The Sikh Gurus, The Sikhs and The Khalsa

Prof. Hardev Singh Virk

Department of Physics, Guru Nanak Dev University
Amritsar - 143005, India.
E-mail: [email protected], Fax: 0091-183-258237

This article is based on excerpts from the Spirit of the Sikh written by Professor Puran
Singh in 1920's and published by Punjabi University Patiala in two volumes during 1982.
Puran Singh was a great scientist, mystic poet, and a visionary and interpreter of the
Sikh cultural consciousness. This article reflects the personal views of the great Sikh
scholar which seem to be relevant for understanding Sikhism and the geopolitical
aspirations of the Sikhs.

1. The Sikh Gurus

As usual, the world is too inert, too late, to welcome its prophets who
bring an altogether new message. So it has been with the Sikh Gurus. The Hindus just
condescended with a superior air to say that the Sikhs are of them- 'born out of them'.
Culturally and academically and even racially this was not wrong, but inspirationally, it
was an attempt to thwart all the potentialities of the Guru's universal message.
After Buddha, it was Guru Nanak who for the first time championed the
cause of the masses in caste-ridden India. The rich aristocracy and the degraded priests
of Hindus and Muslims did not listen to the Guru, but the oppressed people followed him
with joy. He made a whole people throb with love and life. For more than a century and
half his message was secretly flaming in the bosom of the people when the genius of
Guru Gobind Singh gave them the eternal shape of the Disciples, the Khalsa [1].
Guru Gobind Singh is the Guru of the modern times. Assuredly, the
slaves of India have not understood him so far and are not capable of understanding his
genius. The shadow of his large personality falls far away above the head of centuries,
and the so-called best intellectuals of India, when they spread out their mind to
understand the Guru, get bruised by mere thorns and give him up as something not as
spiritual as Guru Nanak. If they cannot see Guru Gobind Singh as the highest, brightest
culmination of Guru Nanak, assuredly they do not understand that King of revolution of
religious thought, the great Guru Nanak.
The world of thought has yet to understand the Ten Gurus in the splendour
of their thought which has been misunderstood due to the Brahmanical language they had
to employ to express themselves and to the Brahmanical environment which always has
been inimical to the true progress of man [2].
Guru Granth of the Sikhs is the most authentic account of the Guru's soul.
It is a pity that some Sikh enthusiasts and half-baked scholars, perverted by the thought of
the age, have tampered with the meanings they themselves wish to give it. But the
authentic word of Guru Granth can never be lost to the world. And as the Bible is
translated into different languages, so Guru Granth will have to be put by poets of
different nations into their own language direct from their own souls. Life alone can
translate life [3].
The Guru Granth is the history of the Sikh soul, and its translation is to
come through the great figure of the social reconstruction of human society as the Khalsa,
where shall reign love, and not hatred. It is society founded on the highest verity of love
of man, inspired by the inspiration of God-like men who symbolize truth as personalities
of love, grace and mercy, such personalities are images of the personalities in the unseen.
Giving ourselves in infinite self-sacrifice in the name of God, washing away the
selfishness of man in the supreme love of the Guru, is the simple, but extremely difficult
path of discipleship. Without the Word of the Guru, and the ideal, the Khalsa, which
stands for the sovereign society, there is no key to the heart of Guru Nanak and his
anthems for the liberation of man. The destruction by the Guru of the Brahmanical
citadels of superstition (as in Guru Nanak's Asa-Ki-Var or in the great Kabits and
Sawayyas of the Tenth Master, Guru Gobind Singh, or in the Vars of Bhai Gurdas, the
great exponent of Sikh ideals), is symbolic of the destruction of all lies on which human
society might be wrongly founded and misguided. Guru Nanak is universal, but he is
mostly the Prophet of the future. Freedom of the human mind and soul is the Guru's
passion [4].
The Guru did not eschew politics-in fact he made the liberation of the
people the cause of the assertion of his heroism; but surely, if the Sikh lives on the
surface only, like the Englishman, for mere politics, votes and such inanities, one straying
from the Guru's path forthwith becomes a traitor to his cause. All freedom is but a
spiritual tradition of the life of the Khalsa: if the Khalsa spirit is dead, all freedom fails.
The Khalsa is the son of the Guru who brings everywhere his Heaven and its delectable
freedoms [5].
The following words were addressed by Guru Gobind Singh to the Sikhs
at Nander on the day of his departure from this world: "I have entrusted you to the
Immortal God. Ever remain under His protection, and trust none besides. Wherever
there are five Sikhs assembled who abide by the Guru's teachings, know, that I am in the
midst of them. He who serveth them shall obtain the reward thereof-the fulfillment of all
his heart's desires".
"Read the history of your Gurus from the time of Guru Nanak.
Henceforth the Guru shall be the Khalsa and the Khalsa the Guru. I have infused my
mental and bodily spirit into the Granth Sahib and the Khalsa.
Then uttering “Wah Guruji Ka Khalsa, Wah Guruji Ki Fateh" he
circumambulated the sacred volume and said, "O Beloved Khalsa, let him who desireth to
behold me, behold the Granth Sahib. Obey the Granth Sahib. It is the visible body of the
Guru, and let him who desireth to meet me diligently search its hymns. And lastly keep
my kitchen ever open and receive offerings for its maintenance".

