Sikhism- An Introduction Page 17

  Sikhism in the early nineteenth century seems to have lacked religious cohesion and unity. Leaders such as Banda Singh and Ranjit Singh had provided a political focus but there was no one to meet the spiritual needs of the Panth. In fact, Guru Gobind Singh had left explicit instructions that his successor in this respect should be the Guru Granth Sahib and the Khalsa. There were to be no more spiritual leaders.

  In times of unrest the Panth seems to have remained small. Only those who were committed to the teachings of the Gurus would call themselves Sikhs when the price of allegiance might be death. In such circumstances, gurdwaras and other Sikh property often passed into the possession of non-Sikhs, or their owners concealed themselves as Hindus, who were much less oppressed than the Sikhs. Some owners were nominal Sikhs, converts of convenience who did not really adopt the Sikh beliefs and practices but hoped that under the rule of a Sikh maharaja they might benefit from becoming Sikhs. For whatever reasons, the reign of Maharaja Ranjit Singh found gurdwaras in Hindu control, Sikh weddings being conducted by brahmins according to Hindu rites, and the Guru Granth Sahib, if it was installed at all, sharing the diwan hall with murtis of Hindu deities. Eventually, a religious revival took place.

  The Nirankari movement

  It was into this situation that Dayal Das, also known as Baba Dayal, grew up. He was born in 1783 in Peshawar and died in 1855. At the age of 18, when he was waving the chauri over the Guru Granth Sahib, he went into deep meditation and heard a voice speaking to him. It told him to cease the ritual practice in which he was engaged, and recognize and preach the message of God as Nirankar, the Formless One. This he began to do, using as his slogan:

  All glory to the Formless One; a God corporeal you must shun.

  This message was not always popular in the Punjab of Maharaja Ranjit Singh because it was accompanied by attempts to purify Sikhism of Hindu practices. For example, Baba Dayal called Sikhs back to the use of Sikh post-funeral rites as opposed to the Hindu practices, which many of them had adopted. This led to conflict with those Sikhs who saw nothing wrong in them and with Hindus who were paid a fee to perform the ceremonies. The spirit of religious harmony and tolerance which the Maharaja promoted seemed threatened. Baba Dayal believed that the Guru Granth Sahib should be the only visible focus for Sikhs. He revived the use of the Lavan wedding hymn and refused to allow brahmins to conduct Sikh ceremonies. According to the 1891 census there were 60,000 Nirankaris in Punjab. There can be no doubt that they provided one of the reforming resistance movements to the teachings of Christians and Hindu Arya Samajists during the second half of the nineteenth century.

  Baba Dayal rejected the militant Khalsa ideal, which he regarded as conflicting with the spiritual teachings of Guru Nanak. For this reason Nirankaris are sometimes called Nanak Panthis, though this term might not be used by other Sikhs. His followers have developed a line of Gurus. Today many Nirankaris take amrit or are keshdhari. However, they wish people to accept the teachings of the Guru Granth Sahib, which is a touchstone for living and do not want insistence on the outward form to stand in the way of this. The headquarters of the movement is in Chandigarh. On 18 Marg (at the end of January) they remember the death of Guru Dayal Das with a night-long kirtan and gurbani recital.

  They should not be confused with the Sant Nirankaris Mandal based in Delhi, which is not Sikh and whose teachings run contrary to Sikh dharam.

  Namdharis

  This is the name of a similar reform movement though, unlike the Nirankaris, they could sometimes resort to physical force to make their point. Baba Ram Singh (1816–84) was their chief protagonist, though the pioneer of the movement was Baba Balak Singh (1799–1861). Initially, their opposition was to moral laxity, the use of drugs and alcohol, and personal extravagance in the celebration of marriages, all of which the Gurus explicitly forbade. They also denounced dowries, the observance of caste in arranging marriages, and the practice of forbidding widows to remarry. In all these matters they were also upholding the known teachings of the Gurus. Their advocacy of vegetarianism, and with it a certain support for the concepts of ritual purity and pollution, however, were not precepts given by the Gurus. Namdharis became involved in the independence struggle and a number of them were executed by the British for attacking Muslim slaughterhouses and butchers’ shops in the campaign to restore Sikh rule to Punjab during the 1870s. Their leader, Baba Ram Singh, was not implicated in the disturbances but, nevertheless, was exiled to Rangoon.

