified slaves of this country Guru Gobind Singh said, “Rise and fight and die fighting on horse-back.
This is an oceanic burst of the same glow of life and this too is of Him.
It is more glorious to die than to live as miserable wretches.
He poured into our veins that life which could not live without song and freedom.
We rose as individuals and as masses shouting for liberty and victory.
He gave us freedom of the soul and we cried for the freedom of life.
We died for it.
Touched by his inspiration we could no more remain slaves.
Here is almost a new race created by the Guru, imbibing a tradition of fire and iron, sacrifice and death, Every page of Sikh history bums with a hundred star-like names; one name is enough 10 thrill a whole life with the noblest of spiritual heroism, The names of Guru Arjan Dev, Guru Teg Bahadur, Guru Gobind Singh, his Four Sons and the Five Beloved Disciples, and of the Sikh martyrs and devotees of the heroes of war and peace, provide the Sikh with an inexhaustible and intense past which no other race with centuries of history behind it can match in its life-giving, death-despising, self-sacrificing powers of inspiration.
Assuredly the Sikhs is not the Mughal Padshahi, but a state representing a crystallized constitution of some future society. And only the future perfection of the state will make clear the significance of the Gurus Khalsa. There is a distinct Utopian and prophetic strain in these prefiguration’s. The Khalsa is verily a great tree whose roots are deep in the bowels of the earth, but whose branches touch the skies above.
At Anandpur, stood Guru Gobind Singh by the side of his drum, contemplating the liberty of his people. There was complete change of colour and shape in the gathering of the disciples around him. A new nation had arrived. The Sikh history shows how the Khalsa foughtr, but it was all a poetic action. It was waged in the songs of the Great Guru to inspire his people. The war had commenced in the Gurus poems. His impassioned lyrics of war, “the Battle of Bhangani,” in Chandi Charitra sound in our ears still, Life rooted in Truth was allowed by Guru Gobind Singh to take the new course of the flood and the storm.
The warlike tones and that clash of steel and that spiritual impatience to die which we find in the pages of our history, have a true Correspondence in Whitman’s poems. Surely no historical accounts show us the poetic genius of Guru Gobind Singh, manifested and enlarged in those vars which were waged insensately on him by the enemies of his thought and ideals. The pint-sized Hindu princes and the mighty Mughals could not endure Guru Gobind Singh being hailed as the “True King” of the people. Their attitude towards him reminds us of the causeless jealousy of his contemporaries towards the Son of Man, Crucifixion of the One is seen here in our history as the crucifixion of the multitudes.
In those poetic wars of Guru Gobind Singh, even the saints enlisted as ordinary soldiers in love of Him. And our saints who chanted songs were the first in the world to organize a society similar in purposes to the present day Red Cross. They visited the camps of friend and foe alike, serving the wounded with water and victuals.
Guru Gobind Singh saw there was no other way to breathe life into the dead masses of the Punjab but by arming them and beating drums, and flashing sabres in the glare of the sun. Dead ye are, rise to die, perchance to catch the park of life in the battlefields.
Earlier Guru Har Gobind had roamed as the sun did set on the battlefield of Amritsar, wiping blood from the faces of his wounded disciples nursing them and pouring into their soul his comfort and blessing, And now Guru Gobind Singh flashed upon the Muktsar battlefield like the divine father of his children, giving them his soul.
Article extracted from this publication >> January 17, 1986
