A SCHOOL OF PARABLES.
THE LAST WORD.
The following words were addressed by Guru Gobind Singh to the Sikhs at Nander on the day of his departure from this planet:
Wherefore always abide in cheerfulness and never give way to mourning. God is ever the same. He is neither young nor old. He is not born, nor does He die. He deals neither in pain nor poverty. Know that the true Guru abides as He. His creatures that are steeped in bodily pride are very unhappy, and night and day subject to love and hate. Ever entangled and involved in the deadly sins, they perish by mutual enmity and at last find their abode in hell. Yet for the love of such creatures, the Guru assumes birth to deliver them. He has instructed them in the true Name and very fortunate are they who have received and treasured His instruction, By it, they are enabled to save themselves and others from the perils of worlds ocean. And, when after drought, rain falls and there is abundance, the Guru seeing human beings suffering and yearning for happiness, comes to bestow it on them and remove their sorrows by his teachings. And as the rain remains where it falls, so the Gurus instruction ever abides with His disciples.
‘The Sikhs who love the true Guru are in turn loved by Him.’
‘O Khalsa! Remember the true Name. The Guru has arrayed you in arms to procure you the sovereignty of the earth. Those who have died in battle have gone to an abode of bliss. I have attached you to the skirt of the Immortal God and entrusted you to Him. Read the Granth Sahib or listen to it, so shall your minds receive consolation and shall undoubtedly obtain an abode in the Guru’s heaven. They who remember the true Name render their lives profitable, and when they depart enter the mansions of eternal happiness.
‘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 serves them shall obtain the reward there of 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 Khalsa the Guru. I have infused my mental bodily spirit into the Granth Sahib and the Khalsa’.
He then put on a muslin waist-band, hung his on his bow on his shoulder and took his musket in his hand. He opened the Granth Sahib and placing a coconut before it, solemnly bowed to it as his successor. Then uttering Wahe Guru Ji Ka Khalsa, Wahl Guru JI Ki Fateh he circumambulated the sacred volume and said, O Beloved Khalsa ! Let him who desires to behold me, behold the Granth Sahib, and obey the Granth Sahib. It is the visible body of the Guru. And let him, who desires to meet me, diligently search its hymns. And lastly, keep my kitchen ever open and receive offerings for its maintenance.
THE SACRED SUCCESSOR.
The Guru Granth of the Sikhs is the most authen¬tic account of the Gurus’ minds.
There is no other way to convey the passion of repeating the “Name of the Beloved” as in the Guru Grand?. This repetition is tiring to those who are not aching with that love with that love which, in its acute pang and pain, needs the sound of the “Name of the Be¬loved”, some news of Him for its cure. Such as these do not feel relieved by any philosophy, but by a bird-like piping of “His Name”. Only the “Love ¬afflicted” can understand the significance of the repetition of the love lyrics in the Guru Granth.
The Gurus are the poet-prophets, friend-guides arid man-makers of the whole world of man. The Gurus adore “an indescribable state of life where life begets life.” They describe a cosmic process the elevation of men en masse, and of man the individual; and, as such, they have promulgated no so-called “religion”, but a living faith in the Universal Divine Spirit of things. In essence, all things and all life are spiritual. The Guru’s religion is a lyrical condition of the soul, induced by the sight of the Guru-God, and through the Guru, revealed and realised.
The Guru Granth is one and mighty paean celebrating the miracle of life. Its soulful chants have turned pragmatic creatures into men of trans¬parent spontaneity, as the very rivers in flow. They now love the creation because their hearts have been changed by the Guru to love the Kartar or the Creator. They take nature (including man) as a poem of God. They are poets who drink the beauty of the sun and the moon, of the earth and forest and the dry desert, and they feel so satisfied in their souls that, in their turn, they flood Nature with the rapture of their life and song. Thus do they go on fertilising the soul of a whole people and making the humble earth blossom with virgin beauty in joyous pride. They are intensely lyrical, and their soul quivers with the uncrushable spirit of delight, and with the beauty of being. The Gurus feel in the depths of their soul-consciousness the unfading joy-emanations of creation as the flower feels in the sun’s rays. Difference vanishes in that vibrant radiation. And in the Union of man and God are lost all questions and complaints. In that intense state, all philosophies find their unique interpretations, not one excepted. Every thing in man and nature grows to be symbolic to them. The poetry and the music of the Gurus, therefore, need translation through the spirit of poets; dead words can never translate the poetry of these prophets. Scholars toil in vain, to catch “the rainbows of the sky” in their hands. The Guru reveals himself in a beautiful innocence of the soul; he will always be misunderstood by the learned, for they learn by analy¬sis. Beauty of any kind, more so the Guru’s tran¬scendental realism and realistic transcendentalism, would really be beyond analysis.
