Sikhism

Most of the memorable events that are of major importance to Sikh religious tradition have taken place in the productive agricultural region called the Punjab, which is largely in north India but extends beyond India's current border into Pakistan. The region's name literally means "five rivers" (panj-ab), and historically its produce depended on water available from the five tributaries that flow into the Indus River and then into the Arabian Sea. Since the nineteenth century, modern irrigation canals have carried water down from the foothills of the Himalayas, and more recently hybrid seeds have made the Punjab plains one of the world's great sources of food grains. Today most of the world's Sikhs, who number around 15 million, are descended from Punjabi farmers and from people who supplied them with goods and services essential to their agricultural livelihood. Punjabi language, kinship patterns, and cultural habits in general are interwoven with the Sikh ideals and teachings that were first revealed though the life and work of Guru N?nak (1469–1539).

The lineage of the ten spiritual masters who have highest religious authority for Sikhs begins with Guru N?nak and ends with Guru Gobind Singh (d. 1708). These are ten different human beings, but because they reveal and reflect the unity of a single timeless divine reality, a Sikh is likely to refer to any or all of them together, and to whatever derives from them, in the singular as "the Guru." In fact the traditional Punjabi name for what English speakers call Sikhism is Gurmat, which means the doctrine or teachings of the guru(s). From the time of the death of Gobind Singh, who did not appoint any human successor, the function of spiritual teaching has been served mainly by the Sikh scripture called the Adi Granth (literally, "the first book"), which is more popularly and appropriately known as the Gur? Granth Sahib. Its standing among contemporary Sikhs is similar to that of the Torah among Jews, the Qur'an among Muslims, and the Bible among evangelical and other conservative Christians. As the repository of spiritual truth and power, it is accorded highest respect and deference. The central act for establishing a gurdwara, the Sikh of worship, is to install a copy of the Guru Granth Sahib at a suitably prepared site. Its very presence is in a sense the presence of the Guru.

Guru Gobind Singh added another dimension to Sikh identity, which already had geographical and ethnic as well as spiritual sources, in 1699 when he founded the Kh?ls? Panth in the Himalayan foothills at Anandpur. The ethos of the kh?ls?, a voluntary order composed of adult men and women initiates within Sikhism, is that of the soldier, and its symbols are those of military preparedness. Five emblems of membership that are always to be kept on one's person are uncut hair and a comb, a steel bracelet, short (under)pants, and a dagger or sword. Vows taken at the time of initiation commit one to follow a shared set of prescribed rules (rahit). Kh?ls? identity provides a complement to the universalist teachings of Guru N?nak and the inclusivism of the Adi Granth, which was compiled on the Punjab plains at Amritsar largely by the Fifth Guru and incorporates the poems and prayers of several Hindu and Muslim saints whose spiritual perspectives are compatible with those of the Sikh masters. The Kh?ls? also generates a dynamic tension within Sikh tradition akin to the tension between priestly and prophetic strands within biblical tradition.

Kh?ls? members never have been the majority within Sikh tradition at large, but their ethos pervades and enriches Sikhism—which otherwise might not have attained widespread recognition in the twentieth century as a world religion with its own distinctive religious rites and practices, sites and homeland, and organizational structure. The dynamics infused into Sikh tradition by the Kh?ls? provided a rallying point during British colonial rule in South Asia—particularly in support of the establishment and legal recognition of separate Sikh life-cycle rituals early in the twentieth century and then in favor of legislative provision for Sikh control of historically significant religious centers, including the large and lucrative ones at Amritsar and Anandpur during the 1920s—and after the end of colonial rule in the movement for creation of a Punjab state with a Sikh majority in the Republic of India.

Sikh presence in the United States was almost completely excluded by restrictive and discriminatory immigration laws until the 1960s. Then within a few years several factors brought Sikhism into prominence. Some of the American counterculture youths who were attracted to Eastern spirituality joined one of the several movements created by Punjabi immigrant Harbhajan Singh (Yogi Bhajan) in the 1960s and 1970s, including the Healthy Happy Holy movement and later the Sikh Dharma of the Western Hemisphere. The apparent conversions generated debate about what should be required in order to be considered a Sikh, and the degree of acceptance of these gora or white Sikhs and their leader by religious authorities in the Punjab fluctuated in correlation with shifts in local politics. At the same time, new immigrants with advanced technical and professional training settled in North America, became highly successful, and found themselves increasingly nostalgic about their Punjabi Sikh heritage. A few of them lent support to a movement for a separate Sikh state to be called Khalistan, which they envisioned would be independent of both India and Pakistan. In the longer term the perennial issues that are likely to continue to influence the development of Sikh communities in North America are very likely to be the same as those that socially define other religious groups—how families are to be preserved, children educated, traditional values honored and enacted, religious centers controlled, and success within the world ensured.

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Gene R. Thursby