Appearance
6.14 — The Sikhs: From Nanak to Ranjit Singh
Guru Nanak's first recorded statement after his enlightenment experience, according to Sikh tradition, was: "There is no Hindu, there is no Musalman."
He meant it as a criticism of both — that the labels had become substitutes for the conduct they were supposed to describe. Five centuries later the community that grew from that statement had its own scripture, its own institutions, its own military order and its own kingdom, and its history is one of the clearest cases anywhere of a religious movement being reshaped by persecution into something its founder would not have predicted.
Nanak
Born 1469 at Talwandi in Punjab, in a Hindu family, in a region already saturated with the devotional movements of Chapter 6.9 — Kabir's verses, Sufi practice, and Bhakti singing were all part of the environment.
His teaching, in its essentials.
One God, formless, without gender, not incarnated, the creator, present everywhere. The opening line of the Sikh scripture — the Mul Mantar — begins Ik Onkar, one reality, and the whole theology follows from taking that seriously.
No ritual, no priesthood, no pilgrimage as means of salvation. He is recorded as pointedly rejecting the sacred thread, ritual bathing and caste observance.
Three practical rules, and they are the most distinctive part. Naam japna — remember God constantly. Kirat karni — earn an honest living by your own work. Vand chakna — share what you earn.
The second of these is unusual. Nanak explicitly rejected renunciation. The householder who works and shares is the model, not the ascetic. Sikhism has no monasticism.
Two institutions carried the ethics into practice, and both survive unchanged.
Langar, the free community kitchen, where everyone sits in rows on the floor and eats the same food regardless of caste, religion, gender or status. In a society organised around who may eat with whom, this was a direct and deliberate attack on the whole system, and it is still served daily at every gurdwara. The kitchen at the Golden Temple feeds tens of thousands of people every day, free, to anyone who comes.
Sangat, the congregation, in which anyone may participate and lead, without priestly mediation.
And he travelled extensively, by tradition to Mecca, Baghdad, Sri Lanka and across India, in dialogue with teachers of other traditions.
The ten Gurus, and what changed
Nanak appointed a successor rather than a son, choosing a disciple on merit — a precedent that lasted for the first several successions.
The succession's early phase was institutional. Guru Angad developed the Gurmukhi script, which gave Punjabi a writing system distinct from the Devanagari and Persian scripts and made the community's texts its own. Guru Amar Das organised the community geographically and insisted that anyone wishing to meet him first eat in the langar — including, by tradition, the emperor Akbar. Guru Ram Das founded Amritsar.
Guru Arjan (fifth) compiled the Adi Granth in 1604, the scripture, and its editorial policy is remarkable: it includes not only the Gurus' compositions but the verses of Hindu and Muslim saints — Kabir, Namdev, Ravidas, Farid — chosen for their content. A scripture that deliberately incorporates other traditions' voices is rare anywhere.
And then the turn. Arjan was executed in 1606 under Jahangir, on charges connected with having supported a rebel prince. This is the first Sikh martyrdom and it changed the community's direction.
Guru Hargobind (sixth) responded by taking up arms. He wore two swords, representing miri and piri — temporal and spiritual authority — and built the Akal Takht at Amritsar facing the Harmandir Sahib, a seat of temporal authority beside the seat of worship. Sikhism from this point holds both together as a matter of doctrine.
Guru Tegh Bahadur (ninth) was executed in Delhi in 1675 under Aurangzeb (Chapter 6.12). Sikh tradition holds that Kashmiri Pandits facing forced conversion appealed to him, and that he told the authorities they should convert him first and then the Pandits would follow. He refused conversion and was beheaded. The execution is documented; the framing of it as a defence of another community's religious freedom is Sikh tradition, and it is the framing that has shaped Sikh self-understanding since.
The Khalsa
Guru Gobind Singh (tenth), Tegh Bahadur's son, founded the Khalsa at Anandpur in 1699, and the founding is the pivotal event in Sikh history.
The account: he called an assembly, asked for a volunteer willing to give his head, took one man into a tent and emerged with a bloodied sword, and repeated this five times. The five, the Panj Pyare, then emerged alive. He initiated them with amrit — sweetened water stirred with a double-edged sword — and then asked them to initiate him in turn, which put the Guru and the disciples on the same footing.
The five initiated men came from different castes, including from groups regarded as low. All took the name Singh, lion; women took Kaur, princess. This abolished caste surnames at a stroke for those who took it up, which was the point.
The five articles of faith — the five Ks — were prescribed: uncut hair (kesh), a comb (kangha), a steel bracelet (kara), a sword or dagger (kirpan), and a specific undergarment (kachhera). Each has a practical and a symbolic reading, and together they made a Sikh immediately identifiable, which is both a discipline and, deliberately, a removal of the option of hiding.
A code of conduct came with it — no tobacco, no intoxicants, no meat killed by ritual bleeding, no adultery, and the obligation to defend the defenceless.
