The desire to exist in a separate independent State is, as we have seen in the previous chapter, the reaction against historical process of the rise and growth of Hindu and Muslim communalism in India, with which it is not possible to have any truck in the present phase of Indian history. It is the natural culmination of that feeling of distinct nationhood, which after having remained latent for a long period has been made vocal and self-assertive in the Sikh people. The British rule has had the effect of killing the Sikh aspirations and of emphasizing their division and subdivision into small castes and social groups, thus fomenting among them petty local jealousies and ambitions to the exclusion of any larger feeling of nationhood. The Sikhs, being small in numbers, have suffered enormously in the process. Sikh rule over the Punjab for over a century and a quarter had welded the Sikhs into a strong, compact and well-knit nation, which felt, thought, hoped and acted as one man. The Sikhs organized as “the Khalsa” acted as a distinct, separate nation in the days of the Misals and under Ranjit Singh and after. The Khalsa is the name conferred by Guru Gobind Singh upon a people knit together by faith in a common religious Scripture and religious preceptors, in a certain way of life, marked by the institution of the community kitchen or langar and a puritanical, military organization and having a supreme seat of authority and legislation in the Akal Takht at Amritsar. Guru Har Gobind, the Sixth Guru and Guru Gobind Singh, the Tenth Guru, who organized the Sikhs for fighting Mughal Imperialism, gave them all the qualities and attributes of a nation all that makes a people active, alive and able to maintain a rigorous political character. They were organized as a commonwealth bound together by ties of religion and of a common political objective, which was successively to fight Moghal and other domination, to carry on the government in the various parts of the Punjab, and later to carve out and consolicate the Sikh Kingdom. The Sikh people were at first theocratic in their political organization, submitting later to the monarchical dispensation, and now they are organizing their national life on a democratic basis like the other Indian nationalities. The Sikhs have all through history acted as a separate nation, with a distinct polity, outlook and political objective, in which, for example, the other inhabitants of the Punjab, such as the Hindus and the Muslims have not participated except as under the Sikh lead. So long as the Sikhs remained independent, they maintained in theory as well as in fact a distinct national political existence. They dominated the political scene in the Punjab, in the North Western and South Western parts of what is now known as the United Provinces, in Kashmiri in the Province of Peshawar and in other parts. They negotiated as a sovereign people with the Government of the East India Company in India and with the monarchs of Kabul, Iran and other Eastern countries. The monarch of the Sikh nation, Ranjit Singh, Styled as
“Sarkar” of the Indians and as ‘the Sikh’ by the English chroniclers, exchanged embassies with foreign kings, including one with Louis Philipe, King of France and another with George IV, King of England.
When British rule came, the British Imperial Government set about the task of destroying and obliterating the vestiges of Sikh nationhood. The Sikh democratic way of life was suppressed, and the Gurdwaras, centers of the Sikh national life were placed in the hands of hereditary priests, who tried as far as practicable, to dilute this Sikh feeling. The Akal Takht was no longer the seat of the Sikh national Will and Power, symbolized by the Panth, but a mere altar where offerings were made. The result was that the Sikhs became divided and disrupted and lost all consciousness of their historical past as a nation. The Panth was no longer a living, vigorous nation, but a herd of unorganized people led by corrupt priests and hereditary aristocrats, selfish tools of British Imperialism.
The Sikh revival from this state of prostration dates from the great days of the Gurdwara Reform Movement, which made the Sikhs aware after nearly three quarters of a century of atrophied national existence, of their great and splendid heritage of being the Khalsa, the Pure, the Elect, the band of Guru Gobind Singh, Lord of the Hawks. It aroused in the Sikhs the feeling that they were meant for a higher destiny than that which appeared to be marked out for them under the twofold domination of the British rule and their own priest craft. So they resumed in those critical days the entire consciousness, organization and paraphernalia of completely developed nationhood. They were running a kind of parallel Government in the form of the Shromani Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee, which issued commands and ordinances, organized jathas, fought the bureaucracy and through its actions galvanized the entire Sikh people with a powerful feeling of their aroused nationhood. The Sikhs recalled and revived the entire pattern of their national life, which had been given to them when Guru Gobind Singh had created the Khalsa.