The Guru Granth is the history of the Sikh soul and its translation is to come through the social reconstruction of human society as the Khalsa, where man shall reign in love, and not in hatred. It is a society founded on the highest verity of love informed by the inspiration of God-like men who symbolise truth, as 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 and its greatest humanity.
Without the Word of the Guru, there is no key to the heart of Guru Nanak and to his anthems For the liberation of man. Its interpretation lies in the human soul, in the meanings of this life creation. Mere intellect is husk; the soul wakens to great noble acts. The destruction by the Guru of the brahrnanical citadels of lie and superstition ~as in Guru Nanak’s Asa Di Var or in the Sawayias of the Tenth Guru, Guru Gobind Singh, or in the Vars of Bhai Gurdas, the great apostle of Sikh ideals), is symbolic of the destruction of all tin on which human society might be wrongly founded, Guru Nanak is universal, but he is mostly the prophet of the future. The Guru exalts in the souls of a whole people love of com¬rades and human fellowship (stretching its arms all round the globe, full of power and helpful living, and radiating soul-consciousness in every home, in little acts of kindness to each other, to animals and birds) as the essences of all divinities. Freedom of the human mind and the soul is the Guru’s passion.
Guru Gobind Singh, the Tenth Guru says:
Sack Kahun
Sun leo sabhe
Jin prem kio
Tin hi Prabh payo
I say verily
Unto you all,
He who loves,
Alone finds the Lord.
Again in his conversations with Bhai Nand Lal, his beloved scholar and poet-disciple, the Guru says:
Khaliq khdliq Ki Jan Ke
Klzaliq dukhawe nak
Khaliq dukhai Nandlaiji
Khaliq kopai tahan
Know, the people are of God,
Hurt not the people,
If the people are hurt, O Nandlal,
It provok’th the Lord into anger.
His love of the people becomes tearful in the follow¬ing saying:
“I am of them as of none other,
By them I am what I am.
In the Guru’s words, there is holy war, the axe strike, the swords clash, the arrows fly, destroying
ghosts of darkness. These words of his gave a new glimpse of the fire of life that tingled in his bipod, of a new tradition that occupied his mind.
It is significant that none of the Gurus ever wrote a line of prose. What they said is poetry, music. Their whole lives are ten long continuous songs. The people they created are the poems, the epic des¬cription of their inner state, giving a glimpse of their Immense personality. The Gurus wrote more in the characters of men made by them than in words. The Guru’s spirituality is watching the blacksmith at work, the carpenter making a wooden cage, the farmer sowing and reaping the harvests of wheat and maize.
FORWARDS.
THE MAN AND THE POET.
The poet in the East has traditionally been regarded as a person possessed. He is the odd man abroad, spinning on a precarious pivot, tending to shoot off the tangent into oblique fantasies and ambivalent uttering. In more acute cases, his quest ends up in a kind of “divine frenzy”, and thereafter his signatures become almost cabbalistic. He achieves a supra-rational state of mind wherein the singer striving becomes the song.
Such a species is not extinct in the West, though a Blake or a Whitman is becoming more and more archetypal image no longer holds or satisfies, and the difficult to come by. Even here in the East, the poet is more likely to look like a suburban commuter, or a confidential clerk hammering away his heart -beats between chores over a muffled typewriter. But fortunately, the Oriental reservoirs are not quite spent, and time and again, the mystic East throws up a poet who operates more on the vertical than on 4 the horizontal beams. In the highest state, like a-Kabul Gibran or a Bhai Vir Singh, he becomes the logos, the Word incarnate.
Puran Singh unreservedly belongs with such a spiritual fraternity. Both his life and work issued frown that vital and mysterious energy which informs the suns and the stars, which rock the oceans and the continents into being. He had from the beginning an unmistakable sign in his aspect and stance. A strikingly handsome person, he overwhelmed the people with his presence. Both as child and man, he created an aura of fragrance and charm around him¬self. No wonder, in the plenitude of his youth, his face shone like a diamond. Even in his declining years, with his flowing locks and patriarchal beard, he was a face to reckon with. There was a degree of sovereignty about his person which compelled notice and adoration.
