Especially between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, poets across India, writing in the spoken languages of the people, aspired for direct experience of ultimate reality unmediated by liturgy, elaborate rituals, book learning or intercession by institutionalized specialists such as Brahmin priests or Muslim clerics. Some poets focused on fervent devotion – bhakti – to a loving, personal deity who possessed attributes that were manifested in visible form. Such devotion was expressed by outward forms of piety such as reciting or singing verses of adoration addressed directly to the deity, or making pilgrimages to a temple in which the deity’s image was enshrined. Other poets conceived of the deity as a formless, eternal, all-pervading consciousness that both created and inhabited reality, but which was not manifested with attributes and could not be represented in images. Both kinds of devotion were animated by the promise of liberation for all sincere devotees, regardless of caste or gender, meaning that the verses of bhakti poet-saints often carried, at least implicitly, a message of protest against socio-religious inequality. From at least the late nineteenth century on, it was common to refer to the collective aspirations and deeds of these poets as constituting a ‘bhakti movement’. This phrase, however, suggests a monolithic and self-conscious historical phenomenon possessing a well-considered goal, such as a ‘nationalist movement’. An alternative model is the notion of a ‘bhakti network’, in which the voices of disparate poets echoed or resonated with one another across time and space, but without there ever having been a coherent or collectively organized ‘movement’.37
In the Punjab, such a voice was heard in the words of Guru Nanak (1469–1539). Unlike other poet-saints of pre-colonial India, however, Guru Nanak actually did initiate a movement – indeed, a new and original religious tradition: Sikhism. Born in 1469, Nanak belonged to the rural Punjab’s upper-caste Khatri community. His father had learnt Persian to get a job as a patwari, or village accountant in the service of a village headman, working in the lower rungs of the Delhi sultanate’s revenue system during the Lodi dynasty’s final, chaotic days. As a young man, Nanak became a householder and found a job as a rural grain merchant. But he was living in unsettled times; he was thirty-six in 1505 when Babur launched the first of his five raids on north India. The political landscape was collapsing, and to him the moral landscape looked no better. As a rural official who witnessed plenty of corruption first-hand, he concluded that he was living in the kaliyuga, that is, a time of moral decay when dharma, codes of proper conduct, had vanished. It seemed to him that neither Hindu nor Muslim ideals were being upheld. According to one tradition, a holy man came to him and so ‘subdued his mind’ that he gave away all his granary’s assets, together with his personal property, and abandoned his wife and children.38 He then undertook a series of long trips that included, within the Punjab, sites important for yogi ascetics as well as Sufi centres in Multan and Pakpattan. He also made more distant travels within and beyond India before finally returning to the Punjab and settling down at Kartarpur, on the banks of the Ravi River. Here he famously declared his distance from both Hindu and Islamic institutions, gathering a group of followers who would hear and accept his message. Nanak returned from his wanderings and began his career as a spiritual teacher around 1524, just a few years before Babur swept away the last Lodi sultan and established the Mughal empire, meaning that north India witnessed the launching of two new dispensations – one spiritual, one political – at nearly the same time.
Like other bhakti poets, Nanak challenged the hierarchal order of the caste system and delivered a message of liberation from the cycle of births and rebirths fundamental to classical Indian thought, preaching that liberation was offered to all, regardless of caste or gender. And, like most devotional poets, he composed his verses in the common language of the people, in his case Punjabi, with a view to reaching a broader public. He saw no merit in making pilgrimages or in worshipping images. For him the Supreme God is a formless, eternal being who, both transcendent and immanent, created not only the observable reality but also the very deities that head the Hindu pantheon: Brahma, Vishnu, Śiva. He would not worship such derivative, created deities, much less their many incarnations or avatars. To his followers at Kartarpur, Nanak preached a distinctive doctrine of meditation on the name and the word of God, together with an active, ethical engagement with society; there would be no retreating from the world in the manner of monks or ascetics. Release from the bonds of karma (the theory of action and its consequences), and the cycle of repeated rebirths to which karma gives rise, could result only from the grace of God, together with one’s individual effort and piety. That is to say, the law of karma might explain the social position into which one is born, but it could also be annulled by the grace (hukm) of God.39