2. The Sikh People

The Sikh people, unlike other people of India, are a race of straight
forward men of action, whose simple minds, informed of the Eternal by the Guru, shrinks
from the idle speculation of the Brahminical mind, and also shrinks from the too
theological law of the Muslim, and lives the simple, austere life of incessant labour that
characterises the tiller of soil everywhere. They have an inventive genius and love the
practical persuits of life - agriculture, tool-making and engineering. They are, as a
people, fond of colonisation. Given opportunities and modern education, this nation has
potentialities of progress which no other set of people in India possesses in so remarkable
a degree [6].
 Four hundred years ago, the inhabitants of the Punjab were all slaves. The
invaders that came by the Khyber Pass destroyed by the sword all Indian hopes of ever
becoming a self-governing nation. What could the invaders have achieved if the will to
die for freedom were there in the soul of India?
Out of the downtrodden, oppressed, lifeless slaves of the Punjab, Guru
Gobind Singh moulded a nation which has in it the potentialities of a progressive nation
of men. In the whole of India, the Sikh nation is the brightest spot still which has an
inexhaustible will to die for the love of its ideals. When they are called upon, the Sikhs
seek death as moths seek light. Guru Gobind Singh cut the moorings of this nation form
its racial past and a nation wholly modern in spirit and mind sprang up out of the Guru's
mind, with a highly inspiring and most deeply reactive tradition and history of it own.
The Sikh was made to be a feast-giver on the roadside, to spend as the
day ended, all he earned daily: and it is his self degeneration if he accumulates and thinks
of the morrow. The thought of the morrow for a Sikh is irreligious. To a true Sikh, death
is better than security earned with dishonesty. His giving away of his labour and love is
like the lamp distributing light, like the rose distributing its fragrance. A Sikh's
spontaneous and natural function of life is such; otherwise he is not a true Sikh.
The Culture created by the Guru is in one word, the all-mind divine
culture. The Sikh, like the Guru, like sunlight and air and water belongs to all: he is
culture-embodied, love-incarnate, sweet fragrance of humanity that kindles dead souls.
Men are very rare and the Sikh still more so.
If you wish to know the Sikh, love him. There is a gleam under the stack
of hay, such as Moses beheld at Sinai. The Sikh body politic is a heap of immense matter
in which still scintillates the spirit. The hair of the Sikh distinguishes him and his unique
love. In Brahmanical India, the spirit itself would have died without those who have
worn this rather unkempt exterior. And those of Brahmanical India who might desire
life, and having got the life spark to maintain it, have similarly to isolate themselves [7].
Religious fanaticism was that the Guru never allowed to enter his court.
Religious superstition was eradicated from the very blood of the Sikh. The Guru cleaned
with his sword the darkness that clung and clings still to the endless philosophical hair
splitting of the Hindu and the Jain. The liberation of the human mind was the first and
foremost thought of the Guru. He liberated man from the slavery of the Devas, the
Vedas, and put him to work [8].
If the Sikh, as he was born, had ever been afforded opportunities of
spiritual isolation from the rest of world, to develop his powers of self-realisation, and his
instincts of art and agriculture and colonisation, his would have been by now, one of the
best societies of divinely inspired labourers, of saints living by the sweat of their brow.
But Brahminism was there to engulf it from within. His political temper,
the result of his complete mental liberation and his passionate love of liberty pitched him
against the Moghuls from the time of its birth. Out of the jaws of death, if the Khasla has
still come out, there is much hope for it yet. All is not yet lost.