In her “Reminiscences”, his wife, Maya Devi, speaks of many an apocalyptic story from his crowded life, but I think none of these is more revealing of the man and the poet than the simple facts relating to his spontaneity and humanity. He was often seen embracing trees and shrubs, strangers and outcasts, birds and beasts. At times, he would roll naked on green velvety lawns and munch blades of grass like the goats browsing around. He felt a long, deep, primordial calling within his bowels which tied him to all animate beings. In the final analysis, man and animal, fruit and flowery became an indivisible entity for him. In one of his poems, called ‘The Grazing Cattle”, Puran Singh writes:
Dekh dekh mur mur lochan,
Main mur pashu theen noon,
Admi ban ban thakeya!
Seeing them graze, I long
To be an animal again.
I am tired of donning man’s mantle!
This is not to say that the poet was alienated from mankind – nothing could warrant such a conclusion – only he felt keenly the loss of communication and empathy in modern life where the intellect of man tended to insulate him from the unitary springs of being.
Again, it was typical of the man to care nothing for money or fame or position. In fact, he consider¬ed “the accretion of lucre as the accretion of muck”, if it served no better purpose than self-advancement and creature comforts. He would dispense largesse like a prince. Nothing ever stopped that open and large hand. A man who could walk out 6n a feudal Maharaja in an open court telling him roundly what he thought of him, was certainly not looking for earthly honors!
It would appear odd to think of Puran Singh in the role of a scientist, and yet for the better part of his life, he was experimenting with one thing or another. His interests comprehended a variety of things such as the Rosa grass farms, pharmaceuti¬cal industry, sugar technology, etc. And in each of these fields, he left the imprint of his genius behind. Wordsworth, who came close to his heart. And bosom, has defined poetry as “the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all science”. I am inclined to think, Puran Singh fully realized the truth of it in his own life. For him, poetry and science were not the two opposite poles of reality as is often believed; he saw the inner identity which eludes the critical eye.
Puran Singh’s thought was shaped by three climactic events in his life, and these were his Japanese experiences, his discipleship of Swami Ram Tirath, and his meeting with Bhai Vir Singh: Each of these had something to do with his pilgrimage and arrival. Together, they formed the human and temporal basis of his spiritual Odyssey.
As a student in Japan, he imbibed the ethos of a beautiful people, wholly charmed by their ritual and ceremony, their industry and integrity, their innocence and insouciance. Flower-symbolism in his poetry may owe a great deal to that period, when his youthful imagination came into contact with the delicate cunning and tracery of Japanese life and art. In any case, the openness of their nature and the holiness of their hearts’ responses made him for ever a worshipper of life’s largeness and generosities.
It was again in Japan that he came under the powerful spell of Swami Ram Tirath. It was in fact not a meeting, but a realization and a homecoming. The two spirits had indeed been struck out of the same flint. No wonder, till the end, Swami Ram Tirath regarded Puran Singh as an echo or image of his own self. The poet turned monk now roamed abroad, robed in saffron and steeped in the Vedanta. This interlude was to last for more than a decade, and though eventually he graduated to the discipline of Sikhism, this was much too traumatic an experience to be washed out of his consciousness; He subsumed it in the dialectics of his Guru’s creed.
The meeting with the great Sikh poet and savant, Bhal Vir Singh, took place in 1912 at Sialkot, and this was the final turn of the wheel which had come ful1 circle. He was never the same man again. A touch on the head put him on the pristine path again, and he could never bear to have it touched by anyone else again. The great hymn to the mystic lair with which the present volume opens is a direct evidence of the soulful change wrought in him. He had strayed only to return with greater vigor and conviction. And he lived on for another 19 years or so to attain to the status of the complete Sikh. His poetry in the interval suffused with Gurbani or the Guru’s word acquired fresh dimensions and wide horizons. In short, Puran Singh, the poet of Guru-Consciousness and of the peasant-Punjab had arrived.
