CHAPTER II.
NANAK THE REFORMER, FOUNDER OF THE SIKH SECT.
The Sikh religion originated with the teaching of Nanak, who from being a wandering Hindu devotee settled down about the year 1500 as a missionary preacher to his countrymen, proclaiming a deistic doctrine, embracing what was best in the two ancient faiths of Hindu and Budhist—the personal God of the one and the spiritual equality of the other. He was born in 1469 in a village near Lahore in the Punjab, the son of a Jat farmer and small trader. As a boy he was thoughtful, reserved, and inclined to devotion. He early showed the bent of his mind by puzzling his teacher with questions as to the existence of God. At the age of nine he shocked the family Brahman priest by refusing to be invested with the sacred thread at the Hindu ceremony of initiation, contending that it was a useless form. As a youth, to the distress of his father, he was antagonistic to the ways of the world, despising money-making. Later on marriage failed to divert his mind from the religious turn. He then at the age of thirty-two became a public preacher, and, garbed as a fakir, left his home to attain religious wisdom by travel and intercourse with others in foreign lands, accompanied by four companions as disciples, one of them being the family bard. His sayings and the verses he composed in praise of God were sung by this minstrel to the sound of the rabab, or Eastern lute, as he said the "skill of the strings" was necessary to attract listeners. His family now looked on him as mad. In his ardent desire to find a resting-place among the conflicting creeds of men he wandered over all India, and visited Ceylon, Mecca, Persia, and Kabul. The story is told of him that while at Mecca the Kazi observed him asleep with his feet towards the holy Kaaba, the object of Mahomedan devotion. He was angrily roused, abused as an infidel, and asked how he dared to dishonour God's house by turning his feet towards it. "Turn then, if you can, in a direction where God's house is not," was his reply.
On returning to his home after his wanderings he threw aside the garb and habits of the fakir, saying that the numerous religions and castes which he had seen in the world were the devices of men; that he had read Mahomedan Korans and Hindu Purans, but God was nowhere found in them. All was error. He now taught his followers that abandonment of the world after the manner of ascetics was quite unnecessary; that true religion was interwoven in the daily affairs and occupations of life; that God treated all men with equal favour; and that between the hermit in his cell and the king in his palace no difference was made in respect of the kingdom to come. "God will not ask man of what caste or race he is. He will ask him what he has done." As a man sows, that shall he reap. He contended against the furious bigotry of the Mahomedans and the deep-rooted superstition and caste thraldom of the Hindus, and aimed at reforming and reconciling the two creeds. He proclaimed the unity of God and the equality of all men before God; condemned idolatry and inculcated a righteous religious life with brotherly love to one another. He said he was but a man among men, mortal and sinful as they were; that God was all in all, and that belief in the Creator, self-existent, omnipresent and omnipotent, without beginning and everlasting, was the only way to salvation—the one thing needful being firm reliance on God, who was to be worshipped in spirit and in truth; to have abiding companionship with Him, to let His name be continually in their hearts and on their lips, and to pray without ceasing. "The just shall live by faith." This was the keystone of his doctrine.
He now no longer avoided society, but lived as the head of his family and as a patriarch, preaching openly at all the country fairs in his neighbourhood. He met with violent opposition from the Hindu zealots, who reproached him for laying aside the habits of a fakir. "A holy teacher has no defence but the purity of his doctrine. The world may change, but the Creator is unchangeable," was his reply. No Brahman of any note now acknowledged him. The Jat peasantry formed the mass of his disciples. They resorted from all parts, attracted by his preaching, and he soon exercised great influence over vast numbers, who looked on him as their "Guru" or spiritual guide. With their offerings he established almshouses where crowds of the poor and helpless were fed. He died at his home in 1538, at the age of seventy-one.
He was a contemporary of Luther, and, like the German Reformer, he preached no new faith, but contended that religion had become obscured and transformed during the course of centuries. One of the stories told of him in his crusade against the superstitious ceremonies and forms of the priesthood is that on one occasion seeing some Brahmans at their morning devotions by a stream baling out water with their hands facing the east, going through the ceremony of quenching the thirst of dead clients in another world, he, on the opposite bank, began to do the same facing the west. The Brahmans, thinking him a fakir out of his senses, remonstrated with him, saying that all his labours were in vain, and that he could not hope to relieve the thirst of the departed by such heretical actions. Nanak replied, "I am not giving water to my dead, but irrigating my fields in Kartarpur to prevent them drying up by the scorching heat of the sun." "Watering your fields in Kartarpur, such a long way off! How can these handfuls of water benefit your fields at such a distance?" the Brahmans scoffingly replied. "How can, then, your waters," rejoined Nanak, "reach the next world and quench the thirst of your dead? If the water cannot benefit my crops, which are in this world, how can it benefit your dead in another?"
