Introductory - Global Sikh Studies

and a major factor having a great bearing on the Indian polity. It
almost polarized he masses into two mutually hostile camps. Being a
foreign domination, initially, the political domination assumed a new
dimension, especially as it involved religious dictation as well. As a
consequence of this socio-religious confrontation, human values of
freedom and equality were further relegated to the background, and
the narrow caste system and religious bigotry gained ascendancy. The
Radical Bhakti movement was an attempt to resurrect human values.
But this protest of the Bhaktas did not have much of a social impact,
because it remained confined to the ideological plane. Three chapters
have been devoted to these problems.
The Sikhs movement established the Sikh Panth outside the caste
society and successfully used it as a base to challenge political and
religious dominance. It even captured political power for a plebian
cause. What the Radical Bhaktas did not, the Sikh Gurus did. This
development could not be fortuitous. It was because of the Sikh
Gurus’ view of religion which, regards the tackling of all problems,
social or political thrown up by life as a part and parcel of one’s
religious duty. No understanding of the Sikh movement can be
complete without understanding the Sikh thesis, because its political
orientation and development was only a projection of the Sikh view
of religion. In the succeeding chapters an attempt has been made to
interpret the Sikh movement in the light of the Sikh thesis and the
Sikh approach to life.
Movements are the resultant of varied and complex forces
operating over a period of history. Any attempt to generalize about
them cannot possible escape the blemish of over-simplification.
All these varied factors, moreover, often get mixed up in a manner
that it becomes next to impossible to demarcated the part played
by them individually. One can take not of only the dominating
tendencies.
The ideology of the orthodox social order, which the Sikh
movement challenged, has been, for the sake of convenience,
termed Brahmanism or orthodoxy, and the orthodox social order
itself has been frequently referred to as the Brahmanical order, or
the orthodox order. Brahmanism, including its later phase of Neo-
Brahmanism, may be loosely defined as the socio-religious
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