Does Sikh Civilisation exist?
This commentary essay explores the existence of a Sikh civilisation, as well as its nature, character and role in world history, among other themes.
I
Is there Sikh civilisation - before we can answer this, we must reckon with the pesky question of defining what a civilisation is : we do not want to dwell on academic debates here, as to a large extent, this is a question that explains itself as what the farmer-scholar James Scott calls ‘an either/or proposition.’ But let us think for a moment of the concept through the prism of the following conceptual binary : sabhyachaar & sabhyata.
These are, in a sense, the yin and yang of civilisation (both as a process and as an entity, its being and becoming, so to say) : one might think of sabhyachaar as a fluid force of norms, behaviour, and refinement, which flows through a people and a place to create(once it reaches a tipping point) a sabhyata, or civilisation.
This force might be seen as cascading through, or rising upward and infusing into, five levels, or interacting layers of the lifeworld of a people: the political, the economic, the social, the cultural and the ideological.
Now, to answer the question : is there a Sikh civilisation, let us ask, if such a force can be observed, to have moulded a people (lok), and a region (des) at any point in world history?
This, I propose, can be observed in the Sikh historical ethos moulding the lok-des of Punjab, as the process described above networked through its many communities. The space where this process of change and entanglement of fates occurred is, naturally recognised (by them) as the homeland (watan) of the Sikh people - a birthplace, so to say.
A lok, however, is recognised not merely by its shared origins, but also its shared fate. This fate is also generally tied into that of its homeland. That this is true for the Sikh people and their watan (of greater Punjab) is borne out by the various cycles of history that unfold in this regional theatre.
The responses of the people of the land to the ebb and flow of these cycles of history, as we will discuss, are motivated by a sense of deeply-rooted historical ethos, which is inherited from some founding tradition, while also moulded in the flow of time.
The Sikh historical ethos, I propose, can be understood as what we might call Nanakta: which is meant to denote something more than mere philosophy or theology, or movement of history, but, while inclusive of them all, is also something greater. Nanakta is an all-pervading influence on history, diffusing and radiating through it while moulding the ethnoregional space of the Greater Punjab, and in doing so, creating an emergence of a unique (and nascent) world civilisation.
What is the nature of this civilisation? We will explore this through a historical interlude.
II
To explore this further, let us draw a comparison between this Nanakian Civilisation, and another ‘frontier civilisation’ wedged between two world historical theatres, the civilisation of the Hebrews.
Why this foray in the history of such a distant region, which, one might assume, has little to do with the history of the Sikhs? There are obvious parallels in the history of the two communities- I will not state them too openly, to explain is at most times also to restrict, but I have dropped some ‘hints’ in the description that will allow some directional analogy. There is value in this comparison, and the parallels that follow are worth drawing, as they are observed (primarily) because the Jewish, like the Sikh, civilisation emerged and sustained itself in the ‘frontier’ zone created by the overlap of two (or three) greater metacivilisational theatres (meaning, great regions in which multiple civilisational expressions emerge and exist simultaneously; the Mediterranean world and the Greater Mesopotamian world for the former and the Greater Middle East and the Greater Indic world for the latter; the first pair overlaps in the Levant, the second in the greater Indus valley to ancient Ariana (central Afghanistan), with a further overlap with the Great Eurasian Steppe world and the Chinese, in the Tarim Basin- all important regions for Sikh history).
For now, we turn to the following historical sketch of the self-transcreation of the Hebrews as an emergent Jewish civilisation.
The transformation of the people known as the Hebrews into a consolidated (and robust) Jewish Civilisation, has a history of about 500 to 700 years. While the cosmo(geo)graphies of the Jewish origin mythopoeia unfolds on a much (much) wider scale, here I will trace out a brief historic map of this transcreation, or world-historic emergence of the Jews- through their historic initiative, often in opposition, and resistance to, the current of history.
After an era of wanderings, settlings, and displacements, the Hebrews found their first expression as a people on the world map, so to say, in the reign of King Solomon (in the 10th century BC), the most glorious of the Davidic kings; this was a point of concentration in time and space, in which the social, cultural, and economic legacies carried through the long ages that preceded this polity were consolidated, codified, and made capable of withstanding the ravages of history - that is, they developed into a civilisational ethos. The ravages came, first with the displacements of the Assyrians, followed by the destruction of the Neo-Babylonian period; a brief Akbarian restoration occurred at the behest of Cyrus the Great, followed by an era of tense co-existence; the fire and fury of Alexander’s march across the Persian Empire passed the Jews by, but fell on the Phoenicians, their Canaanite civilisational rivals (only, as they say, ‘in a sense’); but then followed the reign of the Seleucids, which was in a sense an empire that was a Hegelio-synthetic hybrid of the Persian and the Greek worlds.