And Gobind Singh ended the line of human Gurus. Before his death in 1708 he declared that the scripture itself would be the Guru thereafter — the Guru Granth Sahib. A community whose ultimate authority is a book rather than a person cannot have a schism over succession, which is a considerable institutional achievement, and it is why the scripture is treated with the honours due to a living Guru.
His own losses were total. All four of his sons were killed — two in battle, and the two youngest, aged about seven and nine, executed at Sirhind after refusing conversion. These events are central to Sikh memory and they are why the community's relationship with the Mughal state is what it is.
From band of soldiers to state
Banda Singh Bahadur, after Gobind Singh's death, led a rising in Punjab from 1709, took Sirhind, abolished the zamindari system in the territory he held and granted land to cultivators, and was captured and executed with his followers in 1716.
Then decades of extreme persecution. Provincial governors put prices on Sikh heads; the community retreated to forests and hills. Two episodes of mass killing in the 1740s and 1760s are remembered as the Chhota Ghallughara and Vada Ghallughara, the smaller and greater holocausts.
And the community survived by organising into misls — twelve or so bands, each under its own chief, cooperating through a general assembly at Amritsar. They filled the vacuum left by Mughal collapse and Abdali's raids, and by the 1770s they controlled most of Punjab in a loose confederacy.
Ranjit Singh
Ranjit Singh took Lahore in 1799 at nineteen and unified the misls into a single kingdom, ruling until 1839.
His kingdom ran from the Sutlej to the Khyber Pass and included Kashmir, Multan and Peshawar — and it is the only Indian state that ever took and held the Khyber, closing the door through which every invader for three thousand years had come (Chapter 6.1).
The army was modernised more thoroughly than any other Indian force. He hired European officers — French, Italian, and others, many of them Napoleonic veterans — to train infantry and artillery on European lines. The Fauj-i-Khas was drilled, uniformed, paid regularly and equipped with locally manufactured artillery, and it was, by the assessment of the British officers who eventually fought it, the most formidable army in India.
Governance was deliberately non-sectarian, and this is well documented rather than legend. His court and administration included Muslims and Hindus at the highest levels — his foreign minister Fakir Azizuddin was Muslim, his finance minister Dina Nath was Hindu, and his army had Muslim units. He did not levy jizya. He funded Hindu temples and Muslim mosques as well as gurdwaras, including gold plating for the Harmandir Sahib, which is why it is called the Golden Temple. He forbade cow slaughter, which was a concession in the other direction.
He also kept the Koh-i-Noor, taken from the Afghan ruler Shah Shuja, which the British took after annexation and which is now in the British crown jewels.
Why it fell
Within ten years of his death in 1839 the kingdom was gone.
No succession arrangement. His heirs were weak or children, and there was a rapid sequence of assassinations at court.
The army became a political actor. A large, well-paid, undefeated army with no strong ruler above it began electing its own committees and effectively directing state policy. This is the Roman problem of Chapter 5.3, in Punjab.
And two Anglo-Sikh wars, 1845–46 and 1848–49. The fighting was hard — British commanders' accounts of Ferozeshah and Chillianwala describe some of the most difficult engagements they had fought in India. The Sikh army was betrayed at senior level in the first war, with the commanders Lal Singh and Tej Singh acting in ways multiple sources describe as deliberate treachery, and the second war ended in annexation in 1849.
Punjab was the last major Indian territory annexed. After it there was no independent Indian power left.
And then the reversal of alliances. Within eight years, in 1857, Punjab supplied troops that helped the British retake Delhi (Chapter 6.18) — because the Sikh soldiery had no attachment to the Mughal dynasty being restored there, which had executed two of their Gurus.
Where this shows up in your life
The langar is one of the largest free food operations in the world and it runs entirely on volunteer labour and donation. During the COVID-19 pandemic and during Indian floods and earthquakes, gurdwara kitchens have repeatedly been among the fastest large-scale food responders anywhere in the country.
The five Ks and the turban make Sikhs visible, which has had a cost — Sikhs have been attacked abroad by people who mistook them for something else, most notoriously in the United States after 2001.
Sikhs are around 2 percent of India's population and have been substantially over-represented in the Indian armed forces, in agriculture — Punjab was the centre of the Green Revolution (Chapter 6.28) — and in emigration, with large communities in Britain, Canada, the United States and Australia.
And the community's twentieth-century history carries two more events this volume returns to: Punjab's partition in 1947, which cut the community's homeland in half and produced some of the worst violence anywhere (Chapter 6.23), and the events of 1984 (Chapter 6.27).
What the next page covers
We have now seen the Rajputs lose to the Turks, Vijayanagara lose at Talikota, the Marathas lose at Panipat, the Sikhs lose to the British, and the Mughals themselves lose to Nader Shah and Abdali. Chapter 6.15 stops the narrative and asks the question directly: why did Indian states keep losing? It examines the horse problem, the military technology gap and when it opened, the difference between a coalition and a unified command, the role of treachery and why it was structural rather than accidental, the fiscal and naval gaps, and the argument about caste and military recruitment. It is the analytical centre of this Part.