To direct our attention to Puran Singh’s poetry per se would perhaps amount to some kind of a criti¬cal heresy. The very first line of his famous book, The Spirit of Oriental Poetry (Kegan Paul, London, 1926) enjoins on the reader to look for the soul of. The poet, not for his artefact alone. We love our poet rather than his poetry, our artist rather than his bit.” Obviously, the poet here is the privileged being taking his place with “the Guru, the Master, the Buddha, and the Christ.” To our modern minds attuned to what has come to be called “the New Criticism” in America and elsewhere the primacy of the poet is something suspect. The poet’s perso¬nality is neither here nor there; all we should be interested in is the end-product. It is certainly a helpful corrective to the excesses of the old historic-romantic criticism, but the writ does not quite run in the domain of Bhakti and Sufi or devotional and mystic poetry. There the poet is all or nothing; His whole being is distilled in verse till the scented lines begin to glow with his presence. The fragrance could, in short, scarcely exist without the rose. Thus the poetry of Puran Singh is nothing but a vessel for his spirit, a house for his soul. To read it is to evoke overtures to his wide and warm embrace. Inevitably, every line here leads back to the great dreaming heart. It helps construct the spiritual graph.
And yet paradoxically, this type of poetry is also the least individualistic in as much as the poet is not a sovereign voice, complete unto himself, but an echo of the cosmic consciousness, an infinitesimally small link in the chain, a moment in the eternal continuum. In the widest sense, his work ensures “a continual extinction of personality”, though not in the manner T.S. Eliot understood the phrase.
This sort of confusion occurs because of the two separate approaches to poetry. Much of modem poetry seeks to be cerebral and ratiocinative, courting ambiguities and complexities, it is mocking and ironical in tone, troubled and torn in spirit, It is a poetry of doubt and protest, of interrogation and indirection. But a great deal of Eastern Poetry has been poetry of respect and integrity, poetry of synthesis and realization. It seeks to reach the inner truth of this though self-surrender and sacrifice. What interest it is not the appearance but the energy behind it. In short, it is poetry of acceptance, of the big yea. Puran Siugh’s poetry, like that of Walt Whitman who fertilized his mind and ‘provoked him into song time, and again, is fundamentally and finally the poetry of man’s soul. Here, the act of creation proceeds from an inner certitude. The imponderables of life are resolved through a process of spiritual alchemy.
A poetry such as Puran Singh’s would chafe under tags and labels; being free as the winds of the skies, but if there is one word that comes nearest to expressing it, it is amplitude. I can think of no other poet, Eastern or Western, except, of course, Walt Whitman, who is so much taken up with the vastness¬es and richness of life. Puran Singh rejects all that existence, all that causes a clausmophobic c feeling in the mind. The titles of his collection of verse, Khule Maidan, Khule Ghund, Khule Asmani Rang, are all bound by the leit-motif, Khule, which in the Punjabi language means “open” or “Vvide”. The breathless miracle of life—its terrors as well as its ecstasies—fascinates him endlessly. There is a Lawrentian readiness in his salute to life. It is no accident that almost all hi. Poetry is written in’ vers libre.
Great poets achieve universality when they transcend frontiers of self, home and state. They become cosmic citizens, owing allegiance only to vaster and higher truths. Puran Singh’s Poetry is assuredly in tune with these eternal harmonies which make him an organ of oceanic consciousness. How ever, despite this transcendence, he remains ineluctably a regional poet, rooted in the rhythm of his native soil. It is difficult to imagine a poet more spiritually bound to a geographical entity than Puran Singh. Since Waris Shah who composed the immortal Punjabi love-epic, Heer KinjIia, around 1766, no poet has orchestrated so soulfully the wash and swing, the quick and plume, of Punjabi life as Puran Singh has done. The element of nostalgia for the sights and smells of the Punjab is almost overwhelming in ‘its quality and pervasiveness.
But finally, Puran Singh’s’ work becomes an unceasing hymn in praise of the Ten Sikh Gurus, more particularly of Guru Gobind Singh whose revolutionary Weltanschauung or world-view was wholly in consonance with the compulsions of his psyche. Thereafter, its dynamics and metaphysic stem from one homing centre on which all the flights of fancy converge. The highest Point is reached when the poet’s consciousness merges in “Guru Consciousness” and the Guru’s Word is all.
In these Reflection and Offerings, one finds a most emphatic avowal of Puran Singh’s surrender to and intoxication with the Giru’s Personality. His whole being is now an aching emptiness yearning to be filled with “nectar Iain’ ruin, In Guru Gobind Singh’s creed of the hawk and the sword, he fluids a vision of he Ultimate Principle. The armed, puissant and covenanted race which the Guru raised at Anandpur the City of Bliss became for him an embodiment of the Essential Man. And hissings thus :
In the Name of God did fashion.
