I.D. Soni
The more we think of Guru Govind Singh Ji, the more we repeat to ourselves the words: “The Guru did so much for us: what are we doing for him”? His life was a yagna, a sacrifice for India to the Eternal. We think of him as the Guru of the Dark Night. He bore his cross heroically. He went into great agony and he shared his agony with his disciples, his countrymen. He bore his agony and shared it in silence. Again and again have we thought of the silence of the Guru in the last, closing, crowning period of his blessed life. He kept his heart as a sanctuary for the Hidden Word of the Holy Spirit. In his little “Abchal Nagar”, the city of Eternal, he communed with God in silence and love. Only one language he spoke in that last period of his agony and isolation, only one language. He spoke in silence. We may hear it in silence, the language of love.
In tattered garments he travelled from place to place and then stayed in the “Abchal Nagar”. He travelled as a pilgrim: he stayed there as a pilgrim. And in silence he wrought the wonder of his work and the wonder of his life. In silence, too he communed with God. What wondrous songs he sang! We still may sing them and find that they nourish our interior life, a life radiant with strength and serenity, with service and interior peace – a life rich in suffering and sacrifice, in the love of God and the love of the poor, broken bleeding ones.
What has not the great Guru done for us! The Hindus had failed to organise their forces for the protection of their frontiers and their cities, their families and their village-folk. India was immensely rich. Alas! the Hindus had failed to guard their wealth and freedom. And Turks and Afgans had swept down to destroy India’s peace and prosperity.
Mahmud of Ghazni had swooped over India and pillaged the cities of Hindus and destroyed their temples and carried away to his capital, Ghazni, treasures accumulated for centuries – pearls and diamonds and rubies and emeralds and jewels. Mathura and Somnath had been sacked. Mahmud of Ghazni had become the richest king of the world.
Ala-ud-Din came after Mahmud. He, too, proved a scourge for India. In quick succession came Babar, the Moghul. He continued the terrible work of destruction. In the line of the Moghul kings, Akbar was the one king who combined statesmanship with sympathy in his attitude and dealings with the Hindus. But Aurangzeb upset the conciliatory work of Akbar. Aurangzeb’s dream of a Muslim empire in India was never realised. He weakened Akbar’s work: he wrecked his own dynasty: and the mute millions of India prayed for his death. Indeed, he himself began to realise, when, alas! it was too late, that his narrow, sectarian policy had destroyed the heritage of Akbar. His deathbed “letters” are Aurangzeb’s “confessions” – a lesson and a warning.
“I know not”, he writes, “who I am and where I shall go or what will happen to me, a sinner full of sins. My years have gone by, profitless. I have greatly sinned and know not what torments of hell await me”. Guru Gobind Singh Ji surveyed the situation of India. He saw that if Hindus would maintain freedom, they must pay the price of freedom: and that price was “vigilance”, “eternal vigilance” not the non-violence of the weak. If power corrupts, so may non-violence corrupt, too. India has been invaded, again and again, by barbaric and aggressive forces. And India’s hope, I humbly submit, is not in a creed of non-violence but in the spirit of heroic resistance, which surrenders life in reverence for the Great Life. Guru Gobind Singh Ji dared to go out to meet Aurangzeb and his forces of intolerance and oppression in the true Kshatrya spirit that fights, not for selfish gain but in order to purify and heal. This I interpret as the true Khalsa spirit that awakes in him who has reverence for life.
In this spirit, indeed, Gobind Rai – then, a mere, boy – said to his revered father, Guru Teg Bahadur Ji: “Father! Offer yourself as an oblation and save the people of Kashmir! Embrace death as a bride”! In the same spirit did Guru Teg Bahadur Ji and faced death when he was beheaded, reciting the Japji under the banyan tree which still stands a witness to the heroic spirit of the martyred Guru. Guru Gobind Singh Ji was in his revered father’s Anandpur, when the news reached him of the passing away of Guru Teg Bahadur Ji, others mourned, but Guru Gobind Singh Ji asked them all not to weep but to give glory to God and bless His Name. Gobind said to them:
Say not he is dead!
Listen to what the angels sing:
“He cometh home:
The Victor cometh home”!
In our love for the beloved is our freedom for ever!
Gobind, as a boy, cheerfully offers the life of his father as a sacrifice to God for the freedom of the people. The same Gobind, in the maturity of his years, offers his two sons as a sacrifice to the Akal Purukh for the sake of the people. The Guru dresses his little boy, Ajit, as a soldier and says to him: My child go forth! The Akal Purukh so Wills it”! With the same spirit the Guru fills the Khalsa Brotherhood that he organises for the service of his country.
