History

The Evolution of
The Saint Soldier

by HARCHAND SINGH BEDI

 

 

Sikhs are known as the best soldiers in the world.

The British-Indian Army had a disproportionately large number of Sikhs. During the Indian mutiny, Sikhs helped the British to put it down. [The mutineers were the same motley crew that had, only a decade earlier, joined British forces to bring down the Sikh Raj.]

The Sikhs thereafter became the backbone of the Indian Army.

During the two World Wars, over a million Sikhs fought for the Allies, and well over 80,000 sacrificed their lives for the freedom of humanity. Thus, the freedom we enjoy now was earned by our ancestors. Wherever we live in the world, our turban adorns - or should adorn - many in the military and police forces. We earned the right to wear it, on the shoulders of our ancestors who gave their all during the two great wars. Not surprisingly, Sikh soldiers won a disproportionately high number of Victoria Crosses for their valour.

Since independence, the Indian Army too has had a very large number of Sikh soldiers. They have been the back-bone of Indian victories in major conflicts.

Being a sant-sipahi is in our DNA. We live by the code of Saint Soldiers. We are never afraid, nor do we impose fear on any but the enemy. Our supreme commander is God itself. This central belief is given to us by the founder of the Sikh Brotherhood, our Tenth Master, Guru Gobind Singh:  Be a proud Sikh; wear your turban with pride. Wherever you are, serve your country and community!

The Sikh National Anthem

Grant me this boon, O Lord:
May I never be deterred from good deeds.
Without fear may I enter the battlefield.
With complete resolve, may I bring victory.
May my mind be trained to sing Your praises.
And when the time comes, bring me a valiant death on life's battlefield.

[Guru Gobind Singh, Dasam Granth:.99]

The following quotation written in the Jang Naamah (battle chronicles) of Qazi Nur Mohammed in 1765, depicts the latter as a staunch enemy of the Sikhs, but he goes into a rosary of praise when he defines the traits of Sikh Warriors:

" ... If you cherish the desire of learning the art of war, face them on the battle field. When they hold their mighty sword, they gallop from Hind to Sind. Nobody however strong and wealthy dare oppose them. If their sword struck a coat of mail, the coat itself becomes the enemy's shroud. Each and every one of them looks like massive boulders of rock. In a grandeur, each one of them excels fifty men ..."

Sikh warriors developed these qualities through hard physical and mental training; They spent their spare time in meditation, and learning Shastar Vidya (Sikh Martial Art). The icing on the cake was getting initiated into the Khalsa by taking Amrit, which stirred valour and bravery in them. In fact, this was a pre-requisite before they were recruited in the forces to fight the oppressor.

So much admiration has been excited by the distinguished conduct of the Sikh regiments of the Indian Army in the Frontier campaign and in the two World Wars that some account of the origin of these fine fighting men may be found interesting and an eye-opener.

To those unacquainted with the history of the subcontinent, the qualities of the Saint-Soldier are best exemplified in the Battle of Saragarhi by the 22 Sikhs who gave their all and created unprecended history in the annals of Man.

The evolution of the Sikh soldier dates, however, to a much earlier period.

The Sikhs, it must be remembered, were in the beginning a  persecuted religious community. A new and revolutionary faith had been created by a succession of Ten Gurus - Spiritual Teachers - who freed the people from the tyranny of the Hindu Brahmins and the caste-system imposed on the populace.

It is clear that Guru Nanak started the herculean task of nurturing the Sikhs to become the bravest saint-soldiers the world has ever known. The successive Gurus tended to the continued shaping of the nascent community.

The concept of Miri-Piri (the intertwining of one's temporal and spiritual obligations) introduced by Guru Hargobind, the Sixth Master, was given its final shape by the Tenth Master, Guru Gobind Singh, who metaphorically merged the two swords into the Khanda, double-edged sword.

From this khanda, the Khalsa took amrit (ambrosial nectar) on the historic day of the first Vaisakhi in 1699. With this, the great mission of Guru Nanak was complete. Thereafter, the Khalsa was ready to play the Game of Love in his/her role as a
sant-sipahi, the Saint-Soldier.

After the era of the Great Gurus came the two Holocausts during which the Mughals tried to eradicate the Sikhs completely.

The Sikhs not only survived against heavy odds but, in the year 1780, was born at Gujranwala, Ranjit Singh, destined to become a great ruler of men, and to be deemed worthy by many of the designation of the 'Napoleon of the East'. Ranjit Singh was the son of Mahan Singh, chief of one of the least powerful of the twelve confederacies in which the Sikhs were at that time embodied, and, succeeding his father at the age of eleven years, pursued a persistent and unswerving ambition of bringing all of Punjab under the same flag and push back the foreign invaders.

In 1799, he became the absolute Emperor of a united Punjab, and ruled from Ladakh to Kashmir to Afghanistan to the Sutlej unchallenged for four decades.

Betrayed by his Hindu Dogra generals - their loyalty bought by the waiting British with the Kingdom of Kashmir - Ranjit Singh's empire fell to the British after his death. 

During the battles that are now popularly known under the misnomer of the Anglo-Sikh Wars, the British learnt of the true mettle of the Sikhs, and turned them into the "sword-arm" of the empire.

They continued that role in independent India, saving it from its various enemies during a series of wars with its neighbours in the 1960s and thereafter, to this day.

Today, the Sikhs of the world - Saint-Soldiers, ever - stand poised, ready to make history once again ... as a nation which now claims the world as its home.

 

December 2, 2010

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