While the Jewish people had been able to maintain their distinct cultural identity in the age of empires since the fall of their first kingdoms - the civilisational consolidation of their ethos in Solomonaic Era bore them through. Building on the foundational legacies of this era, the Jewish people consolidated their theological and wisdom [1] literature, rites and rituals, and expressions of distinct identity in the ages that followed. They had always been under constant pressure of assimilation, and though this had never really been concretely forced, they had to respond to these cultural pressures. In the Assyrian-NeoBabylonian ‘captivities,’ followed by the Seleucid Empire, things changed, as they began to face direct attacks and pressure to assimilate. Always a challenge for such nascent civilisations, across history.
In the reign of Antiochus the Fourth, this emperor, who took the title of Epiphanes, ‘god on Earth,’ in alliance with the various Syrian peoples amidst whom the Jews were islanded and who saw the Hebrew faith as a mere ‘spiritual continuation’ of the age old animist faiths they had followed since time immemorial - the Seleucids declared ideological war on the Jews, with the aim of forcing them to give up their claims to a distinct faith, and submit to the state religion. The Seleuicid strategy hinged upon the desecration of their rites, an abrogation of their rules of conduct, and culminated in an attack on their temple.
The Jews did not submit. They rose in revolt led by Judah Maccabee and his brothers, defeated the ambitions of the Seleucid king, and founded a new (autonomous) Jewish state, which lasted for over a century, till it was subsumed under the Roman Empire, against which too, the Jews would resist forced assimilation and destruction of their civilisational uniqueness.
III
From the above, there are some important themes to note : a religio-cultural tradition nurtured by a succession of, let’s call them ‘prophet-kings,’ created the foundations of a political, social and ideological legacy; the memory of which was carried through generations, and which became a locus of resistance when (ideologically existential) war was declared upon them. They resisted and survived.
In the ages that followed, importantly, the success of this resistance was remembered (and still is in the Hanukkah) for 2000 years, as the descendants of the Jewish civilisation continued to draw on their history to survive the greatest odds and the hardest of times, demonstrating the power of their ethos.
IV
The parallels between this history and the Sikh experience are there to be seen : embedded in Sikh theology, is a philosophy of history. Sikh historians and theologians often express this as the belief that the ‘emergence’ of Baba Nanak in the world was a ‘divine answer’ to the plight and prayers of the countless suffering people.One could see in this a historiographic signification of the instability and war ravaged nature of the world into which Baba Nanak was born.
Sikh theology further speaks of Nanak in two senses : an earthly Nanak, or Baba Nanak as the historic figure; and the ‘cosmic Nanak,’ or the identification of Nanak with the all-pervading Akal; a third connotation might be understood as referring to the House of Nanak, that is the shared divine luminescence (jot) of the ten Gurus, including the Guru Granth Sahib; the Gurubani, therefore, is quite directly the living speech of Nanak. This is important for our purposes, as Gurubani is the central core, or the axle, around which almost all Punjabi literature revolves, much like the King James Bible in the Anglophonic world; it is in this context that the concept of Nanakta has generally been used.
More importantly, Nanakta was an ethos shaping force. One could conceive of the word of Nanak as also acting as a force of sabhyata, a civilising force in an overlapping frontier between metacivilisational theatres, caught in an endless cycle of wars for centuries, forever wary of losing its identity to assimilation into the greater cultural worlds, especially of the Greater Mesopotamian and Eurasian Steppe world intersection. Especially relevant here, in the context of the frontier geography, are the ideologically powerful injunctions against the ‘strong preying on the weak’ (je sakta sakte ko maare). But also importantly, the spiritual-philosophical response of the message of Nanak to this era of crisis was further took root in the foundation of the first Sikh polity, the Sangat of Kartarpur, which would in fact and substance grow into institutions that would offer physical protection to all who came under its protection. (This has been explored in this author’s two essays : On Baburvani1 and Sangat and Society2.)
So, Nanakian sabhyata was, since its foundation, created for pervading all layers of the sociocivilisational complex (see section one), but also as an answer to the problem of history. The political, social, and ideological component is quite clear (please refer to essays linked above), let us briefly speak of the cultural and the economic.
