Sikhism

Origins in the Punjabi Sant Tradition

Sikhism emerged in fifteenth-century Punjab against the backdrop of the Sant tradition of northern India — poet-saints such as Kabir, Namdev, Ravidas and Sheikh Farid, whose vernacular devotional verse rejected caste hierarchy, ritualism and the authority of Brahmin priesthood in favor of direct, interior devotion to a formless God. That northern Sant current itself drew on the broader Bhakti movement whose earliest expressions had appeared centuries earlier among the Tamil Alvars and Nayanars of South India before spreading north. Punjab in this period lay under the Delhi Sultanate and then, from Babur's 1526 conquest, the early Mughal Empire, with a population mixed between Hindu and Muslim communities. Guru Nanak's teaching addressed both, declining to treat the distinction as spiritually meaningful.

Guru Nanak (1469–1539)

Born in 1469 in Talwandi (now Nankana Sahib, Pakistan) to Kalu Mehta and Tripta, of the Khatri caste, Nanak worked in his youth as an accountant (modi) under the local Muslim governor Daulat Khan Lodi at Sultanpur. Sikh tradition holds that a formative spiritual experience there — a three-day disappearance into the Bein river — was followed by his first recorded declaration, that there is no Hindu and no Muslim, only a shared human relationship to the one God. He then undertook a series of long missionary journeys, the udasis, which hagiographical accounts (the janamsakhis) describe as reaching as far as Mecca, Baghdad and Sri Lanka. In later life he settled at Kartarpur on the Ravi river, establishing the first Sikh community around daily hymn-singing (kirtan) and the communal kitchen (langar), and before his death in 1539 named his disciple Lehna, not his own sons, as successor — establishing merit rather than heredity as the basis of Sikh leadership from the outset.

The Early Gurus (1539–1606)

Guru Angad (1504–1552), formerly Lehna, standardized the Gurmukhi script for writing Punjabi, promoted physical training through wrestling grounds, and strengthened the langar. Guru Amar Das (1479–1574) organized the growing community into 22 preaching districts (manjis) run by appointed deputies, opposed sati and the veiling of women, and appointed women as missionaries; Mughal and Sikh sources agree that Emperor Akbar visited him at Goindwal and ate in the langar seated among ordinary followers. Guru Ram Das (1534–1581) founded the city of Amritsar around 1577 and dug its sacred pool, the Amrit Sarovar, besides composing the Lavan hymns still used in Sikh wedding rites. Guru Arjan (1563–1606) compiled the Adi Granth in 1604 at Ramsar, gathering the hymns of the preceding Gurus together with the Bhagat Bani — devotional verse by non-Sikh saints including Kabir, Ravidas, Namdev and Sheikh Farid — and built the Harmandir Sahib with four open doors, one on each side, as a statement of accessibility to all. He was arrested and died in Mughal custody in Lahore in 1606; Jahangir's own memoir, the Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri, records displeasure connected to Arjan's blessing of the rebel prince Khusrau and a fine imposed on him, while Sikh tradition holds he died under torture — the two accounts agree on the fact of his death in custody but differ on its circumstances.

Militarization and the Later Gurus (1606–1708)

Guru Hargobind (1595–1644) responded to his father Arjan's death by wearing two swords, representing miri (temporal authority) and piri (spiritual authority), and built the Akal Takht opposite the Harmandir Sahib as a seat of worldly Sikh authority, engaging Mughal forces in several skirmishes. Guru Har Rai (1630–1661) ran a herbal dispensary and maintained an armed but largely peaceable court; his sympathy toward Aurangzeb's defeated rival Dara Shikoh, whom his physicians reportedly treated, drew Mughal suspicion, and when his elder son Ram Rai altered a line of scripture to placate Aurangzeb, Har Rai passed him over and named his younger son, Har Krishan, as successor instead. Guru Har Krishan (1656–1664) became Guru at five and died at eight of smallpox contracted while tending Delhi's sick during an epidemic. Guru Tegh Bahadur (1621–1675) was executed in Delhi in 1675 on Aurangzeb's orders; Sikh accounts connect his execution to his defense of the right of Kashmiri Pandits to practice their religion freely. Guru Gobind Singh (1666–1708) founded the Khalsa at Anandpur on Baisakhi, 13 April 1699, initiating the first five members (the Panj Pyare) and instituting the Five Ks and the names Singh and Kaur to erase caste distinction. He lost all four of his sons to the Mughal-Sikh wars that followed — his two elder sons killed fighting at Chamkaur in 1705, his two younger sons executed at Sirhind on the orders of the Mughal governor Wazir Khan. He was assassinated at Nanded in 1708 by an Afghan in Mughal service, and before his death declared the Guru Granth Sahib the eternal Guru, closing the line of human Gurus.

