It has been observed by the American theologian, Dr. C. H. Loehlin, who spent a life time in the Punjab, that the orthodox Hindu evinces little interest in human history. With the Possibility of 184,000 incarnations the Hindu had little interest in this transitory life. In sharp contrast was the Sikhs’ emphasis on history. Dr. C. H. Loehlin narrates * that a noted Sikh historian has said that, in India, only the Sikhs, the Muslims and the Christians are interested in human history, for they have only one life to live on this earth and so wish to make the most of it. Dr. Loehlin agrees that the Sikh does have a keen sense of the importance of history. And if it comes to a Jat-Sikh, Dr. Loehlin correctly observes that,
“In his boisterous sense of humor, as in so many other things, he seems closer to the West than to the East,” **
“That the Khalsa is a State is the earliest clear idea that has emerged in Sikh epiphany and that has been accepted as the true Sikh postulate for the last 300 years.
This was much before Hegel stated that ‘only those people can come under our notice which forms a State.’
What counts in history is continuity and fecundity. Sikhs must multiply and expand and they must remain at all costs in the vanguard of political activity…..
They (Sikhs) are facing the mortal danger of being pushed out of the main stream of History and of eventual extinction.
Their duty, therefore, is firstly to carve out and establish for themselves a congenial habitat and milieu wherein the guiding impulses and postulates of the Sikh society can freely operate and fructify.
Their second task is to so organize and equip themselves as to play the vital role of being a cultural and political bridge between the Aryan and the Semitic western Asia.
Guru Nanak has warned that ‘when the focii of holiness, the spots of sanctity and the areas of pride of a people are violated, desecrated and degraded, then the people sink down into despairing gloom and a state of abject Surrender…
____________________________________________________________________________________________
* Dr. E. H. Lochlin, The Christian Approach to the Sikh, Edinburgh House Press, 1966, pp 62, 63, 74,
** Dr-C.H. Loelin, Supra (The joie de vive of Vaslov Nijinsky’s dance, when in 1945 the Russians occupied the town in Hungary where Nijinskys were living and jumped up and danced spontaneously with the Russian soldiers doing peasant dances, is equally reflected in the dance steps and movements of the Bhangra the Sikh-Jats are known to specialize in: Author)