3. The Khalsa Ideal - State and Democracy

The Khalsa is the ideal future international state of man: it is an absolute
monarchy of the kingdom of heaven for each and every man, the absolute democracy,
distribution of bread and raiment of the kingdom of labour on this earth - all in one. It is
democracy of feeling all on this physical plane of life, where most misery is due to man's
callousness to man. It is brotherhood of the souls where intensity of feeling burns out all
differences [9].
In the realms of the soul, each is to have his own measure of the Guru's
joy and sorrow and love and feeling and spiritual delight, according to his individual
capacity. This will constitute the measure of the real aristocracy of each one's genius; but
bread and raiment, the barest necessities of the physical body shall, in this kingdom of
love for the Guru, never be denied to any one. If the Guru's ideal state, or even an
approach to it, is ever made by man, no one will thenceforward die of hunger or go
naked. Death cannot be prevented, innate differences cannot be destroyed; but physical
privation will be prevented here on this earth by man himself. Let mountains be high,
flowers small and grass low, but all shall be clothed with the beauty of God and fed with
His abundance. The true vindication of the Khalsa commonwealth and its ideals as
announced by Guru Gobind Singh, have yet to appear in terms of the practice of those
ideals by those having faith in the Guru. The modern world is, however, busy evolving
its version of the Guru's Khalsa state out of social chaos. This much be said at once, that
the Khalsa is more than a mere republic of votes of little men who must be influenced to
give votes. It is more than the Soviet, which aims at the change of political environment
and law, to bring the Heaven of equal distribution on earth because without the
transmutation of the animal substance of man, of selfishness into sympathy, there can be
no true socialism.
The Guru Khalsa state is based on the essential goodness of humanity,
which longs to share the mystery and secret of the Creator, and longs to love the
Beautiful one living in His creation. The Guru thus admits man to an inner kingdom of
the soul, where each and every person receives such abundance of pleasure and the
beauty of His Love, that selfishness dies of itself. Inspiration to the higher life drives out
the lower. Each one, according to his worth and capacity to contain, has enough of the
inner rapture of the beauty of God in him, so that he lives quite happy and contented
without interfering in anyone's affairs or robbing any of his rightful freedom to increase
his own pleasure. This endless self-sacrifice in utter gladness of a new realization is the
sign and symptom of the true 'Nam' culture of the Guru. No one can be man of truly
human society, who has not obtained this divine spark which puts the self at rest, which
thereby imbibes a nobility from God to leave everything along and gaze at Him with
unending rapture and renunciation. Man need to be truly and inwardly a divine aristocrat
to be truly democratic in this world.
In the constitution of the Khalsa commonwealth [10], the greatest act of
genius of Guru Gobind Singh was when he transferred the divine sovereignty vested in
him to the God-inspired people, the Khalsa. When speaking of the people, the Guru
speaks of the people whose personality is transmuted into the divine personality of
selfless being. As the chemist talks of pure elements just as they occur in nature, the
Guru refers to the 'Pure' of the Cosmic Spirit and not as they are found with their blind
animal instincts. In this one act lies our history and the future history of human progress.
At Chamkaur when all was lost, he made His Five Disciples representative of the Guru,
and gave them his insignia of Guruship and saluted them. The constitution of the Khalsa
was thus built on the heart-shrines of humanity inspired with love of God, on the God-
consciousness of Disciples, and not on law-books. Guru Gobind Singh would have died
fighting on the battlefield even, as a while before, his two young sons had obtained the
glory of martyrdom. But these 'Five Enthroned' asked him to go from the scene, and to
do for the Khalsa, what only he, Guru Gobind Singh, could do. So, he went, herein the
Guru's benign submission to the will of the Khalsa was complete and unconditional. To
obey, to continue to live instead of fighting and dying, even in that great personal
affliction of having seen his sons and his dear disciple soldiers dying before him,
overwhelmed by odds, yet to go and live for them, as bidden by them, is the supreme
self-sacrifice of God for man, out of whose red flames of blood is born this Khalsa with
the mysterious destiny.
In the Khalsa constitution, the people inspired by the natural goodness of
humanity, by the spontaneous Divinity of God, by the Guru's mystic presence in all
beings, are made supreme. They are the embodiment of Law and Justice fulfilled for
ever in the love of Man. This state has but the Guru as Personal God. In this state, the
Khalsa, the law of man's natural goodness is the only law [11].
Guru Gobind Singh was neither a Caesar nor an Aurangzeb. He was the
true king of the people and a comrade of the people, in the truest representative spirit.
Guru Gobind Singh founded the true democracy of the people in which there were no
dead votes or votes won by mental persuasion or interested coercion. Democracy was a
feeling in the bosom of the Khalsa and it gave an organic cohesion to the people who
founded both society and state on the law of love, on Justice and Truth, not an impersonal
system of the will of the blinded mob-representation by sympathy and not by dead votes.
The Khalsa-State is an Ideal; Sikhs may die, it does not. It is immortal [12].

