A Popular Dictionary Of Sikhism: Sikh Religion And Philosophy (popular Dictionaries Of Religion)

A POPULAR DICTIONARY OF Sikhism A POPULAR DICTIONARY OF Sikhism W.OWEN COLE AND PIARA SINGH SAMBHI LONDON AND NEW YORK First published by Curzon Press 15 The Quadrant, Richmond Surrey, TW9 1BP This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Copyright © 1990 by W.Owen Cole and Piara Singh Sambhi Revised edition 1997 Cover photograph by Sharon Hoogstraten Cover design by Kim Bartko All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0-203-98609-1 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0 7007 1048 5 (Print Edition) To Lt. Colonel Jagjit Singh Guleria, poet, man of letters, devout Sikh, and friend MAP 1 The Punjab MAP 2 The Mughal Empire at the death of Akbar (1605) INTRODUCTION The word ‘sikh’ comes from the Punjabi verb ‘sikhna’, to learn. A Sikh is therefore a learner, that is, one who learns and follows the path of liberation taught by a man called Gur N nak and his nine successors, who lived in the Punjab region of India between 1469 and 1708. The Sikh religion has only recently come to the academic attention of western scholars. There were a few books written earlier than M.A.Macauliffe’s monumental study of the lives and times of the Gur s, The Sikh Religion (Oxford 1909), but these were often the work of soldiers or administrators, like Macauliffe himself, who needed to understand something of the Sikhs for political reasons. Three views, not necessarily mutually exclusive, tend to have been held of Sikhism by scholars writing during the first half of the twentieth century. One is that Gur N nak was a disciple of Kab r, and that the religion owes its theology largely to him. So G.H.Westcott, Kab r and the Kab r Panth, Cawnpore, 1907. This interpretation seems to have been accepted by J.N.Farquhar, Primer of Hinduism, London, 1912. This book still seems to influence many who write on the period of Indian religion from about the thirteenth century to the death of the last Sikh Gur in 1708. The source may be indirect, perhaps A.L.Basham, The Wonder that was India, Fontana edition, 1971. On page 481 he writes, ‘One great religious teacher of modern India, Kab r (1440–1518), a poor weaver of V r nas , taught the brotherhood of Hindu and Muslim alike in the fatherhood of God, and opposed idolatry and caste practices, describing that God was equally to be found in temple and mosque. Later, N nak (1469–1539), a teacher of the Punjab, taught the same doctrine with even greater force, and founded a new faith, that of the Sikhs, designed to incorporate all that was best of both Hinduism and Islam.’ Here the second view is present, that of Sikhism as a form of deliberate syncretism. It has gained some support among Sikhs themselves eager to portray Gur N nak as a forerunner of M hatm G ndhi, a reconciler of Hindu and Muslim. This leads to the third position, the view that Gur N nak was a social reformer, seeking to ameliorate the lot of the poor and outcastes of Indian society; again perhaps this idea owes something to the work of G ndhi. Examining these interpretations briefly, it is necessary first of all to say that none of them gives any real scope for the insistence found time and again in Gur N nak’s hymns, that he was being used as a messenger of God. His own words describing his calling will