Nanak, who soon acquired the title guru, or ‘teacher’, understood his teachings as constituting a decisive break with existing religious traditions, which is why he took measures to institutionalize his work so as to ensure its survival for subsequent generations. He modified a thirty-five-character script that had existed from before his day, and used it for his own verses – hence the script’s name of Gurmukhi, ‘from the mouth of the Guru’. Just as the Arabic script was associated with Islam, and Devanagari with classical Hindu scriptures, the use of this distinctive script was intended to ensure the unique nature of Guru Nanak’s teachings. Written scriptures also served to stabilize the new community, since they could provide focus, cohesion and permanence across space and time. Indeed, the Sikhs (from the Sanskrit shishya, ‘disciple’), being a community that coalesced around a holy book, present a clear instance of a ‘scriptural community’. Guru Nanak took further steps to stabilize his fledgling following. He established three daily prayers (dawn, sunset and day’s end), and in order to eradicate distinctions of caste and gender he instituted a communal kitchen open to all followers. He engaged in collective singing of his own verses in a sacred meeting place, initially called a dharmsal, and admitted followers through a formal initiation rite. He also took great care in selecting a successor, both to institutionalize the authority of his position and to ensure its continuance in succeeding generations. By choosing someone who was not a member of his own family, moreover, he implicitly rejected a dynastic principle for the tradition’s future leadership.40
That said, the religion founded by Guru Nanak, like any when viewed across historical time, did not fail to evolve after the death of its founder in 1539. Some fluidity is seen, for example, in the different terms by which the community was known – for example, Nanak-panth, Gurmukh-panth, Nirmal-panth, Gursikh. The same is true of the growth of the movement’s holy book, the Guru Granth Sahib. Originating in a volume of Guru Nanak’s own hymns that were passed on to his first successor, Guru Angad (1539–52), the book continued to grow during the sixteenth century.41 This was a time when devotional verses of poet-saints across northern India were being compiled in anthologies. The so-called Fatehpur manuscript, compiled in Rajasthan in 1582, included the verses of Surdas (d. 1573) and thirty-five other poet-saints such as Kabir (d. *c.*1518), Namdev (d. c.1350), and Ravidas (d. 1540).42 Similarly, the third Sikh Guru, Amar Das (1552–74), collected surviving verses by Guru Nanak and included them in a two-volume holy book, the Adi Granth, to which he added hymns and couplets of more than a dozen non-Sikh poet-saints – most prominently Kabir, Namdev, Ravidas and the Chishti Sufi Shaikh Farid al-Din Ganj-i Shakar (d. 1265) – evidently because their thought conformed to Sikh theological and ethical principles.43 Apart from the Adi Granth, however, from the late sixteenth century there circulated oral narratives of Guru Nanak’s life, the janam-sakhis, which freely borrowed themes from tales of Hindu deities (Puranas), Sufi saints (tazkiras), and the Buddha (Jatakas). This sort of diversity suggests the malleability of Sikh identity in the sixteenth century, and the lack of a fixed image of the religion’s founder, whose life appears in these stories to have been fashioned, at least in part, by the fluid cultural universe of early Mughal Punjab.44
The Sikh community grew rapidly in the sixteenth century. Nanak’s earliest followers had been fellow Khatris engaged in petty trade, shopkeeping, or lower-level civil service in the Lodi or Mughal bureaucracies. But as the movement grew, it experienced a significant influx of Jat cultivators.45 The Jats first appear in recorded history in eighth-century Sind, where they were described as cattle-herding tribes that lacked a sense of social hierarchy. By the eleventh century they had migrated up the lower Indus to the Multan region of southern Punjab, where they were described as ‘cattle-owners, low Sudra people’. By the thirteenth century they had moved further north into the central Punjab, and by the late sixteenth century they had abandoned pastoralism for agriculture, becoming dominant landholders in nearly half of Mughal Punjab. Their adoption of agriculture was assisted by the introduction of the Persian wheel (see p. 73), which enhanced the land’s capacity for producing food crops.46 The Jats’ transformation from nomadic pastoralism to field agriculture progressed to the point that, by the 1650s, the word ‘Jat’ had become virtually synonymous with ‘villager’, or even ‘cultivator’. Yet their elevation in economic status had not been accompanied by a commensurate rise in caste status in the Hindu social hierarchy. They also appear to have retained an egalitarian social outlook from their pastoralist days. As an open community that espoused social as well as religious equality, the Sikh movement was therefore well positioned to absorb a significant influx of Jats.
