Guru Nanak and national integration
By Gurbachan Singh Talib

NATIONAL integration is a phrase which we have recently added to our social-cum-political vocabulary. While India has been divided and fragmented for millennia over religion, caste, language and region, attempts have been made by our Sufis and religious teachers from time to time to bring about cohesion and harmony. While at a particular period of history a fair amount of such cohesion was achieved by shared beliefs in what is called Hinduism, there nevertheless were tendencies of a centrifugal nature, as would inevitably exist in any society spread over such a vast area as our country. These were tendencies towards division of the whole mass into sects and castes and subcastes. Partly the origin of such division was racial as between Aryan and non-Aryan. We need not go here into bewildering varieties of these that have obtained in our country for centuries beyond precise determination.

With the coming of Islam, which unlike the earlier influences that entered that country could not be digested into the body of Hinduism, nor would agree to live in harmony with it, a new and continuing conflict arose, which in some form or the other is alive till today; and having entered the political field in the form of the pursuit of power and the creation of Pakistan, has indubitably been intensified. Along with the two major groups that are loosely called Hinduism and the Islamic millat, may be reckoned other religious factors like Sikhism, Christianity and a number of tribal creeds. While numerous religions exist alongside each other in most countries, in India their conflict and rivalry has taken a particularly violent form, mainly because of the centuries-old course of conquest of Islam and Hindu resistance thereto in various forms — military, social and credal.

While present-day political ideologies try to minimise such conflict, it nevertheless has been real in history and has left bitter race memories particularly among non-Muslims, which at any time can be easily revived and made to start conflicts. With the Muslims it is a memory of lost glory and a crusading zeal. Part of the bitterness arose from the fact of the Hindu generally being the money-lender and the Muslim the insolvent debtor. Any attempt at bringing about national integration must reckon with this fact rather than gloss it over by fine phrases and fancied appeals in the past for harmony.

A new factor of disharmony that has entered the Indian scene is the upsurge for human rights among the so-called untouchables and the other depressed classes, kept down by the sanction of religion. But this part of the conflict is a recent phenomenon and is the result of the arousing of the conscience of the higher castes among the Hindus themselves as a result of enlightenment brought in by the modern humanism and science. The British rulers did little to ameliorate the condition of these classes, except indirectly and involuntarily as, for example, in common rail travel for all and recruitment of untouchables to the armed forces.

The crux of it all is that while the caste factor is now important in disrupting harmony and retarding integration, the Hindu-Muslim conflict, added to which may be such conflicts as the Sikh-Hindu bickering in Punjab and Haryana, is the major case of tension, and in chalking out any programme of integration, the effort must be concentrated on diluting it. Perhaps with the passage of time and the emergence of new socio-political factors like the class-conflict,this side of tension may be softened down, but at present it is strong and bitter, as resentment suppressed and open everywhere shows.

A happy feature of our social life in the past was the people living in the countryside, away from that influence of hate-spitting theologians. While the Muslims of foreign origin did maintain a superior stance, those who were descendants of local converts and followed occupations parallel to their Hindu counterparts, seldom thought in terms of conflict. They had their system of faith and social customs paralleled to the Hindus, with a kind of coexistence. What kept all at peace was common subjection to the exactions of the feudal lords, Hindu and Muslim. Individually there was little to be gained on a class basis, and so unlike our present-day political conflicts, struggle was personal and individual or at best familial. At the folk level people even had common religious teachers in the form of local saints and hermits. It was the kazis and mullahs, bigoted theologians who thought in term of suppressing kufr of heresy.

Among the seers of India the one who made the most potent and persistent effort towards reconciling the warring groups in the Indian populace was Guru Nanak. In respect of what we now term national integration and what in his day would be known as humanitarianism, his effort took a two-fold form. With regard to the caste conflict, while he upbraided the Brahmin for his claim of inherent purity and exclusive guardianship of spiritual enlightenment, he declared spiritual instruction to be the universal right of all without distinction of caste. This in those times was a revolutionary step. Even in our day such a right has found only tardy and reluctant acceptance. Despite being a high caste man himself, he felt deeply the deprivation of the lower castes from spiritual instruction. It was not their social degradation that primarily moved his compassion, but the fact that they were treated as without souls, who did not need the ministration of religion.

Guru Nanak sought to integrate the lower castes into the mainstream of Indian humanity. In one place he affirmed Nanak navain bajh sanat (those living without God are the really low-caste). In another place he called the lower tendencies of the mind such as foul thinking (kubudhi), hard-heartedness (kudaya), wrath (krodh) and such others the real untouchables. Guru Nanak identified himself in feelings with those considered low caste and held in contempt. In one of his famous pronouncements he declared:

Lowest of the low am I, with the lowly identified.