Anandpur and the New Order,
The Khalsa is verily the E** of the Lard!
How deeply Puran Singh felt the truth of this convict ion can be gauged from the brie of the lyric intensity of his feeling for the Guru-given tresses. The hair, he avers, puts the Sikhs on the side of elemental forces of nature. Thus the images invoked are those of the swaying trees and forests of the gathering storms and clouds, of the majestic eagles and lions. This is not to say, the “unkempt exterior” proclaims an untamed or uncultivated heart; it is only a symbol of the mystic compact with the Master and the Lora. Otherwise compassion is very nearly the highest virtue in Sikh ethics. And as Purai1 Singh knew, only the Strong and the brave were of capable of tempering justice with mercy’.
In culling the hair, the iron ring and the sword “wedding-gifts from the bride is only using the traditional Indian concept of the Lord’s consort. The devotee in Sikh scriptures is often cast in the image of a woman supplicating to her lord, and surrendering herself wholly to his enticements and embraces. In fact, there is a feminine and sensuous apprehension of reality in much of Puran Singh’s work. The Creative Force is seen here as the male principle, whereas the human variant is seen as the female principle. Thus the “wedding¬ gifts” become a token of the married state; their violation would amount to spousal infidelity. It is difficult for the Occidental mind to realize fully the spiritual inebriation of the Eastern bride, and thus the intensity of the sentiment may strike it as some¬thing whipped-up and overblown. The luxuriance or opulence of the idiom, however, is simply a sign of the enchanted heart. Here, even the excess is not enough!
And this brings me finally to the language of Puran Singh. He catches superbly the unique sounds and inflections of the Punjabi tongue–its lilt and flow, its sinewy and muscled strength, its ruggedness and resilience, its built-in rhythms and undulations. Something of this can even be felt’ in his English prose style. The language becomes highly metaphorical and evocative. When in passion – and it’s nearly always so– it become a river in flood. The imagery inevitably turns symbolical. ‘Puran Sinah could seldom achieve urbanity or even elegance, or restraint, simply because his, terms of reference were different and wider. It is a style that spends itself in giving; it does not with - hold its hand. It swells up to the condition of music to preserve the integrity of vision. Of course, there is always ‘a danger here of the language taking the bit in its mouth, and sheering off in precipitate flight–the feeling of vapidity and amorphousness lingers in some of Puran Singh’s compositions–but there will be a greater risk in breaking it to discipline.
For in the latter event, the spell would be broken and the riches spilt. No arid or lean’ idiom could ever describe the splendor of things. And Puran Singh above all was concerned with the dizzy heights and reaches of life. If the words glow and sparkle dance and leap, it’s because Puran Singh was a “Pilgrim of Eternity!”
THE STAR OVER PATNA.
In world of religious and spiritual phenomena, one occasionally comes across certain ambivalent and teasing correspondences which seem to connect disparate and distant events in history. It is difficult to account for them in terms of reason of argument, and one is inevitably driven to the world of signs and symbols. Such occurrences could perhaps be regarded as mystic metaphors operating through occult links, in any case, they seem to indicate the archetypal nature of inner reality even takes centuries to endorse the correspondence. Or else hoe explain the striking resemblance between two widely separated Nativities? The magi who were drawn to Bethlehem with offerings for the infant Christ had seen a beckoning star. So had perhaps a renowned Muslim saint, Syed Bhikan Shah, who came to patna in A.D. to bless the day-old Gobind Rai and pronounce him divine. The Mark of Divinity in either case was compelling. It required ordained scribes of the Lord to break the code and see hidden credentials.
That the Patna birth was in the nature of a Command Performance may be judged from the account given by Guru Gobind Singh himself in his Vachitar Natak or “The Wondrous Tale”- a spiritual autobiography, written in the fullness of his poetic and mystic powers. After sketching the lineal and temporal graph, the Guru goes on to speak of his pre-natal existence, when his disembodied self was already a part of the Divine Consciousness, free from the coils of mortality. However, at the behest of the Great God of Creation, he came into the world again to fulfil his destiny. Such orders are received by the elect whenever the Lord’s name no longer remains a spiritual tender. In a long colloquy, God told him how the prophets and Messiahs created by Him from time to time “Struck out their several paths”, and thus denied Him in the effect. And He concluded thus :
“I have cherished thee as My son,
And created thee to extend My religion.
