“When the chiefs and principal leaders are seated, the Adi-Granth and Dasama Pādshāh Ka Granth[5] are placed before them. They all bend their heads before the Scriptures and exclaim, ‘Wah Guruji ka Khālsa! wah Guruji ka Fateh!’[6] A great quantity of cakes made of wheat, butter and sugar are then placed before the volumes of their sacred writings and covered with a cloth. These holy cakes, which are in commemoration of the injunction of Nānak to eat and to give to others to eat next receive the salutation of the assembly, who then rise, while the Akālis pray aloud and the musicians play. The Akālis, when the prayers are finished, desire the Council to be seated. They sit down, and the cakes are uncovered and eaten by all classes of the Sikhs, those distinctions of tribe and caste which are on other occasions kept up being now laid aside in token of their general and complete union in one cause. The Akālis proclaim the Guru-Māta, and prayers are again said aloud. The chiefs after this sit closer and say to each other, ‘The sacred Granth is between us, let us swear by our Scriptures to forget all internal disputes and to be united.’ This moment of religious fervour is taken to reconcile all animosities. They then proceed to consider the danger with which they are threatened, to devise the best plans for averting it and to choose the generals who are to lead their armies against the common enemy.” The first Guru-Māta was assembled by Guru Govind, and the latest was called in 1805, when the British Army pursued Holkar into the Punjab. The Sikh Army was known as Dal Khālsa, or the Army of God, khālsa being an Arabic word meaning one’s own.[7] At the height of the Sikh power the followers of this religion only numbered a small fraction of the population of the Punjab, and its strength is now declining. In 1911 the Sikhs were only three millions in the Punjab population of twenty-four millions.
[1] See article Nānakpanthi for an account of Nānak’s creed.
[2] Here again, Sir D. Ibbetson notes, it is often the women who are the original offenders: “I have often asked Sikhs how it is that, believing as they do in only one God, they can put any faith in and render any obedience to Brāhmans who acknowledge a large number of deities, and their answer in every case has been that they do not themselves believe in them; but their women do, and to please them they are obliged to pay attention to what the Brāhmans say.”
[3] Punjab Census Report (1891), para. 107.
[4] Account of the Sikhs, Asiatic Researches.
[5] Apparently the Scripture of Govind, the tenth guru.
[6] ‘Hurrah for the Guru’s Khālsa, Victory to the Guru.’
[7] Sir Lepel Griffin’s Life of Ranjīt Singh.