Sardar Pushpinder Singh Puri has written a very interesting and
informative article in the February issue of the Sikh Review.
He informs us that the younger generation of Sikhs in Canada defines
Sikhism in a slightly different way than it is defined in the native
Punjab. He goes on to tell us that there, in Canada, a Sikh especially
the young one, considers that so long as he expresses his faith in the
teachings of Guru Nanak to Guru Gobind Singh and considers the Guru
Granth Sahib as the holy scripture of the Sikh religion, he is a Sikh.
He goes on, the hint is clear, he is not prepared to accept the
traditional physical outlook (sic) of a Sikh, which was made compulsory
by Guru Gobind Singh by imposing on the Sikhs the five Ks. He advocates
the essence of Sikhism in the script and soul and not in the physical
requirements.
The writer concludes the point by informing us that the young Sikh in
Canada pleads that the need of the time is different and that to fit in
the Canadian pattern of life we will have to look like others.
Mr. Puri offers an apology for all this by adding that, though the
faith from tradition is shaken, faith in Sikhism stays.
While it is possible to understand and even appreciate the attitudes of
the younger generation of the Sikhs in Canada and elsewhere outside
India, it is not easy to accept it either as logical or as otherwise
capable of defence from the point of view of the Sikh doctrines and the
historical role the Sikhs are required to play according to the vision
of the Gurus.
The psychological need to look like others who are in a majority and
also in a position to impose their approval-judgements on a strange
minority amidst them, is all too obvious. The writer of these lines,
while a student at Cambridge in the Great Britain during the forties of
this century, was personally made aware of this social stress for a
number of years. But the more he has thought over this question, the
more he is convinced that those who surrender to the foreign social
ethos of non-Sikh societies neither display any exemplary integrity or
strength of character, nor much proficiency in logical thinking and nor
even practical wisdom. Conformism is the easiest response to antagonism
and stresses of a social and emotional character such as the presence of
a strange minority in foreign social surroundings generates. Conformism
releases an individual from the terrible tension of being different from
othrs all the time, in a foreign social atmosphere, but when this has
been said, all has been said in favor of the attitudes of the young
Sikhs in Canada and elsewhere.
Firstly, it is not easy to sympathize with a point of view which
arrogates to itself the authority to define Sikhism, in a slightly
different way, from how it has been defined by the founders of Sikhism
and the collective national consensus of the historical Sikh community.
This arrogation is escapist cowardice, if words are not to be minced. It
would perhaps be less presumptuous and more honest to adopt and declare
an attitude of a personal incapacity to act upon and sustain the true
definition of religious requirements than to assume the competence to
redefine what ought to be the true Sikhism. Heresy, apostasy and
defection from a religion are more honest names for the attitude that
underlies the claim to redefine a religion. Those who shirk from
calling a spade a spade and do not admit this truth to themselves merely
push their personalities into emotional conflicts and complexes which do
more damage to themselves than the gains they seek to achieve by the
circuitous path they thus follow. Is it more profitable from the point
of view of individual himself to be utterly honest with oneself and
admit what he really intends and does, or is it a cleverer or wiser path
to conceal the true contours of ones own hidden urges and temporary
emotional problems such as arise in the case of Sikhs when they try to
transplant themselves in a social milieu altogether strange from, if not
hostile to, the fundamental insights into Reality, represented by the
religious way of life of their ancestors? Any psychiatrist or a
psychoanalyst practitioner will not hesitate as to what advice to give
under the circumstances. By arguing falsely that while they are actually
defecting from Sikhism they are merely re-defining it, is to create
greater problems than those which are sought to be solved. This is one
important aspect of the problem to be seriously considered by the
younger generation of Sikhs in Canada.
The second point, which is no less important for them, is that in
Sikhism, unlike many older religions such as Islam, Mahayan Buddhism,
and certain varieties of Christianity, mere verbal assent to a faith is
of no avail. The young Sikh in Canada seems to think that he has the
capacity and authority to separate the essence of Sikhism from the
formally non-essential, and that thereby he achieves access to the
kernel of religion and discards the husks. What that essence and
kernel is, he alone presumes to be the final judge of it. It was
maintained in the past, in the older religions, that if a votary of
religion just makes a true and unreserved assent to a certain verbal
formula, which was supposed to encese the truth of that religion, the
devotee was automatically saved thereby. From Guru Nanak to Guru Gobind
Singh, constant and repeated stress was laid on the divergence of
religious stand of Sikhism on the point, namely, that the essence of
religion is not the dogma or the formula, for, what people think is
relatively secondary; what matters is the true substance of the dogma
and the formula which is expressed in the acts of men and not in the
mere words or utterances of men. This, incidentally, is the new movement
of humanism where Catholics, Protestants, and Marxists move in common
disregarding different formulae and ideologies that separate them. This
central truth of Sikhism is enshrined in the revelation of Guru Nanak
himself,
galli[n] bhist[i] na jaiai chhuttai sachch[u] kamai
"the goal can be achieved only through the deed and not the word." [1]
It is obvious, therefore, that the very claim which the young Sikhs of
Canada thus make of redefining Sikhism for themselves is not only highly
presumptuous, but it also constitutes a defiance of the starting point
of Sikhism. Thereby, these young Sikhs do not accept or practise
Sikhism, but repoudiate and defect from it. It is necessary for the
young Sikhs to be clear in their minds on this second point also.
The last point to bear in mind is as to what culture, which includes the
practice of religion, consists in. In the UNESCO sponsored book,
Traditional Culture in South East Asia, the following definition of
culture is given:
Culture means the total accumulation of all material objects, ideas
and symbols, beliefs, sentiments, values and forms which are passed
from one generation to another in any given society.