Nanak's followers were called Sikhs, from sicsha, a Sanscrit word signifying disciple or devoted follower, corrupted into Sikh, pronounced Sick, and he was called by them Baba Nanak or Guru Nanak—Father Nanak or the Spiritual guide. When he felt that his end was approaching he appointed as his successor in the Guruship one of his most faithful followers, passing over his two sons despite their remonstrances, one of them being an ascetic and the other a man of the world. He selected whom he thought most fit by moral courage and devotion to the cause to carry on his ministry unimpaired. He did not consider the office he had created a hereditary one, but this was later on brought about by a father's strong affection for a devoted and ambitious daughter. The religion which Nanak founded would have sunk into oblivion, as befell that of other reformers in India before him, but his foresight in creating an apostleship and selecting a successor before his death saved it.
Sikhism had its root solely in religious aspirations. It was a revolt against the tyranny of Brahmanism. On throwing off the yoke, Nanak and his disciples reverted instinctively to the old theistic creed of their ancestors. The simple-minded Jat peasantry to whom he spoke were inclined to the reception of religious reform. Brahmanism was not so deep-rooted in them as in the mass of Hindus in Hindostan; regard for caste was weak, that of tribe and race strong. Their old Getic faith had left a lasting impression on their independent character which profoundly modified their beliefs as Hindus, for the ancient Getes, according to Herodotus, were Theists, and held the tenets of the soul's immortality. With the spread and ascendancy of Hinduism idolatry and priestcraft reigned supreme, and caste exclusiveness, with its narrow restrictions, pressed heavily on the lower classes, who had little consolation to hope for in the next world for the hardships of the present.
As the period between the downfall of Budhism and the advent of Islam was of comparatively short duration, the doctrine of the innate superiority of Brahmanism was rudely shaken by the success of the Mahomedan invaders, inspired with the religious zeal of their new faith, proclaiming the unity of God, denouncing idolatry, and disregarding the bonds of caste. Early in the fifteenth century Hindu reformers had risen in Hindostan who seized upon the doctrine of man's equality before God, assailed the worship of idols, the authority of Hindu Shasters and Mahomedan Koran, and the exclusive use of a learned language in religious books unintelligible to the lower orders. They strove to emancipate men's minds from priestcraft and polytheism, and advanced in some measure the cause of enlightenment. The people were appealed to in their own tongue and told that perfect devotion was compatible with the ordinary duties of the world. These reformers passed away and left no successors, but their writings were very popular among the people from being in a spoken language. Nanak's susceptible mind had been influenced by these writings, some of which were afterwards embodied in the sacred book of the Sikhs.
Nanak was the only Hindu reformer who established a national faith. He rose out of the dust as a great preacher with a great theme which he boldly proclaimed, waking up the people to a higher notion of religion. It is a strange coincidence that from being a Hindu devotee he did so at the very time when Luther, the German monk, nailed bis famous theses to his church door at Wittenberg, starting the Reformation in the West, both intent on denouncing what they considered the errors in their religions. His preaching attracted the attention of the Mahomedan governors, who reported that a fakir preaching doctrines at variance with Hindu Vedas and Mahomedan Koran was gaining much influence among the peasantry, which might prove serious to the Government. At that time Baber with his conquering Moghuls was entering the Punjab from the north. He was summoned to Delhi to appear before the Emperor, who after hearing him ordered him to be confined in prison. There he remained for seven months, until Baber captured Delhi and established the Moghul power. Baber interviewed him, when he defended his doctrine with firmness and eloquence. He was released, returned to his home, and continued his ministry.
He extricated his disciples from the accumulated errors of ages. Regarding them merely as disciples, he had no views of political advancement. As a preacher of peace and goodwill to man he told them to "fight with valour, but with no weapon except the Word of God," an injunction to which his successors in the apostleship later on, when driven by persecution to defend themselves, added, "and with the sword of the Lord." His care was to prevent his people from contracting into a sect or into monastic distinctions, proving this by excluding his son, a meditative ascetic, from the ministry after him—the son who justified his fears by becoming the founder of a sect called "Oodasses, indifferent to the world," still existing in considerable numbers, proud of their origin, and using the 'Granth,' but not regarded as genuine Sikhs.
BABA SIR KHEM SINGH, BEDI, K.C.I.E.,
Lineal Descendant in the Fourteenth Generation from Baba Nanak, the Sikh Reformer.
Nanak's line of the Bedi clan through his younger son has been preserved to the present day. During these four hundred years they have been held in much veneration by all Sikhs, trusted and protected in the stormy times out of regard for their ancestor. An interesting personality at the recent Coronation celebration in London was Baba Sir Khem Singh, Bedi, K.C.I.E., one of the representatives sent from the Punjab, an old man of great influence and of proved loyalty, who has stood by the British Government from the day, as he expressed it, since the line of Ranjit Singh was ended—the lineal descendant in the fourteenth generation from the Sikh reformer, and the present head of the family. He spoke with decision for his co-religionists, of their fervid loyalty and of their readiness to prove it again and again in the future as they had done in the past, in defence of the King-Emperor and his kingdom. 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.