Sikhism

A community of 20 million people, Sikhs represent the youngest and least well known of the world's monotheistic traditions. Historically associated with the Punjab, a region in northwestern India and in Pakistan, Sikhs today live in lands as far-flung as Australia, East Africa, Western Europe, and North America.

Nanak (1469–1539) founded the Sikh religion. Sikhs believe that Nanak had a divine revelation in his twenties that resulted in his leaving domestic life and journeying for about twenty years, after which he acquired farmland in the lush plains of the central Punjab and founded the town of Kartarpur (“City of God”). At Kartarpur Nanak became the first of the Sikh Gurus, and the daily routine of the lives of his Sikhs (sikh means “follower” in Punjabi) was constructed around his beliefs.

Guru Nanak composed hymns that were to form the core of the Sikh sacred text, the Adi Granth (“original book”), which in later Sikh history was elevated to become the Guru Granth (the eleventh, and final, Guru, manifested in the book form). Guru Nanak also instituted the communal recitation of three daily prayers at Kartarpur, and established a community kitchen (langar) where all Sikhs were to eat in a manner that embodied their belief in human equality—an enduring [Page 1246]Sikh principle. Angad, Nanak's successor, became the second in a line of Gurus that continued through Guru Gobind Singh, the tenth Sikh Guru (1675–1708).

During the seventeenth century, the Sikh community faced a hostile political environment, in reaction to which Gobind Singh proclaimed his followers to be the Khalsa, “the pure”—as distinct from others in the surrounding world. By insisting on their pure and separate identities, Guru Gobind Singh gave the community a new understanding of its relationship to God, as well as its mission to establish a khalsa raj (“kingdom of God”), a political entity where that relationship could flourish.

Strengthened by this sense of identity and religio-political mission, the Sikhs came to believe that the land of the Punjab was a special gift from the tenth Guru to them. They waged relentless military campaigns in the years that followed, and finally, under the leadership of Ranjit Singh (1780–1839), created a powerful kingdom in the region. The community's understanding of itself as the Khalsa did not foster any concerted effort among Sikhs to convert others to their faith, and even at the peak of their political power they remained a small minority in the Punjab.

After Ranjit Singh's death, the Sikh polity became unstable, ultimately falling to the British in 1849. The Sikhs worked closely with the British administration, but the small size of the Sikh population in relation to other residents of the Punjab did not permit the British to create a separate state for them when the Indian sub-continent became independent in 1947. The Akali Dal, the Sikh political party that came into being in 1920, has a history of conflict with the central government in postindependence India. In the 1980s, a Sikh secessionist movement led by Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale to create a Sikh state shook the Punjab.

...