Sikhs

“ The character of the Sikhs, or rather Singhs, which is the name by which the followers of Gúrú Góvind, who are all devoted to arms, are distinguished, is very marked. They have, in general, the Hindú cast of countenance, somewhat altered by their long beards, and are to the full as active as the Mahrátas; and much more robust, from their living fuller, and enjoying a better and colder climate. Their courage is equal, at all times, to that of any natives of India; and when wrought upon by prejudice or religion, is quite desperate. ”

“ I bivouacked with the men without food or covering, and our nights are very cold—a burning camp in our front, our brave fellows lying down under a heavy cannonade, which continued during the whole night—mixed with the wild cry of the Sikhs our English hurrah, the tramp of men, and the groans of the dying. ”

“ The Sikhs have been reputed deceitful and cruel; but I know no grounds upon which they can be considered more so than the other tribes of India. They seemed to me, from all the intercourse I had with them, to be more open and sincere than the Mahrátas, and less rude and savage than the Afgháns. They have, indeed, become, from national success, too proud of their own strength, and too irritable in their tempers, to have patience for the wiles of the former ”

“ Sikhs must have one form of initiation, sprinkling of water by five of the faithful; they should worship the one invisible God and honour the memory of Guru Nanak and his successors; their watchword should be, “Sri wah guru ji ka khalsa, sri wah guru ji ki fatah” (Khalsa of God, victory to God!) , but they should revere and bow to nought visible save the Granth Sahib, the book of their belief; they should occasionally bathe in the sacred tank of Amritsar; their locks should remain unshorn; and they should name themselves singhs or lions. Arms should dignify their person ”

“ Of all the many peoples of India none possesses for us greater or more varied historical interest than the Sikhs, a people who four hundred years ago as a reformed religious sect sprang from the ranks of the Jats, a numerous as well as the most important agricultural tribe in the Punjab, descended from the ancient Scythian Getæ. They stand out prominently as men of action, who have preserved inherited racial characteristics foreign to Orientals, and evolved themselves by the strength of their own arms into one of the finest military types to be found anywhere. ”

“ If the traveler chooses, he may find many an amusing drive in the native parts of the town. Tall Sikhs, whose hair and beards have never known scissors or razor, and who stride along with a swagger and high-caste dignity; effeminate Cingalese; Hindoo clerks, smirking, conceited and dandified too, according to their own notions; almost naked palkee-bearers, who nevertheless, if there is the slightest shower, put up an umbrella to protect their shaven crowns; up-country girls with rings in their noses and rings on their toes ”

“ The temple is the centre and inspiration of the Sikh religion. The Sikhs are an interesting people. They rallied round one of the multitude of the Hindu religious reformers, named Nanak Shah, who established this cult about the end of the fifteenth century. It may be called an amalgam of Mohammedanism and Hinduism. It unites the monotheism and the stern morality of the former with much of the petty ritual of the latter. It does not observe caste. Still, in outer matters of observances, Sikhs are not easily distinguishable from ordinary Hindus. ”

“ The conduct of the Sikhs to their women differs in no material respect from that of the tribes of Hindús, or Muhammedans, from whom they are descended. Their moral character with regard to women, and indeed in most other points, may, from the freedom of their habits, generally be considered as much more lax than that of their ancestors, who lived under the restraint of severe restrictions, and whose fear of excommunication from their cast, at least obliged them to cover their sins with the veil of decency. ”

“ THE SIKH It has often been said that the Indian Army has kept Sikhism alive. War is a conserver of the Khalsa, peace a dissolvent. When one understands how this is so, one has grasped what Sikhism has done for the followers of the faith, and why the Sikh is different in habit and thought from his Hindu and Muhammadan neighbour, though in most cases he derives from the same stock.
The Sikhs are a community, not a race. The son of a Sikh is not himself a Sikh until he has taken the pahul, the ceremony by which he is admitted into the Khalsa, the community of the faithful. ”

“ Theoretically Sikhism acknowledges no caste; but in practice the Sikh of Jat or Rajput descent will not eat or drink with Sikhs drawn from the menial classes, though the lowest in the social scale have been tried and proved on the field, and shown themselves possessed of military qualities which, apart from caste prejudice, should admit them to an equal place in the brotherhood of the faithful. ”

“ Though driven back by superior numbers to take shelter in the ravines and folds of the ground, they leapt forward again and again at the call of their regimental leaders, till they gained a footing by shouldering one another up to the embrasures, capturing and spiking the guns in their front. The Sikhs fought stubbornly and desperately hand to hand, till at last the assailants, swarming through the breaches, mounted the ramparts with cheers of victory and took the whole line of intrenchments ”

“ Then you have heard lies, sahib. I know the burden of their song. A bad Sikh and a bad Englishman alike resemble rock torn loose. The greater the height from which they fall, the deeper they dive into the mud. Which is the true Sikh, he who marched with us or he who abuses us? Yet I am told that in America men believe what hired Sikhs write for the German papers. ”

“ In a will case lately before the Punjab law courts, the decision was that the Sikhs at the present time are regarded only as a sect of Hindus; but the local Sikh organ, 'The Khalsa,'—its policy being to maintain the original reformed religion and worship of the Sikh Church,—protested that Sikhism differs widely from Hinduism in fundamental doctrine; that Sikhs do not consider themselves Hindus, and do not respect the Hindu pantheon or observe their religious rites; that Nanak, though born in a Hindu family, was not a Hindu, but established an independent religious sect of his own ”