Scripture

The Guru Granth Sahib runs to 1,430 standardized pages (angs) in every printed copy, written in Gurmukhi and drawing on Punjabi, Sanskrit, Persian and other languages. It contains the compositions of six Gurus (Nanak, Angad, Amar Das, Ram Das, Arjan and Tegh Bahadur) together with the Bhagat Bani of Hindu and Muslim saints outside the Sikh Gurus themselves, a deliberate pluralism unusual among scriptures of its period. Its textual history runs from the Kartarpuri Bir, the original manuscript compiled by Guru Arjan and preserved by his descendants at Kartarpur, to the Damdami Bir associated with Guru Gobind Singh at Damdama Sahib, which incorporated Guru Tegh Bahadur's hymns. A separate text, the Dasam Granth, attributed to Guru Gobind Singh and compiled after his death (traditionally by Bhai Mani Singh, c. 1734), mixes devotional and martial poetry, including the autobiographical Bachittar Natak; its status alongside the Guru Granth Sahib remains a live point of debate within the Sikh community.

The Khalsa and Sikh Identity

Initiation into the Khalsa is through Amrit Sanchar, a baptism ceremony in which sweetened water is stirred with a double-edged sword. Baptized Sikhs maintain the Five Ks: uncut hair (kesh), a wooden comb (kangha), a steel bracelet (kara), a ceremonial sword (kirpan), and cotton undergarments (kachera), and adopt the surname Singh (lion) or Kaur (princess) in place of caste-marking family names.

Sikh Political History

After Guru Gobind Singh's death, Banda Singh Bahadur led an armed Sikh revolt against Mughal authority in Punjab from 1709 until his capture and execution in 1716. Through the eighteenth century Sikh power was organized into rival confederacies (misls), which Maharaja Ranjit Singh unified into the Sikh Empire, ruling from Lahore between 1799 and 1839 and extending control over Kashmir and Peshawar. Ranjit Singh's court, though built on Sikh military power, was religiously plural in its administration, and it was under his patronage around 1830 that the upper storeys of the Harmandir Sahib were covered in gold leaf, giving the Golden Temple its present name. Two Anglo-Sikh Wars, in 1845–46 and 1848–49, ended in the British annexation of Punjab in 1849; the Koh-i-Noor diamond, part of the Lahore treasury, passed to the British Crown under the terms of the annexation. Sikh regiments subsequently formed a disproportionately large share of the British Indian Army, including during both World Wars. The Singh Sabha movement, from the 1870s, reasserted a distinct Sikh identity against both Christian missionary activity and the reformist Hindu Arya Samaj, and the Gurdwara Reform (Akali) movement of the 1920s — including the 1921 killing of protesters at Nankana Sahib — transferred control of major gurdwaras from hereditary custodians (mahants) to the elected Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee, formed in 1920 and given legal authority under the Sikh Gurdwaras Act of 1925. The 1947 Partition of Punjab divided the Sikh homeland, left Nankana Sahib and other major sites in Pakistan, and displaced much of the Sikh population into India.

Pilgrimage Sites

The Harmandir Sahib (Golden Temple) at Amritsar, founded by Guru Ram Das and completed under Guru Arjan, is Sikhism's most important site. Five gurdwaras hold the status of Takht, seats of temporal Sikh authority: the Akal Takht at Amritsar, Takht Sri Patna Sahib in Bihar (Guru Gobind Singh's birthplace), Takht Sri Kesgarh Sahib at Anandpur (site of the Khalsa's founding), Takht Sri Damdama Sahib at Talwandi Sabo, and Takht Sri Hazur Sahib at Nanded, Maharashtra, where Guru Gobind Singh died. Other major sites include Gurdwara Janam Asthan at Nankana Sahib, Pakistan, Guru Nanak's birthplace, and Gurdwara Bangla Sahib in Delhi, associated with Guru Har Krishan's care of smallpox victims.

Sikhism Today

Daily Sikh devotional practice centres on the Japji Sahib, Guru Nanak's composition placed at the opening of the Guru Granth Sahib and recited each morning, together with set evening and night-time prayers drawn from the same text. Sikhs today number in the tens of millions, concentrated in Punjab with substantial diaspora communities in the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States and Australia; the langar tradition of free communal meals, open to people of any faith, remains one of the religion's most visible public institutions worldwide. Modern Sikh political history has been marked by tension between the community and the Indian state, most sharply in 1984, when the Indian Army's Operation Blue Star against militants inside the Harmandir Sahib complex was followed by the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and large-scale anti-Sikh violence — events that remain a significant reference point in contemporary Sikh political consciousness.