The growth in the Sikh religion also saw changes in ritual. Guru Amar Das established festival days and distinctive ceremonies for a Sikh’s birth, marriage and death. Even though Guru Nanak had rejected the idea of pilgrimages, Guru Amar Das built a well of eighty-four steps in his village of Goindwal, which became the Sikhs’ first pilgrimage centre. Before his death in 1574, he had begun excavating a great tank on a plot of 500 bighas (a unit of land area) given to him by Akbar. Completed by the next guru, Ram Das (1574–81), the tank would become known as Amritsar, ‘the nectar of immortality’. Eventually the town that grew up around the tank would be known by that name, too, as it became the primary seat of Sikh authority.47 As the community grew across the Punjab and even beyond, Guru Amar Das began sending personal representatives (masands) to look after distant congregations and to bring annual offerings to Amritsar. This organizational elaboration was followed by attempts to standardize the Sikhs’ canonical scripture. The fifth guru, Arjan (1581–1606), updated the Adi Granth by adding his own verses and those of Guru Amar Das to the two-volume body that had been collected by Guru Ram Das. He then supervised the compilation of an authoritative text, completed in 1604. This was done, in part, to commit to writing hymns that in his day were available mainly in oral form, and partly to protect the purity of Sikh verses from interpolations by the guru’s rivals.48 The result was to stabilize the scriptural foundation of the Sikh religion. To strengthen its institutional and ritual basis, Guru Arjun enlarged Amritsar’s great tank, paved it with bricks and – most prominently – in 1589 built in its middle the famous Harmandir, popularly known as the Golden Temple. Apart from being one of India’s greatest architectural triumphs, the Harmandir made Amritsar the Sikh faith’s primary ritual focus, since it was here that the Adi Granth was placed for continuous reading, highlighting that scripture’s role as the heart and soul of Sikhdom. Notably, the Harmandir’s distinctive design and architectural style clearly set this structure apart from mosques and Hindu temples of the day, boldly asserting the autonomy of its faith community from India’s other religious traditions [see Fig. 15]. It even appears that Akbar – who had a brief but cordial meeting with Guru Arjan when passing through the Punjab in 159849 – allowed the latter to manage the city of Amritsar, effectively placing it outside the Mughal administrative framework, a ‘state within a state’.50
In the sixteenth century, the growth of the Sikh movement attracted little if any attention at the Mughal court. But this changed soon after Jahangir came to the throne in 1605. Because the new emperor’s eldest son, Khusrau, had contested his father’s claim to succeed Akbar, he was detained immediately upon Jahangir’s accession. But in April 1606 the headstrong prince managed to escape confinement in Agra and dashed straight for the Punjab in a desperate search for support to overthrow his newly crowned father. When his hastily assembled army reached Tarn Tarun, a settlement south of Amritsar, which Guru Arjan had established, the guru responded favourably to Khusrau’s call for supporters, notwithstanding the fact that the emperor was advancing towards the Punjab in hot pursuit of his rebellious son. Jahangir himself relates what took place next:
Khusrau happened to halt at the place where he [Guru Arjun] was, and he came out and did homage to him. He behaved to Khusrau in certain special ways, and made on his forehead a fingermark in saffron, which the Indians (Hinduwan) call qashqa [tika], and is considered auspicious. When this came to my ears and I clearly understood his folly, I ordered them to produce him [Arjun] … and having confiscated his property commanded that he should be put to death.51
Jahangir ordered the execution not out of any animus against Sikhism, which in any event he failed to recognize as a separate religion, but because of the guru’s apparent support for a state rebel.52
Guru Arjun’s execution posed a major crisis for the Sikh community. The late guru had personally acquired both spiritual and temporal authority and had done more to institutionalize the Sikh religion than anybody since Guru Nanak. His absence therefore not only left the Sikhs momentarily leaderless: it set them on a collision course with the Mughal empire. The guru’s son and successor Guru Hargobind (1606–44) reacted by girding himself with two swords that symbolized spiritual and temporal authority, indicating an ethos of militancy hitherto alien to Sikh tradition. He also built a fort to defend Amritsar, another sign of the community’s more militant profile. Finally, he adopted the trappings of royalty, building opposite Amritsar’s Harmandir a high platform called the Akal Takht, ‘immortal throne’, where he conducted worldly business in a court-like atmosphere. When suspicious officials reported these activities to the imperial court, Jahangir ordered that the guru be detained in Gwalior fort, where the Mughals’ political prisoners were held. Although he was released several years later, Sikh–Mughal relations were poisoned for decades to come.