4. Genesis of Hindu-Sikh Divide

It might seem that owing to the hostility of an environment, and the not
unoften deliberate attempts of the Hindu society to obliterate the Sikh ideals, Sikhs tend
to deny any relationship with Hindu society. The Sikh may deny him or not, the Hindu
has already denied the Sikh. The great Hindu culture and its innate influence on Sikh
culture, however, cannot be denied. It would be to deny one's parentage. Such denials
add nothing to the stature of the Sikh. All that is lofty and noble must be and is fully
reflected in the soul of Sikhism, for matter of that, not Hindu culture alone, but all human
culture itself. The Sikh is rather spiritualistic in his consciousness than metaphysical
[13].
The songs of the Ten Gurus and the lives of unparalleled martyrdom have
created a new race-emotion in the Punjab; the Sikhs are a new nation in its inspiration
and its remarkable cohesion of the masses. The brief Sikh history and tradition inspire the
Punjab peasants as no manner of religious fervour did before, which goes to show that the
Sikh has a tradition and culture of his own which the Hindu has been unwilling to
receive, though he wishes at times to pat him on the back as a kind of off-spring. It is
unfair of the Hindus to condemn the Sikhs for their attempts to cut themselves away from
the mass of Hindudom. They make it a grievance that the Sikhs wish to make their
church stand apart [14].
In view of the political solidarity of India it is mischievous for any one to
suggest that we are not of the Hindu and not equally of the Muslims. It is mischievous to
multiply the point of difference with the Hindu which are not fundamental [15].
The Gurus have shown to Hindus the way to freedom of mind and soul
and also to political freedom. The Hindus, out of the spirit of vain intellectual pride have
withheld themselves from the resurgence that Sikhism would bring. For the Hindus, the
way to survival and freedom is the Guru's way. Unless they accept Guru Granth as their
new Gita, the old scriptures and the stories from Ramayana and Mahabharata can no
longer inspire new life into the mass of people whose backbone has been crushed by
systematic metaphysical and theological burdens. Political slavery has been the result of
their metaphysical mentality [16].
The Hindus in the Punjab have much to answer for. They find more in
Bhagavad Gita and the old Veda than in Guru Granth. They love Hindi more than their
mother-tongue. They relate themselves to the bards of Vedas more than the Gurus [17].
The Hindus failed Guru Gobind Singh: but Guru Gobind Singh has not
failed them. They have not understood him; he understood them. As they have grown so
apathetic, almost antagonistic to the message of the Gurus, it is essential that the basic
unique character of Sikh culture should now be expressed [18].
5. Physics of Spirituality
In the scheme of human progress there is such a thing as the physics of
spirituality; the Hindu has ignored it, the Western races have realized it [19]. Because of
their comprehensive vision, the Khalsa shall have the spiritual and temporal sovereignty
and all shall submit to it, soon or late. Only those shall be saved, who gather under this
