This year marked 550th year of Guru Nanak’s birth anniversary. Born in a Punjabi Hindu Khatri family, the founder of Sikhism created a new identity of his followers with a progressive message of attaining salvation by earning honest living, sharing it with the less fortunate and always remembering the Creator.
He also preached against rites and rituals, the caste hierarchy, and gender inequality. In other words, he created a following among his disciples based on a new philosophy of enlightenment, and started a tradition of appointing successors, which ended with the call of the tenth Guru Gobind Singh’s message to his Sikhs to follow Guru Granth Sahib as the Living Guru.
Notwithstanding the emergence of a new identity, the relationship of a common bond between Hindu community and Sikh community has remained cordial and peaceful despite some testing times. In one of the worst periods for Sikhs during Mughal Emperor Farrukhsiyar’s call to kill all Sikhs in 1713, the Punjabi Hindu mothers started raising their eldest son as a Sikh, a Sardar and a Khalsa to fight against Mughal tyranny and invading hordes.
The elder son fought against the genocide order of the Mughals and invading Afghan forces to protect the motherland, and its customs and traditions.
When martyred, the Hindu mother would ask her second son to join the Khalsa Panth. Just like the elder son, she would bless the second son with a quote from Gurbani: Soora So Pehchaanea, Jo Lare Deen Ke Het, Purja Kat Mare, Kabooh Na Chhode Khet (He alone is a brave who fights under religious command, and would rather be cut into pieces than leaving the battlefield).
This determined force of the brave not only put an end to Mughal rule in Punjab but also stopped the invading hordes of Afghans. As a result, this new force of the Khalsa created the mighty empire of Maharaja Ranjit Singh.
However, the region again came under the rule of foreigners- the British. Their departure created one of the worst humanitarian crisis in 1947. The largest migration of humans in the 20th century took the lives of a million people.
During this madness, the neighbours killed neighbours, women were raped and children lost their childhood. The provocation was created by the British colonialists without any system to process the migration of communities from both sides of the newly created India-Pakistan border.
During this disaster, both Hindu and Sikh communities joined hands to leave their ancestral homes, lands and possessions in West Punjab. Children of a common mother came back to live as neighbours in Eastern Punjab and many other parts of India.
Despite this common history, culture and family bonds, the divisive forces have never given up to divide blood brothers. In independent India, the worst decade and half (1978-1993) for both communities witnessed horrible violence, which includes army action against the Golden Temple and the Delhi massacres of 1984.
Individuals were targeted by terrorists, and group shootings in buses, trains and common places became the norm. However, even during this period of lawlessness, there was not a single incident of spontaneous violence between the two communities in Punjab: Hindus and Sikhs.
The tradition of Hindu families having the elder son adopting Khalsa Rehat has continued in many Punjabi families to date despite provocations from both sides with vested political interests; for example, the former Chief Minister of Delhi, Late Madan Lal Khurana’s elder brother is a Khalsa Sikh.
Both Hindus and Sikhs of Punjab have experienced many common challenges in their history, but they have always risen to the occasion to face them as a united front. Based on their shared history, values and beliefs, they are likely to stay united like a granite stone because they are children of a common mother.