  Namdharis have been led by a series of Gurus since the banishment of Ram Singh, and the present leader is Guru Jagjit Singh Maharaj. Namdharis believe that 0ne day Guru Ram Singh will return at the end of a period of turmoil. There will be an age of righteousness when humanity will live according to the universal principles preached by the Gurus, though not everyone will necessarily be Sikh.

  Their headquarters is at Bhaini Sahib in Punjab. They celebrate the gurpurbs of their own Gurus; that of Guru Ram Singh on Vasant Panchami or Saraswati Puja, the first day of spring in February; Guru Balak Singh’s, which coincides with Hola Mohalla; and Guru Jagir Singh’s, two days before Guru Nanak’s birthday.

  Each of these movements strengthened the Panth and brought it back to an awareness of Sikh principles some years before another reformist group, the Singh Sabha movement came into existence in 1873.

  The Singh Sabha movement

  Reabsorption into Hinduism has always been, and still remains, a perceived threat to many Sikhs, and the Nirankaris and Namdharis did much to counter it in the nineteenth century. However, another development was to cause them even greater anxiety, though eventually it led to a Sikh renaissance.

  In 1834 the American Ludhiana Mission began its work in Punjab. It brought the printing press with it and published the New Testament in Punjabi. It met with little success until 1873 when four Sikh students of Amritsar Mission School declared their intention to be baptized. Such conversions as had previously occurred had been among low-caste, mostly illiterate, Sikhs.

  The success of Christians among educated, wealthier and higher-caste Sikhs in Amritsar, the religious centre of Sikhism, caused shock and panic. Thakur Singh Sandwalia and Giani Gian Singh decided upon a response, which became known as the Singh Sabha movement. The Amritsar Singh Sabha was formed on 1 October 1873 and others followed in the next few years. These associations (sabha means association) had a number of aims:

  to restore Sikhism to its original purity, free from Hindu influences

  to publish books on Sikh history and religion

  to establish journals and newspapers in Punjabi

  to bring apostates back into the Panth

  to interest the British in their educational programme and win their assistance in establishing Sikh educational institutions.

  The Arya Samaj

  No sooner had the Sikhs begun to counter the Christian threat than another Hindu challenge developed. In 1877 the Arya Samaj, a Hindu reform movement, became active in Punjab.

  The Arya Samaj is a society dedicated to the restoration of pure Vedic religion. It is the outcome of the insight of one man more than any others, Dayananda Saraswati, who was born in Gujarat in 1824 into a Shaivaite brahmin family. He came to reject the idea of image worship. He began to question other aspects of his tradition and set off to live the life of a sadhu (Hindu holy man). He learned yoga and found a guru, Virjananda Saraswati, who required him to vow to reform Hinduism of its impurities, image worship, avatar (the doctrine of divine incarnation) and the ideas contained in the puranas, the myths which provide a basis for popular Hinduism. In 1875 he founded the Arya Samaj and led it until his death in 1883.

  Dayananda summed up his teaching, which became the Arya Samaj doctrine, as follows:

  I hold that alone to be acceptable which is worthy of being believed by all men in all ages. I do not entertain the least idea of founding a new religion or sect. My sole aim is to believe in truth and help others to believe in it, to reject falsehood and to help others in doing the sam
e.

  He taught that the Vedas insisted upon the treatment of all other human beings with love and justice in accordance with their merits.

  The most important consequences of this teaching were the rejection of caste and eventually of discrimination against women, accompanied by programmes of social reform, the establishment of schools and colleges so that the poor and socially disadvantaged could obtain an education, and, above all, the assertion that the criterion of truth was the Vedas as they interpreted them. This brought them into conflict with the Sikhs in Punjab where, for a time, a Sikh–Arya alliance against the Christian missionaries seemed a possibility. After all, many of his ideas had been taught by the Sikh Gurus centuries earlier.

