Introductory - Global Sikh Studies

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and hence challenged the Shariatic law, also challenged the political
power which supported it or derived power from it.
Beside this, any policy or activity, the deliberate and consistent
pursuit of which is going to lead to confrontation with the established
power, is political in its aims and content. If the picking up of salt
crystals at Dunee by Mahatma Gandhi could spearhead the civil
disobedience movement against the British Raj, resisting the Shariat
law and the enrolling of Muhammandans to the Sikh ranks was
comparatively far too serious an affair in the bigoted medieval Muslim
State. And there is no doubt that Jahangir himself realized the political
implications of the Sikh movement also because in his autobiograhpy
he clearly mentions that Guru Arjan ‘noised himself as a worldly leader’.
Inspite of this unambiguous position, an erroneous impression
persists that the Sikh movement was a purely religious movement
before it took a political turn with the martyrdom of Guru Arjan.
One reason for this is that the Sikh Gurus conceived and expressed
the entire arena of human activity is religious terms. Guru Gobind
Singh says : “I assumed birth for the purpose of spreading the faith,
saving the saints, and extirpating all tyrants.’ 24a Here in the context of
his Times, the extirpation of tyrants meant the extirpation of the
bigoted Muslim rulers who pooressed their subjects. It was clearly a
political mission but it was linked with the ‘spreading of the faith]. In
other words, the spreading of the Sikh faith was a part of the political
Sikh mission and Guru Gobind Singh expressly stated that he was
following the path laid by the previous Gurus. Apart from the Guru’s
own religious approach, there was no other way for mobilizing the
Indian masses for the achievement of those plebian political objectives
which the Sikh movement had in view. The Marathas had all along a
vague sense of their identity, but, besides other factors, they needed a
religious inspiration to strengthen the bonds of their nationhood. The
Sikhs had to give shape to a political force by uniting those elements
of the population who had no consciousness of their political
destiny, who were split up into mutually exclusive groups, and whose
political aspirations and initiative had been strangulated by the caste
ideology. In the context of medieval Indian conditions, it is very