Go and spread My religion there,
And restrain the world from senseless acts.”
The modern mind perhaps will find it difficult to accept the story-every religion , in fact, has its own share of charisma-and may relate it to the Saviour idea. But as the events in the crowded and climactic life of the Guru will show, his entire being was attuned to the received Command, and issued forth in action like a volley of grape-shot from the mouth of a cannon. It was indeed the Word turned deed!
More significantly, it was not an isolated splinter, or even the sovereign birth, but the final commandment in the decaloge, or the last link in the apostolic chain. For Gobind Singh, the Tenth Guru, was only the spirit of Guru Nanak journeying through nine houses to be finally diffused in the commonality of the Khalsa. All this would reveal-the grand design underlying the divine scheme of things. The Mark will always be showing!
His childhood spent at patna and in the Punjab countryside is characterized by an intense quest for readiness. Handsome in his aspect and stance, lithe and lissome of limb, he wrought his frame into an instrument of supreme will till the body itself grew luminous with thought. As a child, he is known to have been fond of fun and frolic, of riding and hunting, of archery and falconry; but all these exercises were only a prelude to the martial theme of his existential raison d’etre . They were a kind of warming-up for the battles he was destined to fight. A commissioned soul was busy at the outset equipping itself with all the weapons needed to assault the forces of evil and darkness. Viewed thus, the little acts of gallantry, compassion and piety associated with the young Guru fall into their proper places and proportions. “The figure in the carpet” begins to emerge.
This was also the period of his scholastic education when he imbibed the ancient lore and wisdom of his ancestors only to retain the essential grain or pith of things. Learning came to him easily and naturally like one born to it, but he never allowed it to become a mill-stone around his neck. He was indeed contemptuous of cold and abstract philosophy, brahminical logic-chopping and dry dialectics. His mind responded and music of life, and shrank from the sight and sound of bleached bones. For such a youth, all real education was in the experience-fields of life. And to this purpose, he bent his great energies and his great talents.
One is not, therefore, surprised to find him elevated to the pontificate at the age of nine, when his father, Guru Teg Bahadur invested him with authority on the eve of his martyrdom at Delhi. It was no ordinaty pffice, but Gobind Rai was no ordinary mortal either. As the seventh Guru, Har Rai, had once told his son, Ram Rai-an aspirant to the gaddi: “TheGuruship is like tiger’s milk, and can only be held in a golden cup.” It was obvious to all around that the young Master was destined to climb the highest reaches. In fact, he had proved his worthiness in asking the Ninth Guru to offer himself as a sacrifice to save dharma. Such powers are vouchsafed only to the lords of life and death.
Thereafter, the Guru’s thought is governed by two powerful urges-to vindicate his father’s martyrdom and to redress his country’s wrongs. The personal and the national cause meet now to become a universal cause. Henceforth, tyranny in all its forms was to be faced and annihilated. And there was to be no respite, no weakening of the hand till he had proved himself in action. As he pleads passionately with the Lord:
“Now be pleased to grant me the boon I crave with clasped hands,
That when the end of my life cometh, I may die fighting in a mighty battle”.
Thus all his earlier days were in the nature of a challenge and a grand rehearsal. The call could not be denied.
Before long, the moment of choice arrived. It was also the moment of truth. The pack of hill princes, princelings amd Mughal satraps grown green with jealousy at the Guru’s phenomenal success and popularity was soon baying at his heels. All types of cohorts, marauders and desperadoes were pressed into service to stem rising tide. However there was no stopping the revolutionary spirit which now swept the Punjab. The skirmishes and frays around Anandpur- the Master’s seat-soon developed into cruel, desperate and long engagements. No quarter was given or expected. The battles of Bhangani and Nadaun wherein the enemy hosts lay utterly petrified, mauled and beaten despite their superiority in numbers and arms served notice on the Mughal rulers that the youthful and valiant Guru meant business. This made even the Emperor campaigning in the Deccan sit up and think.
Aurangzeb, a most bigoted, fanatical and obscurantist monarch, however, failed to see that the kinetic power of the Word and of the idea was more than a match for the massed might of princes and potentates. And when the Word also happened to be armed in the steel- the only language tyranny understood and respected – it was a fateful marriage of spirit and sword. There was nothing in the Mughal text-book to counter such a challenge.
