Sikhism

Sikhism was founded in the fifteenth-century Punjab by Guru Nanak. What it is, an independent revelation or a synthesis drawing on Hindu and Islamic elements, is a question worth getting right at the start, because the two answers have very different histories. The synthesis reading was popularized by colonial-era scholarship and is still widely repeated; the Sikh tradition itself, as well as most current scholarship, holds that Nanak’s teaching was a distinct revelation that emerged in a context shared with Hindu and Muslim traditions without being derived from either. Nanak’s own reported formulation, that there is neither Hindu nor Muslim, reads better as a rejection of the categories than as an attempt to average them.

There are roughly 26 million Sikhs worldwide, the large majority in Punjab, with significant communities in the UK, Canada, the US, and East Africa. “Sikh” means disciple.

According to Sikh tradition, at the Baisakhi gathering of 1699, the tenth guru, Gobind Singh, called for volunteers willing to give their lives, took five men one by one into a tent, and emerged each time with a bloodied sword, before revealing all five alive and initiating them into the Khalsa. From this come the Five Ks worn by initiated Sikhs: uncut hair (kesh), a comb (kangha), an iron bracelet (kara), a specific undergarment (kachera), and a ceremonial sword (kirpan).

The occasion carried a deliberate social argument. The five volunteers came from different castes, and Guru Gobind Singh gave Sikh men the shared surname Singh (“lion”) and Sikh women the surname Kaur (“princess”) specifically to erase caste markers from Sikh identity. In practice, many Sikhs now use these alongside family names rather than instead of them, and caste has proved more persistent within Sikh communities than the tenth guru intended.

Sikhism has emphasized gender equality since its founding, and the Guru Granth Sahib, the scripture, treated as the living and final guru after Gobind Singh, opens with the Mul Mantar, a statement of belief in one formless, timeless, self-existent creator. It also contains hymns by Hindu and Muslim poet-saints, including Kabir and Farid, which is a fact worth sitting with in the context of the synthesis question above.

Sikhism and Hinduism share deep historical and cultural threads in Punjab, along with overlapping festivals that mark different events for each community. They also differ substantially in theology, institutions, and identity. How much weight to give the shared threads versus the differences is a live question tied up with real political history, Operation Blue Star in 1984, and everything after, and this page won’t try to settle it.

Further reading: Hew McLeod’s work, and the responses to it from within the tradition; between them, you get the shape of the argument. Also, read Nikky-Guninder Kaur Singh on the scripture.