What Is Sikhism? Beliefs, History and the Five Ks
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Sikhism began in the Punjab region of northern India around 1500 with a teacher named Nanak, and it now has some 25 to 30 million followers, more than Judaism. Outside India it is often recognised by the turban and rarely understood beyond it. At its centre is a belief in one God who can be known by anyone, and a rejection, unusual for its time and place, of the idea that birth decides a person's worth.
Guru Nanak and the founding idea
Nanak was born in 1469 into a Hindu family in a region where Hindus and Muslims lived side by side under Muslim rule. Tradition records that after a religious experience at about thirty he declared that there is neither Hindu nor Muslim, meaning that God does not belong to any one tradition, and spent the following decades travelling and teaching. His hymns, set to music and sung, form the earliest part of Sikh scripture.
The teaching was direct. There is one God, formless and beyond gender, who created everything and can be reached by remembering the divine name, living honestly and sharing with others. Ritual, pilgrimage, fasting and priestly castes were unnecessary; a truthful life in the world, earning a living and raising a family, was the path, not withdrawal from it. Women and men, high caste and low, were equal before God. The word Sikh means learner.
Ten Gurus and a book
Nanak was followed by nine successors, each a Guru who led the community, and their two centuries in office shaped the faith's institutions. The fifth Guru, Arjan, compiled the scripture and built the Harmandir Sahib, the Golden Temple at Amritsar, with four doors to show that it was open to all. His execution by the Mughal emperor in 1606 turned a peaceful movement into one that also prepared to defend itself.
The tenth Guru, Gobind Singh, made two decisions that fixed the shape of Sikhism. In 1699 he founded the Khalsa, a community of initiated Sikhs bound by a shared discipline and a shared surname, Singh for men and Kaur for women, so that caste names would disappear. And before his death in 1708 he declared that there would be no further human Gurus: the scripture itself, the Guru Granth Sahib, would be the Guru from then on. It is treated accordingly, installed in every gurdwara, read from at every service, and put to rest each night.
The five Ks
Initiated Sikhs wear five articles of faith, each beginning with the letter K in Punjabi, as a constant, visible commitment:
- •Kesh: uncut hair, a sign of accepting God's creation as it is, kept under the turban
- •Kangha: a small wooden comb, for keeping the hair clean and tidy
- •Kara: an iron or steel bracelet, a reminder of restraint and of the unbroken circle of God
- •Kachera: cotton undergarments, standing for modesty and self-control
- •Kirpan: a small sword, standing for the duty to defend the weak and resist injustice
Worship and the free kitchen
A Sikh place of worship is a gurdwara, the door to the Guru, and any building that houses the scripture can be one. Services consist mainly of singing the hymns and readings from the Guru Granth Sahib, and there is no priesthood: any competent Sikh, woman or man, may lead. Everyone sits on the floor at the same level, covers their head and removes their shoes.
Every gurdwara runs a langar, a free kitchen serving a vegetarian meal to anyone who comes, of any faith or none, all seated together in rows. The practice goes back to Nanak and was a deliberate assault on caste rules about who may eat with whom. The langar at the Golden Temple feeds around 100,000 people a day, and Sikh volunteers running mobile kitchens have become a familiar sight at disasters and protests around the world. Service to others, seva, is regarded as worship in itself.
History since the Gurus
The Sikh community built a state in Punjab under Maharaja Ranjit Singh in the early nineteenth century, was defeated by the British in the 1840s, and then supplied a large share of the British Indian army. Partition in 1947 cut Punjab in two and drove almost all Sikhs from the Pakistani side; the loss of Nanak's birthplace, now in Pakistan, is still felt. In 1984 the Indian army stormed the Golden Temple to remove armed separatists, and the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by Sikh bodyguards in reprisal triggered massacres of Sikhs in Delhi, wounds that remain raw.
Sikhs today number around 24 million in India, overwhelmingly in Punjab, with large communities in Canada, Britain, the United States and Australia. The turban, which is not one of the five Ks but the traditional way of keeping the uncut hair, has made Sikhs both visible and, in some countries, targets of confusion with other groups; the community's answer has generally been more visibility rather than less.
What is inside the Guru Granth Sahib
The Guru Granth Sahib is unusual among scriptures in that it is almost entirely poetry meant to be sung. Most of it is organised not by author or subject but by raga, the melodic framework in which each hymn is to be performed, so the arrangement of the book is itself musical. It is written in the Gurmukhi script, and its language mixes Punjabi with other languages of northern India. Printed copies follow a standard layout of 1,430 pages, so a reference to a particular page points to the same passage in any copy.
The hymns of six of the Gurus form the bulk of the text, but it also includes compositions by poet-saints who were not Sikhs, among them the weaver Kabir, the leatherworker Ravidas, from a caste then treated as untouchable, and the Sufi Muslim Sheikh Farid. Including them was a statement in itself: the Gurus judged that truth about God could come from anyone, whatever their religion or caste. The opening verse, the Mool Mantar, is a short declaration of belief in one God, and many Sikhs recite it and other set prayers every day.
Festivals of the Sikh year
The Sikh calendar is marked by festivals that recall events in the lives of the Gurus. The biggest is Vaisakhi, held in mid-April, which was already a harvest festival in Punjab and became the anniversary of the founding of the Khalsa in 1699. Many Sikhs choose it as the day to take initiation, and towns with large Sikh communities hold processions called nagar kirtan, in which the Guru Granth Sahib is carried through the streets on a decorated float, accompanied by hymn singing and led by five people representing the first members of the Khalsa.
In the autumn, Bandi Chhor Divas falls on the same day as the Hindu festival of Diwali. It remembers the release of the sixth Guru, Hargobind, from imprisonment in Gwalior Fort, where, according to tradition, he refused to leave unless fifty-two imprisoned princes were freed with him, and led them out holding on to his cloak. The Golden Temple is lit up for the occasion. The other major celebrations, the gurpurabs, mark the births and deaths of the Gurus, often with an akhand path, a continuous reading of the whole scripture by a relay of readers that takes about forty-eight hours.
The takeaway
Sikhism teaches that there is one God open to everyone, that all people are equal regardless of birth, and that an honest working life, remembrance of God and service to others is the way to live it. Founded by Guru Nanak around 1500 and shaped by nine successors, it now takes its guidance from its scripture and shows its commitments in the five Ks, the gurdwara and the free kitchen.