Saith Nanak: Lord: thy glance of grace falls on the land where the lowly are cherised.

In an ecstatic mood of compassion he declared: Great is the merit of those of the higher castes serving God: One among the lower castes serving Him may even wear shoes made from my skin.

The problem of untouchability and even of caste gradations has not been solved with us yet. Certain economic and sociological factors however, are at play leading towards such an end, The effect of Guru Nanak’s teaching has been that the castes considered low, without being untouchables, have had a better deal among the Sikhs particularly and in Punjab generally than elsewhere in India. Untouch-ability too here has been practised in a softened form compared to the rest of the country.

With regard to what is called communal rancour or the conflict of faith with faith, what Guru Nanak sought to achieve was reconciliation. Some writers on Sikhism, whose knowledge of the Sikh scriptural writing is only perfunctory have tried to show him in the role of a synthesiser of faiths. This is no way sustainable. His was a revelation of an integrated system of faith and the spiritual life, and not a synthesised group of beliefs borrowed from here and there. In a scene of conflicting faiths, while calling upon no one to abjure his faith or to seek conversion to another, he sought to impart to all men the vision of a common moral system for all humanity, irrespective of the faith anyone might profess.

Rituals, sacrements and symbols there are. He did not interfere with them. If it was the Hindu holy bath, what he commended was purity of heart and not mere ontoward ablutions. With regard to the sacred thread of the Hindus, he did not ask anyone to discard the practice of assuming it, but adjured that it be made up of noble qualities of the soul, such as compassion, contentment continence and purity of heart. These and not mere twisted yarn would make the sacred thread of the soul. A similar transmutation of ritual with moral and spiritual qualities did he commend in the case of the practitioners of hatha yoga. Their earrings, begging pouch, staff etc, he adjured them to make into contentment, modesty, meditation and such other attributes of the ennobled and enlightened self.

Coming to Islam which stood in a stance of straight confrontation/contradiction with the Indian-born creeds cumulatedly known as Hinduism, he offered bold insights. Right from the dawn of his revelation he had declared his aversion to the barriers created by bigotry by raising the cry: ‘There is no Hindu and no Mussalman’. Earlier he was charged with perverting both Hinduism and Islam by people who did not understand the gospel of a universal morality that he was preaching. During his visit to Mecca as the Muslim divines asked him which was superior, Hindus or Muslims, came the reply: "Without good deeds both shall come to suffering."

The query put to him had in it the implict answer that Islam was superior, for such was the conviction instilled in the mind of the Muslim faithful. Addressing Muslim groups he sought to guide them along the same path of a universal morality that he had indicated to the followers of popular Hinduism and yoga. His affirmation to the Muslims are contained particularly in the Var in the measure Majh, a few of which may be given here in rendering. Addressing them in a group he affirmed:

"Hard it is to become a true Muslim;

Only one truly such may be so called;

His first action, to love the way of the holy;

Second, to shed off his heart’s filth as on the grindstone.

One professing to be a guide to Muslim must shed the illusion of life and death.

To God’s will must he submit:

Obey God and efface his self.

Such a one shall be a blessing for all,

And be truly reckoned a Muslim.

Again, transmuting the Muslim’s articles of Shariat into moral and spiritual qualities, he declared:

Make thy mosque of love of humanity;

Thy prayer-carpet of sincerity;

Thy Koran of honest and approved endeavour;

Thy circumcision of modesty;

Thy Ramazan fast of noble conduct;

Thus shalt thou be a true Muslim.

Make good deeds thy Kaba;

Truthfulness thy preceptor;

Thy namaz and kalima pure actions;

The rosary what pleases God —

Thus wilt thou be honoured at the last reckoning.

Five are the prayers, five the hours to perform them,

Five their different names;

What are the true prayers

The first is truthfulness, the next honest endeavour;

The third prayer offered to God for good of all;

The fourth is a sincere heart;

The fifth, divine laudation.

One whose kalima is good actions is alone a true Muslim.

Saint Nanak; All who are false within, in the end prove of no worth.

Rising to a higher emphasis, he declared about the apparent divergences of creed, particularly as between Hinduism and Islam.

He who knows the two paths to be one.

Shall alone find fulfilment.

The evil slanderer and caviller must burn in hellfire.

The whole universe is divine in essence.

Merge yourselves into truth.

Tolerance comes easy to people who under the impact of intellectualism or some ideology have abjured faith in religion. To such all faiths naturally are equally unacceptable.

Where people are deeply religious as in our country and over a great part of the world, the only way to bring out goodwill and work for what may be called integration is Guru Nanak’s way of propagating a universal morality that may cut across the bounds of creeds and bind all men of goodwill in the practice of the gospel for the new man — the man of tomorrow.