II
Though Guru Gobind Singh’s name was beginning to tell, all was not well with the Sikh house itself. The whole edifice with loving care and industry by the preceding Gurus needed a face-lift. The original impulse had weakened ever so slightly in the interval. Such tremors are perhaps inevitable in a growing organism, and are in the end only a means of the furtherance of the dream. Schismatic sects, family feuds and the institution of the parasitical priestly order called the “Masands” were no more than hair-cracks in the splendid house reared by Guru Nanak. The Sikh Organisation was never at any time in danger of losing its pristine image or its identity. There is, in fact, no difference between the ideals followed by earlier Gurus and those followed by Guru Gobind Singh. A discerning eye could at once see the oceanic wash underlying the surface ripples. The fundamental continuity remained unaffected. The end was the same; only the means had to be new in the changed context.
Though his predecessors had continued to build and replenish the spiritual reservoirs of the Sikhs, most of them were by nature God-intoxicated divines believing in resignation and quietism. It was left to the Tenth Guru to orientate the organization in new directions, whilst keeping the heritage securely in view. The decision to evolve a new race of soldier-saints who were to immerse fully in “the destructive element” , to use a Conradian phrase, was the highest moment of a mind in search of absolutes.
Thus the summoning of the great Congress of the Sikhs in the year 1699 at Anandpur whre Guru Gobind Singh formally initiated the Order of the Khalsa amidst symbolic sacrifices and ceremonies was an event that was destined to have far-reaching consequences. A purely religious body was now charged with political duties as well, and invested with insignia and authority. The politicizing of the creed was to prove that in the Sikh graph, politics and religion intersected at the apex. The Sikhs was never a recluse, but a heartly participant in the drama of life. He was to partake of its riches and splendour, its glories and ecstasies, its trials and terrors. His estate had been enlarged to encompass all that goes to make the spangled panorama of creation.
It was also at this great congregation that a martial edge was given to the creed, and the doctrine of the sword proclaimed in tones of thunder and prophecy. A fiery baptism ensued. It is a point often misunderstood and misinterpreted , and, therefore, needs to be placed in its proper perspective. The Guru was not advocating militarism as such, or apotheocising violence. A soul in torment at the miseries and sufferings of its compatriots could never excuse, let alone, celebrate arms, and glorify gratuitous bloodshed. However, it could not lie unmoved “inside the whale” and allow the storms to blow overhead. It was the Guru’s mandate from Heaven to shake the empire of loot, larceny and lies. And even here, he restored to force only when all other means-appeal, advice, argument and persuasion-had no avail. As he wrote in Zafarnama or “The Epistle of Victory” addressed to aurangzeb :
When all else hast failed thee,
Thou shalt rightfully lift the sword.
No wonder, in the scheme of things, he enunciated a philosophy of instant and purposive action. There was to be no hiatus between the hand and the heart. The generosity and aristocracy of the impulse were to be respected. There was no room here for prevarication, casuistry, “doublethink” and procrastination. Only a divided and uncertain mind sought refuge in abstractions and ambiguities. A committed soul could not but be a partisan of truth. And truth is strife. He moves away from the traditional Hindu idea of passivity and inaction. This is not to say that he also moves away from the still centre; only he finds it inside, at the heart of tempest.
Thus he sang full-throatedly the Song of the Sabre, for he relayed steel and action to the primordial and ultimate Principle of Creation. He identified the sword with the Lord, and thus waged wars in His Name. He submits himself to the power and law of the Sword-Lord.
“All-Steel, I am thy slave.
Deeming me Thine own, preserve me;
Think of mine honour, whose arm Thou hast taken.
Deeming me Thine own, cherish me,
Single out and destroy mine enemies.
May both my kitchen and my sword prevail in the world.”