“ Large bodies of Sikhs are employed and drilled as Armed Constables in Hongkong, in the Straits Settlements and in the Protected Native States of the Malay Peninsula, who, after a fixed time of service, return to their country, their places being at once taken by their compatriots, and one cannot help thinking what effect this might have in case of future disturbances in our Indian Empire, should the Sikh natives make common cause with the malcontents. ”

“ Recently in the columns of a Punjab newspaper he has expressed his conviction that the political object which led the Sikhs to adopt a military life—viz., the establishment of a perfectly peaceful Government and the maintenance of a rule of justice and religious toleration—has been completely realised under the benign reign of the British Government, and that the Sikhs, fully regarding that Government as a god-send, have accordingly placed themselves entirely at its service. ”

“ The fidelity of the Sikhs had long been suspected. It was now considered by no means an impossible event, that the march of our army, worn, sick, and incumbered, through the Punjab, would offer a temptation too strong to be resisted by the mutinous Sikh soldiery, whose real feeling had betrayed itself early in the year at Peshawur. ”

“ The publication of orders, in which it was considered that services performed by the Sikhs were referred to in exaggerated terms as compared with the purely British, produced for the time being one effect to which allusion may here be made. “Why,” said a very intelligent officer of that nationality, who was well known to most of us in cantonments, “you admit yourselves that we saved India for you; if we can do that for you foreigners, why should we not take the country for ourselves?” At the very time he spoke there were 82,000 Sikh troops in British employ. ”

“ The history of the Sikhs, after the death of Tégh Behádur, assumes a new aspect. It is no longer the record of a sect, who, revering the conciliatory and mild tenets of their founder, desired more to protect themselves than to injure others ”

“ The Sikhs had now reached nationhood under an able king fully equipped with confidence and energy, who, by transforming the Khalsa into a territorial power, decided once and for all whether the Sikh or the Afghan was to rule the Punjab. ”

“ Once aroused to sense of duty towards the weak and the oppressed, they have always been found willing to give their lives without remorse or regret. Sikhs constitute a major portion of the military and police forces of India and of several British colonies. Those tourists who have been in the East will recall the tall, bearded Sikh policemen of the British principalities of Shanghai and Hongkong. Since the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857, Sikhs have always been regarded as the most loyal and devoted subjects of the British Crown in India. ”

“ The education of the Sikhs renders them hardy, and capable of great fatigue; and the condition of the society in which they live, affords constant exercise to that restless spirit of activity and enterprise which their religion has generated. Such a race cannot be epicures: they appear, indeed, generally to despise luxury of diet, and pride themselves in their coarse fare. Their dress is also plain, not unlike that of the Hindús, [142] equally light and divested of ornament. Some of the chiefs wear gold bangles ”

“ The inhabitants exceed ten millions in number; nearly two-thirds of them are Mohammedans—a very unusual ratio in India. The Sikhs, however, are the most interesting constituent in this population. They are a kind of Hindoo dissenters, differing from other Hindoos chiefly in these three points—the renunciation of caste, the admission of proselytes, and the practice of the military art by nearly all the males. ”

“ The Sikh converts, it has been before stated, continue, after they have quitted their original religion, all those civil usages and customs of the tribes to which they belonged, that they can practise, without infringing the tenets of Nánac, or the institutions of Gúrú Góvind. They are most particular with regard to their intermarriages; and, on this point, Sikhs descended from Hindús almost invariably conform to Hindú customs, every tribe intermarrying within [136] itself. ”

“ The principal leaders among the Sikhs affect to be familiar and easy of intercourse with their inferiors, and to despise the pomp and state of the Muhammedan chiefs: but their pride often counteracts this disposition; and they appeared to me to have, in proportion to their rank and consequence, more state, and to maintain equal, if not more, reserve and dignity with their followers, than is usual with the Mahráta chiefs. ”

“ I have only quite recently met in Lahore young men claiming to be descendants of the Gurus, who told me that they were Hindus, and that they could not read the characters in which the sacred books of the Sikhs were written. Whether the object of their tutors and advisers was or was not to make them disloyal, such youths are ignorant of the Sikh religion, and of its prophecies in favour of the English, and contract exclusive social customs and prejudices to the extent of calling us Malechhas, or persons of impure desires, and inspiring disgust for the customs and habits of Christians. ”

“ The weak state to which the empire of Hindústan was reduced; and the confusion into which the provinces of Lahore and Cábul were thrown, by the death of Nádir; were events of too favourable a nature to the Sikhs to be neglected by that race, who became daily more bold, from their numbers being greatly increased by the union of all those who had taken shelter in the mountains; the readmission into the sect of those who, to save their lives, had abjured, for a period, their usages; and the conversion of a number of proselytes, who hastened to join a standard, under which robbery was made sacred ”

“ A happy consequence of our wars with the Sikhs was that we learned their great value as soldiers when mutual respect was won by valour in the field. After the first war some Sikh regiments were raised for our service, and after the annexation Sikhs were freely enlisted in the Frontier Force, and also in some regiments of the Bengal army, where they were not, however, welcomed by the Brahman fraternity, who resented intrusion on their own preserves as tending to break up their solidarity. ”

“ Religious liberty for all was proclaimed, and it was recognised to be a healthy and good thing for the Sikhs to maintain fidelity to the instincts and traditions of their religious convictions, which were not inconsistent with sincere allegiance to the British Crown ”

“ An appalling incident last spring showed how quick the fierce races of Northern India are to burst into violent feuds amongst themselves for which no responsibility can be imputed to their alien rulers. The Sikhs, though less numerous than the Hindus and the Mahomedans, form an extremely influential community in the Punjab, which was the cradle and always has been the stronghold of their religion, and was only a century ago the seat of their political and military power. ”