The Khalsa was Brotherhood of soldiers who aspired to be servants of saints. The Khalsa called himself “Akali”, the soldier who feared not death but lived in the Akal, the Eternal. And to Him he gave all credit, crying, “Wah Guru”!
Thrilling is the story of the deeds of Guru Gobind Singh Ji and his disciples, the Khalsa. They stood up heroically against the imperial power of Aurangzeb. Many were killed, but they would not surrender. Pursued was the Guru by imperial forces: he faced them. Then, overcome by tremendous odds, he ran from place to place: he never surrendered. Separated was he from his beloved disciples, but they remembered him and loved him to the last. The Guru finds himself, one day, in the solitude of the Lakhi Jungle. Some of his disciples come to know that their beloved leader is in the forest, cut off from his people. The disciples hear in their hearts the call of the beloved, saying: “Come”! And they come: they speed on: they come quickly, crying to him.
Guru Gobind Singh Ji himself tells us in his autobiography Bachitar Natak (Wondrous Drama), that he was aware that God sent him to this earth with a purpose: in his earlier incarnation, he had been a renunciate engaged in a life of contemplation. When he became one with the Unmanifest, God commanded him: “I have cherished thee as my son, and created thee to establish a religion and restrain the world from senseless acts”. Thereupon, the Guru continues, “I stood up, folded my hands, bowed my head and replied, “Lord, the religion will prevail in all the world, when it has Thy support. The Guru concludes his account thus: “For this purpose was I born, let all virtuous people understand. I was born to advance righteousness, to emancipate the good and to destroy all evil-doers root and branch”.
The Guru in his Divine Wisdom knew that he was the last leader of the faith; therefore he pondered deeply on the future of his followers. How could he ensure the physical and spiritual well-being of his community when there would be no Guru in human from? He resolved on the answer to that problem thus: henceforth, each and every Sikh must become the vehicle of the Master’s Teaching: the word of the Master must be enshrined in the heart of the Sikhs; the presence of the Word in their hearts and souls would compensate for the absence of the physical form of the Guru in their midst. With the last benediction of his earth life, he left to his disciples the Book Beloved, the Granth Sahib, the Guru Granth Sahib, Saying: “The bani, the word is the Master, the Guru, now”. Yes, the living spirit of the Gurus speakth in the words of this ever-living Book, this inspired testament of the Sikh Faith.
Guru Gobind Singh Ji healed Bharata by sparks of the divine fire that flowed into him from the Eternal Flame. He, the wearer of the blue robe, the deliverer of India’s millions, the guardian or the sacred idea for which stands the Sikh Faith, does he not still lead his beloved Sikhs to guard the purpose of India’s history?
He was a poet, he was a prophet: he was a seer: he was a scholar: he was a singer: he was a hero: he was a patriot of purest ray serene. And to lowly acts of service he bent his hands to labour and earn his daily bread. He truly realised the dignity and meaning of manual labour. He used to say that labour was worship.
He was not an enemy of Islam. His bani clearly indicates that he saw the Divine Spirit, the one Akal Purukh, in the Koran, no less than in the Vedas. He, therefore, always emphasised that alike for the Muslim and the Hindu the urgent need was dhyanam: meditation, and bhakti, Devotion to God and the Gurus, service of the poor and broken ones. What was needed was Nama, life in Nama, life of devotion and service. What was needed was not a creed but a realisation. Man’s pilgrimage, he saw, as the first great teacher of the Sikh Faith, Guru Nanak Ji Maharaj, had seen with radiant eyes, was to the Satya Loka, the Realm of Truth, the Abode of Eternal life.
The last brief period of his brief life – he was but forty two when he passed away – he spent in loving communion with God. He began his life as a contemplative on the Hem Kanta Mountain: he closed his life in deep communion with the Akal Purukh on the banks of the Godavari at Nader. There he stayed and a few gathered around him: and this community of the contemplatives he called “Abchal Nagar” – words which literally mean, “The city of the Eternal”. I believe that if the Living Word, the Bani of ten Gurus and the saints, the Seers, and sages of India and humanity, of all climes and races could re-inspire the Sikh Faith, it would indeed become a living faith and its message would thrill India again from end to end. This may not be until we enter with sympathy into the child-like spirit of the Sikh Village – folk and their great Teachers, the Sikh Gurus, the saints and the Bhaktas of India. How may we speak of thee, O thou who speaketh still? The tumult and the shouting centuries hath died: the captains and the kings have gone” But thou, O Guru Gobind Singh, dost live on! The sacrifice stands: and thy light shines on – the light of humble and holy heart. He gave to the Khalsa some simple rules from his Mother-heart – Eat little, sleep little, love compassion and forbear, etc.!