V
The idiom of Nanakta was local. Before the consolidation of Gurubani, there was no Punjabi literature, per se. There was the odd dialectic expression in in what we might call pre-Punjabi, but nothing that could act as the spinal core around which a regional language and literature could develop. While the creation of Gurmukhi and the compilation of the Adi Granth by Guru Arjan was ‘revolutionary,’ the process which led to this had commenced in Kartarpur itself, with the dissemination of Nanakbani, and continued in the following Guruships with the creation of networks of Sangats across cities, each with their infrastructure of congregation (and dissemination and compilation). This, for the first time, was a network of institutions in which learning (and discussion which would have naturally followed) was conducted in the regional language.
Institution building expanded in scale with the founding of Amritsar - here we see a convergence also with the economic. Amritsar grew, as is known, to be an important hub for commerce passing through the region into the Silk Road trade complex. While there was a tradition of the founding of ‘free cities’ by traders and merchant groups in coastal India, Amritsar is possible the only inland-hub founded through private initiative which has grown into a successful city. The tradition of founding settlements became an important element in Sikh history. The Dabhistan, a 16th century text, mentions that Guru Hargobind had founded Dharamsals in far flung places (such as the Terai) and that his horses reigned unchecked as far as Ladakh - these are both vital trade routes. The Nanakian era in the Greater Punjab was something of a golden age for Punjabi merchants, who spread over the entire Silk Road trading complex, and into the Indian Ocean trading world, particularly in coastal cities. There was, additionally, a convergence of interests between Punjabi and Sindhi merchants, the latter also heavily influenced by Nanakta.
While these (mercantile) processes could have unfolded even in the absence of Nanakian influence, the question should be asked : what culture would these diasporic communities have carried? Would they have had the cultural confidence to inscribe a Gurmukhi verse on the fire temple of Baku; or, describe the theological parallels between Sri Krisna and Guru Gobind Singh as a Sindhi merchant did to an Arab traveller returning from the Hajj via Africa? Or would Hindu Khatris have been commencing their accounting books with Bismillahs, as many were prone to do before Nanak?
The prophetic age of the Nanakian era had provided all the material necessary for creating a Sikh civilisation; then, there was the Maccabean age.
VI
The frontiers of metacivilisational zones are fungible. Prior to the Nanakian resistance from below, gradually cascading across all realms of the civilisational lifeworld of the region, northern India was all but consolidated as an adjunct region of the Greater Middle East, at least in its landed aristocracy, even if there was some counter Indicisation in the Mughal royalty (old civilisations die hard). Despite the interlude of the first Sikh state (commencing with the foundation of the Khalsa, one could say, lasting till about 1720), the invasions of Nader Shah, followed by Ahmad Shah Abdali, could have reconsolidated this revived Greater Middle Eastern order in the Indus Valley, or even across ancient Saptasindhu, the cradle of (North) Indian civilisation.
But then came another turn in history. We do not need to review the resistance of the Sikhs, the various oppressions and massacres, the retrenchment and ultimate victory of the Dal Khalsa and the emergence of a Sikh States-System, which engendered over a dozen Sikh polities, with that of the Sukerchakias being the most glorious, of Patiala being the longest lasting, and of Kapurthala offering a great demonstration of the (close to) ideal Sikh king.
The question is, why did Sikhs continue to fight rather than capitulate despite the many opportunities to do so? (Additionally, why did some Sikh states agree to partner with some regimes, from time to time; I will leave these as something for the reader to ponder).
Perhaps the determining factor was, in a sense, a realisation that the Sikh civilisational ethos was incompatible with that imposed from above by the various imperial polities against which the bearers of this Sikh legacy went to war. Despite what one might say, war is not in the nature of Sikhs, as the complexity of the various layers of the civilisational complex suggest, but, it is one nature, that may be particularly resorted to when the conditions for ‘just war’ exist, and one is called upon to perform this act of history.
