Sacrifice, valour hallmark of Sikhs
by T.V. Rajeswar

IN the beginning of the second millennium, India was in a social and religious turmoil. Adi Sankara and Ramanuja had left their footprints and gone. Islam had entered the country with Muhammad Ghazni crossing the Indus in 1001. After the Ghaznis, the Ghoris and then the Turks invaded the country. During the next 150 years India was in a state of chaos. Then came the Mughals in the 13th century followed by the Afghan in the 15th century. The interaction of Hindu and Muslim thoughts gave birth to new ideas and a religious ferment. Ramanand (1400 A.D.), Kabir (1450 A.D.) and Chaitanya (1500 A.D.) gave new life to Hindu thought and made it more egalitarian and less ritual. Thus in the beginning of the 16th century, the Hindu faith was undergoing cataclysmic changes and was ready to accept basic reformation. Nanak, born in 1469 in Punjab was a by-product of this age of transition. That Guru Nanak signified the synthesis of the best in Hinduism and Islam was symbolised by his two companions, Mardana, a Muslim and Bala, a Hindu.

This great faith blossomed on the Baisakhi day of 1699 when Guru Gobind Singh was hardly 38 years of age, but the transformation he brought about on that day had far-reaching impact on the history of Punjab and the country as a whole. Guru Gobind Singh proclaimed that he wanted to train the sparrow to hunt the hawk. The intonation Raj Karega Khalsa is traditionally traced Guru Gobind Singh. Though the popular belief is that it means that "the Sikh Khalsa shall rule", the correct translation is believed to be that "the pure shall rule".

The sacrifice that Guru Gobind Singh had made, the battles he fought, the fortresses he constructed and the enormous hardships he faced, including the death of two of his sons in the battlefield and the other two as victims of assassination at the instance of a Mughal chieftain, had all contributed to the Sikh militancy and the determination to fight and never yield to tyranny. The emerging militant Sikhism, with the Jat peasantry as its prime vehicle, had several clashes with the Rajput hill chieftains and later with the army of Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb. Aurangzeb died in 1707, and in the ensuing battle of succession, the Guru fought on the side of Bahadur Shah who succeeded in the power struggle. Guru Gobind Singh was assassinated at Nanded by two Pathans in 1708.

Before his death, Guru Gobind Singh had announced that there would be no more Gurus. He, however, picked a Hindu ascetic, Banda Bairagi, to carry on the fight in Punjab. Banda Bahadur overran the Punjab countryside and repeatedly challenged the might of the Mughal army. The Mughals eventually subdued Banda Bahadur and the Sikhs paid enormously with their lives. Banda Bahadur himself suffered the worst torture before his death at the hands of the Mughals at Delhi. From the defeat and death of Banda Bahadur in 1716 till the invasion of India by Nadir Shah in 1739, the Sikh power was dormant. Within a generation of the death of Aurangzeb in 1707, Muslim chieftains had established separate sultanates in Bengal, Lucknow and Hyderabad. The Afghans in Rohikkhand and the Jats in Bharatpur were also masters of their own turf. When Nadir Shah sacked Delhi and left, Mohammad Shah was a forlorn figure on the Mughal throne in Delhi. Then came the series of invasions in the north by the Afghan adventurer, Ahmed Shah Abdali, who entered India as many as eight times between 1747 and 1767. The resultant chaos in the north ideally suited the local Sikh chieftains and the Mughal authority dwindled year after year. During the very first invasion of Ahmed Shah, Sikh chieftain Jassa Singh Kalol boldly proclaimed the birth of a new power in Punjab — the Khalsa Dal.

During the next 20 years when the Afghan invasions were taking place, more and more Sikh chieftains sprang up all over Punjab. The Maratha power was growing dominant in the heartland and they occupied Delhi in 1758 and again later in 1760. But the battle of Panipat on January 7, 1761, decisively ended the Maratha ambitions in the north and the Sikh chieftains who had formed themselves into various misls, were free to pursue their ambitious adventures. Eventually it was the Sukerchukia misl which prevailed over the rest and Ranjit Singh proclaimed himself as the Maharaja of Sikh kingdom at Lahore in 1799. Ranjit Singh raised a well trained army by enlisting the services of French and British commanders and recruiting units of Pathans, Gurkhas, Dogras etc. Ranjit Singh expanded his kingdom up to Ladakh and the Afghan border in the north but he avoided coming to clash with the British who were masters south of the Sutlej river. Ranjit Singh died in 1839.

In his book The Discovery of India Jawaharlal Nehru has paid rich tributes to the innovative and dominant spirit of Maharaja Ranjit Singh. "Ranjit Singh was a remarkable man and one who was full of curiousity. A French man who came in contact with Maharaja Ranjit Singh described him as extremely brave and almost the first inquisitive Indian I have seen, but his curiosity makes up for the apathy of the whole nation." Ranjit Singh was not only intellectually curious and inquisitive, he was also remarkably humane. He built up a kingdom and a powerful army and yet he disliked bloodshed. Ranjit Singh abolished the death penalty even for heinous crimes, at a time when even petty pilferers had to face death in England. Yet another writer testified "that except in actual warfare, Maharaja Ranjit Singh had never been known to take life, though his own had been attempted more than once and his reign was found freer from any striking acts of cruelty and oppression than those of many more civilised monarchs".

After the death of Ranjit Singh and the two Sikh wars fought between 1845 and 1849 the Sikh kingdom ended in annexation by the British. Punjab, thereafter, witnessed a remarkable administrative transformation at the hands of the British, especially under the remarkable duo, Henry Lawrence and John Lawrence. Land settlement was carried out, roads were laid and schools and hospitals were constructed. It was Punjab which first witnessed the benefits of an administrative system which the British introduced elsewhere in India in the years to come. The crowning glory of administrative changes was the construction of irrigation canals which transformed Punjab into the granary of India which, by and large, it still remains.

The partition in 1947 was traumatic for India but the main brunt fell on the people of Punjab. The massacre which ensued the partition, the mass exodus of Hindus and Sikhs from the Pakistan Punjab and the eventual spread of refugees and their settlement in Punjab Haryana and especially in Delhi, witnessed a massive social and industrial transformation in the north. The green revolution in the mid 1960s enabled Punjab, more than any other state, to produce more and in a remarkable short period almost made good the losses which it suffered during the partition when most of the canal system fell within Pakistan. Punjab remains the largest producer of foodgrains and the largest source of procurement by the Central and state agencies. The prosperity in agriculture is sprouting new talents and new initiatives with the agro-gene technology coming into its own. Many agricultural entrepreneurs, with modern scientific techniques, are producing exportable quantities of vegetables, fruits and flowers and their endeavour is a lesson and pointer to the rest of the country.