The belief, therefore, of the young Sikhs of Canada that they can
diverge from the culture of the older Sikh generations nurtured in
Punjab and yet can remain whole Sikhs is shown to be altogether
fantastic when this definition of culture ins kept in view. What the
young Sikhs of Canada are doing is not a continuation of the culture of
their ancestors but a hiatus and a break from the culture and let there
be no mistake about it. No matter how unpleasant and unpalatable this
truth sounds to the rebellious young mind planted in the current
chaotic, moral and spiritual, atmosphere of the Western societies, it is
the truth.
The keshas, the turban, the iron bangle and all these details which keep
the Sikhs and the Sikh life separate from the majority of mankind
surrounding them, are of the utmost spiritual importance when they are
properly considered. They are the fence surrounding their daily life,
they are not the daily life itself. They make it possible for Sikhism to
survive, but they are not the reasons for that survival.
The Sikhs from Punjab, who during the unsettled history of the community
during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, settled in U.P. and
Mysore and other parts of India, were completely submerged in the
surrounding sea of Hindus by the end of the nineteenth century as soon
as they gave up their peculiar Sikh symbols, and outward Sikh forms.
They even forgot their origins as Sikhs and it is only now, during the
last twenty or thirty years, that evidence has been dug up and
discovered from the past memories and other bits of evidence concerning
these communities that they are originally Sikhs from the Punjab. The
sturdy Sikhs from the Punjab who settled in the early twentieth century
in South America, Argentina, Brazil and Mexico, have been almost
completely submerged into the majority Catholic Christian community by
the middle of the twentieth century once they abandoned their peculiar
religious symbols.
It requires no prophetic insight to know the fate of these young Sikhs
in Canada once they abandon the peculiar symbols of Sikhism ordained by
the Guru himself to whom they profess their total allegiance in this
world and the next. This fate shall be no different from the fate of
those who turn their backs on the Sun in whose light they hope to walk
and move about.
True, Sikhs remain Sikhs inspite of every pressure and temptation,
because it is basically good and satisfying to be a Sikh and not because
they are forbidden to shingle or shave or to smoke the deadly nicotine
poison. And, it is basically good and satisfying to remain a Sikh
because of the deep spirituality and the profound faith in the Word of
the Guru, and not merely because of observance of certain forms or
verbal assent to certain formulae. But this neither detracts from the
vital relevance of these forms and formulae to the all-important
question of ultimate survival, nor authorizes any one to deviate from or
redefine Sikhism as originally revealed by the Gurus. Such a stance is
simply impermissible as well as dangerously unwise.
When at the location of present-day Muktsar the Sikh elders of Majha, in
1706 A.D. presumed to request Guru Gobind Singh to reshape his posture
towards the political power by redefining Sikhism, the response of the
Guru was sharp and to the point: Sikh hovat lebe updes[i]. devat ho
biprit vises[u], [2] "a true Sikh hears and obeys but you are cursed and
contrary and presume to advise and guide the Guru."
The present age calls not for prohibitions, it is true, but for positive
contribution of religion though conditions necessary for preserving the
ethos and the milieu out of which that contribution is most likely to
come, must also be preserved and sustained with utmost care and
devotion. One cannot live without the other and this is the arcane
meaning of the part of our congregational prayer in which we ask from
the Unseen Power that "each Sikh may be given the strength to remain
steadfast in his faith in Sikhism upto his last breath on this earth
with his sacred hair and symbols unmolested."
The Great Samkracharya taught the fundamental classification of huamn
activity and goals into two categories. The preya thoughts and actions
are those which give easement to immediate stresses and problems and
lead to the passing pleasures of life. The shreya actions and attitudes
in life are those that ultimately lead to enduring satisfaction and
spiritual achievements. The claim of religion is to teach men to sift
the preya from the shreya. The path which the young generation of Sikhs
propose to tread in Canada and elsewhere is the road to the preya mode
of life. The path which Sikhism claims to show men is the shreya mode of
life. When one is young and feels the pulsations of bewitching spring of
sensations and pleasures as the only real thing in life, one is
irresistibly drawn to the preya. But when the hectic pulls of sensations
and passing pleasures weaken and are slackened and the mind matures and
gains strength for appreciating and pursuing enduring values of life,
then it is the shreya path which appeals to properly cultured human
mind. Throughout the modern western societies, in which are to be
included the Communist forms of societies, there is evident the
uncontrolled yearning for the preya to the exclusion of the shreya. But
this is only a passing phase. As the signs already indicate on the
horizon, the mankind must turn its face to the Sun of religion as refuge
from the uncertainties and frustrations of the modern western way of
life.
Sikhism and its formal life represent the Light to which mankind is
destined to return sooner or later and it seems, sooner than later. Has
not the Guru prophesied this in the Sikh scripture itself that the
eternal Truths of religion cannot be finally abandoned by man: eh vastu
taji nah jai nit nit rakh[u] ur[i] dharo. [3]
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--------
[1] Var Majh, Slok, M 1, AG, 141.
[2] Sikh hovat lebe updes[i]. devat ho biprit vises[u],
[3] Mundavani M5, AG, 1429.
[Originally published in the Sikh Review, April 1973, under the title
"The Sikh Symbols and the Sikh in Canada"]
 Main: SIKH SYMBOLS AND CONFORMISM by Sardar Kapoor Singh | Rupinder Singh Bedi | 3/22/2002 |
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