The idea of the langar or the kitchen inevitably brings to kind the concept of democracy and socialism associated with the Guru. The Beloved Five who had offered their heads to his flashing sword on the Initiation Day were not drawn from the elite but from the different stratified varnas or castes. The Sikh portals were thrown wide open to all the disinherited and the dispossessed of the world. In the context of the conditions then prevailing in India, it was such a shattering proclamation that the stricken and moribund society of the day insulated by blood-walls was subjected to the severest strains. The Guru’s word released the dormant energies of all the lower orders comprising the peasant, the potter, the artisan, the sweeper , the scavenger and the like. They now brike bread with the master himself, and were honoured and equal citizens of a spiritual commonwealth. In fact, the Guru had restored them their dignity and their manhood, their powers of assertion and dream. Cowardice was destroyed root and branch, and the new entrants were named Singhs or lions. This miraculous transformation was effected both through exhortation and deed. A congeries of serfs and slaves was soon galvanized into action, and licked into a community of heroes and martyrs. The leonine aspect was symbolized in the rough exterior. The sparrow could now look at the hawk in the eye.
But nothing great is ever born without pain and travail. It is the immutable law of life. There is pain even as a child or a star is born, even as the rose-bud silently explodes into the flower. No wonder the Khalsa was born amidst an ecstasy of pain. Few peoples in the world have known such sovereignty of suffering. The Guru taught them to wear pain as the garment of lord. Tempered in the smithy of the soul, pain turned into ineffable joy till the two were facets of the same reality. The concept of sacrifice was enshrined in the heart.
It is this ideal which runs like a purple thread in the tapestry of Guru Gobind Singh’s life. He had cultivated it as a child, and brooded over it in his period of contemplation and study. He knew the hour would strike ineluctably, and he had to answer the Summons. Thus alone can we unders6tand the supreme spirit of faith and hope which inspired him even in the darkest days of his creature existence. The long and cruel siege of Anandpur and Battle of Chamkaur were only a proving ground for his mettle. The world knows of no saga of sacrifice as great and astonishing as the one which was now to unfold itself. He watched astonishingly the sufferings of his soldiers trapped inside the fort. He contemplated the disclaimer signed in panic and distress by his forty followers. And he debated the issue within the fastness of his own mind. The answer was clear and unequivocal. Even as the enemy troops were swarming all over the place, and the famished file of his Sikhs was being slaughtered before his eyes, he blessed his two elder sons, aged seventeen and fourteen, laced them with arms, and sent them forth to the battlefield to die for the cause which had brought him into the world. It was not long before the younger two, tender of age but stout of heart, were sepulchered alive by the Mughal Governor of Sirhind when they scornfully rejected all offers of clemency that sought to undermine their faith. A father and four sons had been offered as sacrifices to the Mughal Moloch. That was perhaps the only way left to exorcize the monster. His own death in 1708 at the hands of a Pathan assassin when the guru had settled down at nander in the Deccan after a compact with the new emperor, Bahadur shah, thus completed the picture. A whole family had borne the Cross one by one. The wheel of sacrifice had come full circle.
The dying Guru addressed himself to the sorrowing Sikhs;
“I have entrusted you to the Immortal God. Ever remain under His protection, and trust to 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 Guru’s 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 Granth Sahib and the Khalsa.”
And the voice was stilled, but not the Word. The word abides.
III
Guru Gobind singh was a rare amalgam of divinity, action and poetry. In a way, all that he did was poetic in spirit, for poetry is the inner and vital soul of things. However, he was also a great poet, and a profound scholar in his own right. Vastly read in Sanskrit, Hindi and Persian literatutes, he brought a classical and cosmopolitan awareness to bear upon his own splendid compositions. First at Paonta, where he presided over a court of 52 poets,
GURU GOBIND SINGH THE REDEEMER.
There He comes, He who bursts open the closed buds of souls and mocks at the long wise face of me! And with a smile unravels all knots of the mind, rock-sealed so long in self-deception! And makes the old skip like fresh new children in the air, and whirls the crowds in the magic ring of His Presence, and makes them dance in a joy undisturbed with care. In his movement is what the dreamers dreamt, the seekers sought, and those with gifts wrought in word and deed. There stands He, the Unseen, Yet even near- Guru Gobind Singh, the Redeemer. Life lingers still on the meadows and the grass. The evening draws down its veil, the morning lifts it up! The housewife wakes to grind the corn, to draw water from the well, to the day’s labor. The ploughman goes with his plough and pair to till the ancient soil, to sow, to reap and to fill the home of God: The mason builds, and the carpenter shape wood, the maidens sing and spin the white cotton flakes.
All eyes rise to a vision of Him Who fought to free them, and the eternal bustle behind is alive with His Unseen resolves to love and die for all, He is Guru Gobind Singh, the Redeemer.
kulindersingh@yahoo.com
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