The Khalsa is essentially a political conception, a fusion of the people into a nation on the basis of religion a conquest not political, but spiritual, through conversion to faith. As said above, the Sikhs were kept busy through bureaucratic and imperialistic tactics with petty objectives and little local and clannish disputes, so that they almost completely lost sight of their conception from the sword of Guru Gobind Singh as a separate, independent nation, and of their glorious history as a conquering, dominating people, once a supremely important factor in the history of India. A great people began to look upon themselves as a sect, a mere off shoot of Hinduism, a reform movement, and thus for a long period the people were lost in the wilderness. Such are the strange pranks played by history, when great movements sweeping along with the majesty of rivers are suddenly lost in the sands of arrested national growth.
The Hindus of the 19th century turned the defeat and misery of Sikhs to their own account, Hindu propaganda spread the view that the Sikhs were Hindus, and so great was the confusion of thought that so many Sikhs lost along with their ancestors. Little was done at the time by the Sikh leaders to combat this evil. Later, in the 20th century, with the rise of the Congress as the dominant force on the Indian political scene, emerged the conception of the “Indian Nation” of which all Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and others were component groups and were to be styled as mere “communities”. From this feeling of being a community the Sikhs have taken very long to emerge. The Khalsa of Guru Gobind Singh, the Commonwealth of the Elect, the rest while conquerors and rulers of the Punjab, Kashmere, Peshawar and Lower Tibet, the people who alone in India had developed all the distinct attributes of nationhood, and had lived as a nation were content to be styled as a “community,” and relegated to a very back seat indeed in this group of communities. The Sikhs have, however, now emerged from the illusion of being a community, fostered by the lust for domination of Hindu majority and have formed the true conception of their status, and have accordingly demanded a National State for themselves.
This the Sikhs are demanding only in the areas in which they are a matter of fact already settled for centuries, in which the land, the cultural and educational enterprise is predominantly theirs, and over which they would also be ruling had not an alien bureaucracy lumped up so many distinct nationality areas into one administrative unit called the Punjab.
Such is the history of the fortunes of the Sikhs as a nation. Their history marks them out as a separate nation who developed and stamped themselves on the pages of history in a manner altogether differently from any other people, for example, the Marhatas. The history of nations is a continuous process, and national consciousness suppressed sometimes has been known to emerge even after hundreds of years of foreign domination and dismemberment. That is what is happening at present to the Hindus, who after about a thousand years of foreign domination are emerging as a Rashtra or Nation. The national growth of the Sikhs has remained suppressed only for about 75 years, when they rallied under the impulse of the Gurdwara Reform Movement, and revived the submerged pattern of their national life and aspiration.
At present to a Sikh there never is any doubt that he belongs to a different nationality from that to which, for example, a Hindu belongs. As soon as one turns Sikh, one is a changed person. His group consciousness undergoes a change. Conversion to Sikhism is not a mere incident in his life; it is a complete transformation of outlook and personality. One’s hopes and aspirations, one’s entire pattern of life, one’s political ideals all acquire a new synthesis of which the component elements are the distinctive Sikh way of life and the Sikh feeling of oneness as a nation all over the world, irrespective of the country where any Sikh may at the moment be residing. Every Sikh, and ever Sikh alone, is a member of the Commonwealth the Khalsa, subject to the social, religious and political ideals issued from the Akal Takht, the Sikh seat of spiritual and temporal authority. This exclusiveness, and this strong feeling of oneness as a group which overrides all distinctions of birth, domicile, social status etc., is what has given the Sikhs that feeling of nationhood which has characterized their outlook and behavior all through their history.
Article extracted from this publication >> November 2, 1990