flag. The Hindus, so far, have not seen the significance of the Guru's creation, the
Khalsa. Great Hindu philosophers like Tilak, Aurobindo and Tagore are reinterpreting
the Gita and the Upanishads in order to come abreast with modern Western thought and
scientific conclusions. But they do not see that more than four hundred years ago, their
own country-men, the Sikh Gurus, actually worked all these modern tendencies into the
constitution of the mind and society of this unhappy land, by creating the Khalsa. Their
lives gave birth to a new country in this old one, and peopled it with a new race, with a
universal religion of faith in man, and fired it with the spiritual passion for progress. Out
of the Gurus came a daring, colonising race, lovers of land and agriculture, ready to start
a new page of life at every turn. And of all the older texts the Sikh texts alone need not
be tortured to come abreast with modern developments: they have woven the philosophy
of the ancient scriptures in an organic whole. The Sikh life is the vindication of natural
manhood and womanhood.
Some modern typical Hindus are trying to interpret Upanishads and the
Gita in modern modes. But such attempts are against the traditional faith that has
gathered round these books. And, however easily they may be interpreted in the modern
modes, they have never shown the great reactivity that is attributed to them. In the past
the teaching of the Gita has never been harnessed to action nor the Upanishads to love of
the people. There has been no phenomena of transmutation of personality by a higher
Being's personal touch on any large scale, as in Sikh history. The Upanishads are
examples of mental splendor, unique and truly glorious. But without Buddhism and now
without Sikhism in India, and without the modern spirit of the West, which lives and
works and attains to knowledge by the experimental method, which is, as I term it,
'physics of spirituality', the Upanishads and Bhagavat Gita could never have been so
interpreted. On the other hand, from close and devoted study of the Guru's hymns, I
assert that many revolutionary tendencies are found in the Sikh thought, song and life.
No texts need be turned upside down for it. It was atrocious not to have seen this, and to
have ignored Sikh history, from the main features of the hostility of the racial
environment in which Sikhism took its birth. The Sikh believes in one great culture of
man which is yet to come. There is more future and past in Sikhism while there is all the
emphasis on the past in Hinduism [20].

References
1. Singh, Puran 1982. Spirit of the Sikh, Vol. II, Punjabi University Press, Patiala, India.
p.317.
2. Singh, Puran 1976. The Spirit Born People, Punjabi University Press, Patiala, India.p.
126.
3. Singh, Puran 1982. Spirit of the Sikh, Vol. I, Punjabi University Press, Patiala,India. p.
12.
4. Ibid, p. 14.
5. Ibid, p. 54.
6. Ibid, Vol. II, p. 311.
7. Ibid, Vol. I, p. 6.
8. Ibid, Vol. II, p. 321.
9. Ibid, Vol. I, p. 9.
10.Ibid, Vol. I, p. 23.
11.Ibid, Vol. I, p. 24.
12.Ibid, Vol. I, p. 27.
13.Ibid, Vol. I, p. 28.
14.Ibid, Vol. II, p. 327.
15.Ibid, Vol. I, p. 34.
16.Ibid, Vol. I, p. 31.
17.Ibid, Vol. I, p. 58.
18.Ibid, Vol. I, p. 33.
19.Ibid, Vol. I, p. 32.
20.Ibid, Vol. I, p. 39.