  Arya missionaries went around the villages persuading people to take part in a shuddhi purificatory thread ceremony. They were particularly successful in winning people of low caste and seemed to threaten the very existence of the Sikh religion, until the Singh Sabha movement struck back through its educational programmes.

  The Sikh response was the creation of more Singh sabhas. These were eventually co-ordinated in 1902 under the Chief Khalsa Diwan, a council pledged to cultivate loyalty to the British crown and to safeguard Sikh rights. During the period between 1873 and 1902, Sikh schools and colleges, often called Khalsa colleges, were established with the support of British administrators who saw the value of Sikh loyalty and the worth of harnessing the Sikh martial tradition to service in the British army. This, in turn, promoted Sikh identity as it became a rule that Sikh soldiers must be keshdhari.

  Chief among sympathetic Britons might be Max Macauliffe whose six-volume history of the Sikhs during the period of the ten Gurus is still in print and widely read. He is the best known of a number of British administrators who made studies of the Sikhs.

  British support also led to the passing of the Anand Marriage Act of 1909, which legalized the practice restored by Baba Dayal Das two generations earlier. Until then, Sikhs were supposed to have Hindu weddings. In 1925 the Gurdwaras Act gave Sikhs control of gurdwaras in the area of historic Punjab, taking them from the Hindus who had often possessed them for more than a century. Actual administration of the gurdwaras was placed in the hands of an elected body, the Shromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC), which had been established in 1920.

  There was still little agreement on what Sikhism was in practice. Writers such as the scholar Bhai Kahan Singh Nabha wrote books such as We Are Not Hindus (1899) as part of the Singh Sabha movement’s redefinition of Sikhism in terms of what the Gurus had taught. It was written to provide Sikhs with evidence, from the writings of the Gurus, that Sikhism had its own distinctive teachings, in the hope that they would return to what were considered to be the pure beliefs and practices of the period when the Gurus guided the Panth.

  The Rahit Maryada

  The Rahit Maryada is usually translated into English as the Sikh Code of Discipline or the Sikh Code of Conduct. It was approved by the SGPC in 1945 after some 14 years of deliberation and drafting. Guru Gobind Singh had provided the Khalsa with a code of discipline when he instituted it, but its precise details have been a matter of argument among members of the Panth. Since the eighteenth century a number of codes (Rahit Namas) have been produced, often claiming to be authorized by the tenth Guru, but they have sometimes contained material clearly at variance with the Guru’s known teachings. For example, the Chaupa Singh Rahit Nama, ascribed to a brahmin Sikh of that name living in the days of the Guru, states that Sikh marriages should be performed by a brahmin and that brahmins should receive twice the deference paid to any other Sikh!

  The Rahit Maryada is divided into a number of sections. It begins with instructions on personal devotion, then provides a version of the congregational prayer, Ardas; it goes on to give rules for gurdwara worship and the reading of the Guru Granth Sahib, followed by a list of beliefs and prohibited practices. The second section covers naming, marriage and death ceremonies. The subjects of the third part are seva, langar and amrit pahul.

  * * *

  Insight

  The Rahit Maryada is a code that upholds the Khalsa ideal and has won widespread support worldwide. It is usually consulted when there is any doubt upon the correct observance of ceremonies.

  * * *

  As the brief outline given above shows, much of the Rahit Maryada relates to a Khalsa Sikh’s individual beliefs and conduct. Most of it, however, is of value to gurdwara committees which are responsible for the orderly conduct of worship and ceremonies. It informs them how all the ceremonies for which they are responsible should be conducted and warns them against non-Sikh practices that are likely to be included if reliance is placed upon folk traditions. The main reasons for the attempt to produce it were to enable the Panth to be faithful to the perceived teachings of Guru Gobind Singh, to provide uniformity of belief and practice, and to rid it of non-Sikh teachings and rituals. The last two of these aims are of special importance for gurdwaras outside India.

