Introductory - Global Sikh Studies

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off the miasma of touch pollution against the outcastes, and how
many of them would publicly volunteer in a body to accept girls of
Chuhras into their families in marriage? It would also be of interest to
know in what ratio the number of whites, who have married Negro
women in the U.S.A., bear to the total population of that country?
This is not to say that the Sikh Jats are superior to the whites of the
U.S.A. in overcoming prejudices of social exclusiveness which have
sunk deep down in the human mind. There may be many factors which
have to be taken into account before even an approximate comparison
is attempted. All that we want to point out is the intractibility of the
problem and the need to assess the achievement of the Sikh Revolution
in this light.
The achievements of movements, we reiterate, cannot be judged
by absolute standards because few of them would measure upto them.
No social movement, howsoever radical, can completely defy its
environmental limitations for long. Viewed in this perspective, the
success of the Sikh Panth in breaking the central core of the caste and
its rigid social and economic restrictions has, indeed, been remarkable.
What is more pertinent for a comparative judgment is whether any
other movement in medieval or modern India has ever reached the
heights the Sikh movement did in achieving its anti-caste goals.
2 Religious and Political Domination
The second objective of the Sikh movement was to fight religious
and political domination. The success of the movement in this respect
is so obvious that it needs no comment on our part.
'We now close the narrative of the Sikhs, who placed themselves
at the head of the nation; who showed themselves as interpreters
of the rights of the people; who maintained the struggle between
good and evil, between the sovereign will of the people and the divine
right of kings, and the opposition of liberty to despotism; who avenged
the insults, the outrages and slavery of many generations past; who
delivered their mother country from the yoke of the foreign oppressor;
who displayed all that was great and noble; who left to the children of
this province a heritage unsullied by the presence of any foreign soldier;