Sikhism

About 25 to 30 million people are Sikhs. The word Sikh means “disciple” or “learner”: a disciple of the Guru, the teacher who leads from darkness to light.

Sikhs believe in one God, Ik Onkar, beyond form and gender, who can be known through devotion, honest living and service to others. They follow the teachings of ten human Gurus, and today of the scripture they call the Guru Granth Sahib.

Sikhism is the youngest of the major world religions, just over five hundred years old. Its heartland is the Punjab, a region now divided between India and Pakistan.

In the late 1400s, Punjab, the land of five rivers, was a rich farming region on the road between Central Asia and India. Armies and traders came through it, and it was ruled from Delhi by the Muslim Lodi sultans.

Most Punjabis were Hindus, many others Muslims. Society was divided by caste, and religious life was full of rituals, pilgrimages and priests.

But new voices were questioning all this. Bhakti poets like Kabir in Benares sang of a loving devotion to one God beyond Hindu and Muslim forms, and Sufi mystics like Baba Farid, who had lived in Punjab, taught love of God in the local language.

Nanak was born in 1469 in the village of Talwandi, now Nankana Sahib in Pakistan, into a Hindu family of the Khatri caste. Stories tell of a thoughtful boy who questioned empty rituals.

As a young man he worked as a storekeeper for a Muslim official at Sultanpur. Each morning he bathed in the Bein river.

According to Sikh tradition, around 1499 he disappeared into the river for three days. When he came out, he said: “There is no Hindu, there is no Muslim.” Sikhs understand this as his call: before God, all people are one, and the path is the same for all.

Tradition says Nanak spent years travelling with a Muslim companion, the musician Mardana, singing his hymns as far as Benares and Assam, Sri Lanka, and Mecca and Baghdad.

He saw the misery of Babur’s invasion in 1526 and wrote of it in his hymns. Around 1520 he settled at Kartarpur on the Ravi river and founded a community of farmers.

His teaching was simple: remember God’s name, earn an honest living, and share with others. He rejected caste and idol worship, and taught that a householder’s ordinary life, not withdrawal from the world, is the way to God.

In the communal kitchen, the langar, everyone sat together on the floor, whatever their caste or religion, and ate the same food. Langar is still served free at every gurdwara today.

Before he died in 1539, Nanak chose a disciple, not his son, to succeed him as Guru. Guru Angad developed the Gurmukhi script for writing Punjabi; Guru Amar Das organised the community and asked all visitors to eat in the langar first.

Guru Ram Das founded the town of Amritsar around its sacred pool. His son, Guru Arjan, built the Harmandir Sahib in the middle of the pool, with four doors open to all four directions.

In 1604 Guru Arjan compiled the Adi Granth, the first Sikh scripture. Alongside the hymns of the Gurus, it includes poems by Hindu and Muslim saints such as Kabir, Ravidas, Namdev and Baba Farid.

In 1606 Guru Arjan died in Mughal custody in Lahore, on the orders of the emperor Jahangir. Sikhs remember him as their first martyr.

Guru Hargobind wore two swords, for spiritual and worldly authority, and built the Akal Takht facing the Harmandir. In 1675 the ninth Guru, Tegh Bahadur, was executed in Delhi under the emperor Aurangzeb; Sikhs remember that he gave his life for others’ freedom to practise their faith.

At the spring festival of Vaisakhi in 1699, at Anandpur, the tenth Guru, Gobind Singh, created the Khalsa, a community of initiated Sikhs. Tradition tells that five men from different castes answered his call, the Panj Pyare, the “Five Beloved”.

Khalsa Sikhs keep the five Ks, among them uncut hair, kesh, and a steel bangle, kara. Men take the name Singh, “lion”, and women Kaur, “princess”, erasing caste names.

Before his death at Nanded in 1708, Guru Gobind Singh declared that there would be no more human Gurus. From then on, the scripture itself, the Guru Granth Sahib, would be the eternal Guru.

In the 1700s, as Mughal power collapsed, Sikh bands called misls fought Mughal governors and Afghan invaders, and gradually took control of much of Punjab.

In 1799 Ranjit Singh took Lahore and built a kingdom from the Sutlej river to Peshawar and Kashmir. His court included Hindus, Muslims and Europeans, and he covered the Harmandir Sahib in gilded copper; from then on it was known as the Golden Temple.

Ten years after his death, in 1849, after two wars, the British annexed Punjab. Many Sikhs then served in the British Indian Army, and some began to travel to other parts of the empire.

When British India was divided in 1947, the new border ran straight through Punjab. Lahore and Nankana Sahib, Guru Nanak’s birthplace, went to Pakistan.

Across India and Pakistan, about 15 million people were uprooted, and hundreds of thousands, perhaps a million or more, were killed in communal violence. Almost all Sikhs in west Punjab left for India.

In June 1984 the Indian army stormed the Golden Temple complex to remove armed separatists. In October, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated by two of her Sikh bodyguards, and thousands of Sikhs were then killed in riots in Delhi and other cities.

These events remain deeply painful. Since 2019, a corridor across the border has allowed Indian pilgrims to visit Guru Nanak’s Kartarpur without a visa.

From the late 1800s, Sikh soldiers, farmers and traders settled across the British Empire and beyond: in Malaya and Singapore, East Africa, Canada and California, and later in Britain and Australia.

Today about 770,000 Sikhs live in Canada and over half a million in England and Wales. Sikh turbans have become a familiar sight from Vancouver to London.

In Thailand, the first recorded Sikh arrival was in 1884, in the reign of King Chulalongkorn; many who followed became cloth traders. Since 1913, Bangkok’s Gurdwara Siri Guru Singh Sabha has stood at Phahurat, rebuilt in 1981, and serves langar to anyone who comes. Thailand has an estimated 70,000 or more Sikhs.

Sikhs gather in the gurdwara, the “door of the Guru”, where the Guru Granth Sahib is placed under a canopy and its hymns are sung. Anyone may enter, with head covered and shoes removed.

Sewa, selfless service, is central. At the Golden Temple, volunteers serve free meals to tens of thousands of people every day, whatever their religion.

Sikhs are taught to live as householders in the world, earning honestly, sharing, and remembering God, while standing up for justice and the equality of all people, women and men alike.

Sikhism grew in a land where Hindu and Muslim worlds met, from a teacher who said that before God there is no Hindu and no Muslim, only people.

Next, the final episode: Southeast Asia and Thailand, where spirits, Brahmin rites and Buddhism live side by side.