  A typical gurdwara in the USA or UK caters for Sikhs from many parts of the Punjab, and often from East Africa as well. They are likely to have experienced many differences in practices. The points covered may seem minor – for example, the placing of incense sticks and a small dish of water near the Guru Granth Sahib – but they can have considerable potential for controversy. One group of Sikhs will say that they are Hindu practices which Sikhs should reject. Others will say that they have been part of the custom of their village gurdwara or home throughout living memory. The Rahit Maryada can be consulted for a definitive judgement. Sometimes women are not permitted to read the Guru Granth Sahib in the sangat; other gurdwaras may discourage them during menstruation. The Rahit Maryada does not give precise instructions on this matter but its guidance is clear – women may perform any ceremonies, and the concept of ritual pollution has no place in Sikh teaching. The conclusion to be drawn is that women may act as readers of the scripture at any time.

  Arguments may occur over the conduct of the amrit ceremony. It may rarely take place in some villages, if at all. The Rahit Maryada provides the committee with details of how it should be conducted, though in such circumstances they might defer to the experience of another sangat where members have performed the ceremony.

  One Sikh wanted to hold a family wedding in the afternoon because relatives had long distances to travel. The community disapproved. The tradition is to hold weddings before noon, perhaps to counter Hindu-influenced ideas of auspicious times. The Rahit Maryada gave no advice, but because it did explicitly reject notions of auspicious times, the Sikh successfully argued that convenience should be the deciding factor and the wedding took place in the afternoon.

  The difficulty facing the Panth is that it has no organizational hierarchy or authority to which it can turn. The five takhts in Punjab were established for this purpose, but they are far from London, New York or Sydney and, strictly speaking, they have no authority beyond Punjab, only moral pressure. The Rahit Maryada is more conveniently available and free from the personal views that a jathedar of a takht is capable of giving (see below).

  By and large, the Rahit Maryada does provide a yardstick by which gurdwaras measure and decide their practices. Often they use Teja Singh’s Sikhism: Its Ideals and Institutions for further guidance. It was published in 1938 and its author clearly influenced the final form of the Rahit Maryada.

  There are at least two matters that the Code of Discipline does not deal with. First, it does not define a Sikh precisely, though this is often remedied by appending to copies definitions from the 1925 and Delhi Gurdwaras Acts. Secondly, it does not say who may be elected to gurdwara committees or who may vote at elections. These issues are wisely left for local decisions.

  The power of local caste groups, families or sants, lies beyond the ability of a book to control, but the cohesion of the Panth and the general uniformity of Sikh practice worldwide owes much to the effectiveness of the Rahit Maryada.

  Jathedars and takhts


  The term jathedar originally referred to the leader of a group of Sikh volunteers, a jatha, usually soldiers who gave themselves to the full-time service of the Panth. ‘Captain’ might be an English equivalent. Now it is used of the head of one of the five Sikh takhts. He is a paid official chosen by the SGPC to serve for an indefinite period. He (no woman has yet been appointed) may issue hukam namas but should only do so after a panthic conference.

  Takhts, literally thrones, are seats of temporal authority. Five gurdwaras are described as takhts. They are:

  Akal Takht, Amritsar, established by Guru Hargobind opposite the focus of spiritual authority, the Adi Granth, housed in the Harmandir Sahib

  Patna Sahib in Bihar, where Guru Gobind Singh was born

  Keshgarh at Anandpur, where the first amrit ceremony was held

  Nander, near Hyderabad, where Guru Gobind Singh died

  Damdama Sahib, near Bathinde. This was only declared to be a takht in 1966. Guru Gobind Singh spent some time there during which he completed the final recension of the Guru Granth Sahib.

  The purpose of jathedars and takhts is not clearly defined. The jathedars sometimes assumed political roles and occasionally made doctrinal statements, which should be pronounced by the whole Panth gathered in the presence of the Guru Granth Sahib. Such a gathering, known as a sarbat khalsa, is not practicable, especially when 16 million Sikhs live in so many countries. Where authority lies in Sikhism is a difficult question to answer as anyone who has tried to involve Sikhs in meetings of religious leaders knows. In practice, it is in the Guru Granth Sahib and the accepted guidance of the Rahit Maryada. At local level, it lies in the sangat or those chosen to lead it or speak for it.