There are, in this world men who are endowed by nature with infinite capacity for attaining perfection, In the days of peace they work for the solace ‘of mankind, and strive 10 smooth the way for the chariot of progress, In limes of calamity they suddenly rip up lo guide the people, and give them an ideal, great and glorious, While putting that ideal into execution, they remain stoic to the shocks of adverse fortune, They endure untold mortifications and sufferings, but stick fast to their ideal, and cheerfully make supreme sacrifices. The grateful world ‘would point to Guru Gobind Singh as one of such men.
His dreams and deeds wrought a wonderful change in his own generation in the religious, military and political life of the people. His personality was so fascinating, so bewitching, so dynamic so momentous and so unforgettable that we are seized with wonder at the changes which took place in Panjab within one year and a half of his death. He was the greatest genius of his age. Wherever we touch that short life, as he died at the age of forty-two, we are a Lance brought into contact with a live wire, He was a mentor that consumed itself to light the world. He was luminous like the sun, and had conquered death.
There are two ethical ideals, the pleasant and the good. The man without discrimination chooses pleasure as the goal, He perishes in his effort to attain it, and the man of wisdom examines both the pleasant and the good. He makes the latter the supreme end. He is never satisfied with the passing, finite things of the world. His hunger is for the infinite, the infinite is true (Sat), blissful (Shiva) and beautiful (Sundar), [tis also the purest delight, the essence of beauty (Ras). This is within reach of all. The limit to a man’s growth is his own vision. Guru Gobind Singh strove after such an ideal. He had the best his time could offer in education and culture, in power and pleasure. He possessed a rare combination of so many excellences, supreme self-denial, ‘marvellous intellect, superhuman willpower, great heart and limitless energy. He examined life and sought its real meanings and the true goal, He came to grips with this fundamental question, He realized his deep bond to humanity, He was moved by the sufferings he saw around him, He decided to help man find freedom, Guru Gobind Singh was not declined to have peace in his lifetime, He was born in conflict. He was brought up in conflict. He lived in conflict, and he died in conflict. Conflict was thrust upon him by the force of circumstances, and he had full measure of it. It was a holy conflict, He aimed a regenerating a decaying people. He endeavored to create a new nation. He planned to lay the foundation of anew society based upon justice and freedom of conscience. He designed to promulgate the principles of liberty, equality and fraternity. At the age of nine Gobind Singh had his father sacrificed in the cause of religious freedom. Between the age of nine and thirty-nine, in thirty years, he had to fight as many as twenty battles, nine before the creation of the Khalsa and eleven afterwards, He had enemies all around. He had little resources in men, money and material within a week in December, 1705, he laid at the altar his mother and all the four of his sons. Besides, thousands. Of his devoted followers were launched into eternity. Eventually at the young age of forty-two, he shuffled off this mortal coil in the cause of freedom and in the service of humanity. Can there be a greater and nobler sacrifice than this? The legacy left behind by him was that of sacrifice.
Service, self-support and self-respect, Bullch Shah, a celebrated Sufi Muslim saint of Panjab was a contemporary of Guru Gobind Singh. He pays a glowing tribute to the Guru thus:
I neither say of the past; nor do I speak of the future; but I talk of the time of Guru Gobind Singh and declare openly.
‘That but for him all the Hindus would have been converted to a foreign culture and religion.” ‘The story of the Sikhs opens up the great difference between head and heart, between knowledge and action, between saying and doing, between words and deeds, and between ‘a dead and living faith. The Sikhs placed themselves at the vanguard of the nation; they showed themselves interpreters of the rights of the people, they maintained the struggle between good and evil, between the sovereign will of the people and the divine right of kings, and between liberty and despotism. They are the people who avenged the insults, the outrage and slavery of many generations past, who: delivered their fatherland from the yoke of foreign oppressor; who displayed all that was grand and noble; who left to the children of land a heritage unsullied by the presence of any alien soldier; who won for the Panjab the envied title of “the soldier’s land”; who alone can boast Or having erected a bulwark of defence against foreign aggression,” the tide of which had run its prosperous course for the Preceding eight hundred years, and to whom all other people of Northern India in general and of the Panjab in particular owe a deep debt of gratitude.
[T.S.R.12/95, Dr. Hari Ram Guptal
Article extracted from this publication >> January 3, 1996