VII
While the civilisational ethos of Nanakta has moulded the region of greater Punjab in a deep and enduring way, one should not fall into the reductionist trap of simplistic narratives which try to present civilisations as nation-state type bloc-coloured entities; mapping civilisations requires very different cartographies. Civilisations are, in their essence, constellations of ideas, and when one thinks of greater Punjab, one cannot imagine any expression of Punjabi culture as existing in the absence of the deep pervasive influence of Nanakta - whatsoever refuses, degrades. As we have discussed above, the efflorescence of Nanakta also pervades into other realms - the political, the economic, the social, and the ideological. When it is absent, these domains tend to lose their distinctive civilisational character : displaying either social fragmentation or decadence. The influence of Nanakta can engender just politics (siyasat) and provide the constitution of well-established states (riyasat). Above all, the philosophy of Nanakta can become a locus of resistance and revolution in situations demanding the destruction of civilisationally incompatible (unjust) orders, and if required, their replacement by Nanakian polities, seen particularly in the Khalsashahi (Sikh political system) of the various Sikh states. (However, decadence and decay can affect states founded on the principles of Khalsashahi as well, particularly when they lose the ethos of Nanakta in the various realms.)
Civilisations are not architectural entities, they are, as I quoted Scott in saying, either/or propositions. They are forever in a flux between being and becoming, and appear, and flourish, when certain conditions are met, or are created by leaders themselves. I have, I believe, offered enough material for the reader to consider what these conditions are, where and when they exist, and how they are degraded and decay.
However, there is no question about the fact that Nanakian civilisation has moulded the course of history in the region of greater Punjab, where its radiance has grown or waned depending on the ebb and flow of times and the choices those who live in them make. I mentioned above that civilisations cannot be mapped like nation-states, they should in fact be seen as fields of radiance created by the fundamental forces of their foundational ethos cascading through the various domains of human lifeworlds. One can even think of civilisations as networks, especially where the civilisational ethos is concretised into infrastructure, the most fundamental of which is the household (grihast), extended to congregation spaces, and so on. In fact, the beauty of the Nanakian lifeworld is that it scales upward from the household, and locates in it, not just the one thing all philosophers search for - eudaimonia or the good life - but also proposes this as the building block of society (Sangat). Which is, in a sense, an extended household.
This is fundamental to understanding the cosmopolitan vision of Nanak, but more on that, some other time.
IX Conclusion
A final word, then. How do we answer the question, and where do we locate Sikh civilisation? When we look back at history, one is often attracted to the greatest peaks and crests of a people, but these great eras, or golden ages, are built on the foundations of something : among these are the physical institutions, such as spaces of congregation, and the wealth and store of knowledge. For Sikhs as a people, with Gurubani, as an all-nurturing fathomless ocean of wisdom, knowledge and greater truths, the Gurudwara, both as fort and sanctuary, have grown from the seeds planted in Kartarpur, Amritsar and Anandpur, into world-spanning trees; they act as a locus for organising and weaving into the fabric of Sikh civilisation each Sikh household in every place where Gurubani is heard, and a Gurudwara is visited. In all times, as in these, these are the sinews of Sikh civilisation.
As history attests, it is from such grihasts that great heroes emerge, who, with characters forged in such households, drawing from the strength-imbuing lessons and legacy of Sikh sabhyachaar, emerge on the stage of history, as the turners of the wheel of time. One can think of any great hero of Sikh history, there is always an iron-kilned household, which has forged them (and how so often this occurs under the guidance of a great mother). So, I would not hesitate to say, it is in the persons of such mothers, in the example of great fathers, and in the crucible of the Sikh household, that Sikh civilisation is cultivated.
One might think of networks of Sikh households, organised into Sangats through the nexus of Gurudwaras, as the fundamental basis, with the health of such association determining the capacity of the organisation to create and nurture other necessary institutions.
The one idea that I propose, then, is that to begin conceiving of Sikh civilisation we look beyond the allure and grandeur of great ages and achievements, and understand the bottom up emergence from which these patterns of history are created, and the fundamental basis which sends forth the great heroes who can rise to the challenge that the great shadow which moves the crests and waves of history poses to each culture caught in its tide : can you build something that will stand the test of time?
X
sri akal sahai.
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https://sialmirzagoraya.medium.com/guru-nanaks-baburvaani-a-sikh-theory-of-history-a-philosophical-engagement-a95783c768d8
The idea that the Sikh ethos (which gives rise to the hero) begins in the household is very important. Something to think about as we traverse the 21st-century, as the author notes... often many commentators speak about the threat to the future of the Sikhs we face today, but fail to see a lack of political power may be due to a failure to live up to the commandment "ghar ghar andar dharamsaal"...
As we move to towards a more decentralised sikh community, would u say Sikhi can exist without Panjab or Panjab can exist without Sikhi? I dont think the latter can it will transform Panjab into something else if it were to ceasing to be Panjab as we know it but maybe the former could as we become more a network (although doubt this too).