Spirit of the Sikh Part2 V2

SPIRIT OF THE SIKH PART II VOLUME TWO PURAN SINGH INTRODUCTION Attention has briefly been drawn to the history of the composition of Spirit of the Sikh in the introductory notes to Part I and to Volume One of Part II of this book. Professor Puran Singh both in his English and Punjabi writings maintains a uniform style of expression, whose prominent features are a vehement lyricism and formation of sentences which because of the almost breathless passion which is at their basis, tend often to go out of hand. The reader has to learn to live with this trait in this writer, which with an overwhelming play of imagination and emotion, helps constantly to throw out passage that are sublimely lyrical. This quality of his style, which has long ceased to be the ruling style in English writings, and has mainly characterized the idealists and visionaries like Carlyle, Emerson and Ruskin, is as a matter of fact as much the result of the author’s own characteristic quality of mind as of the strong influence on him of Carlyle, his favourite author. In many places his writing indicates half-conscious echoes of Carlyle. The other great writer favoured by Puran Singh is Walt Whitman, whom he has quoted more than once. The author’s contact with his contemporary writing is again remarkable. He has more than once referred to Adelphi, a literary magazine of the time and to John Middleton Murry. He has also quoted in full Markham’s Man With the Hoe, a contemporary poem of the time, later deservedly famous, and echoing the passionate plea for socialism, then a recent phenomenon. No less contemporary is the author’s gushing enthusiasm for the Russian Revolution, imperfectly understood by him though, as by most intellectuals of the West and the East then. All this indicates the author’s voracious reading and his almost insatiable hunger to keep himself abreast of such thought and literature as according to him, would aid and supplement his own idealistic vision of Sikhism. In the present volume, the matter is cast in the form of separate and distinct theme headings, elucidating the idealistic vision of the Sikh faith, along with illustrative translated renderings from Sikh sacred literature. The total quantum of such literature quoted and entered in this volume is less than in the earlier. That is because of the scheme that is formulated in this, which is to make it the collection of nearly a score of essays pertaining to Sikhism, couched in a highly lyrical style. The earlier volume is of the nature of a running lyrical passage, with the chapters marking only the successive steps of this total lyrical experience. Following on this lyricism, there are long and copious excerpts from Gurubani in English rendering, which as has been pointed out in the introduction to that volume, is extremely soulful and imaginative. The overwhelming emphasis in these writings, as in all others from Puran Singh, is on the spirit of devotion (Nam and Simrin) in Sikhism, its underlying message of sacrifice and love. In the middle chapters, those entitled War, Ethics, Aesthetics, At the Feet of the Lord and Sikh History, Religion, The Worker and Love, the various idealistic aspects of the Sikh creed are brought out in deeply felt tones, which invest the practice of Religion with a romantic fervour. Puran Singh’s Sikhism is, as would be obvious, not the adoption of a creed in a mindless way by birth only, or by the practice of ritual and formalism. His is a passionately held conviction, in the spirit of the Sikhs of old, to whom their Keshas (long unshorn hair) symbol of Sikhism, were dear as breath itself. There occur in the course of these essays, eloquent passages on the Keshas. Another of Puran Singh’s loves is Buddhism, the creed which he adopted and later left for the creed in which he had been born. Buddhism, standing in the effulgence of its spirit against orthodox Brahmanism, to which Puran Singh appears to be allergic for its quietism, he praises ecstatically in one of the earlier chapters. Towards the close are two chapters, unparalleled for their lyrical exposition of the Sikh spirit and the qualities of the Sikh people—one entitled The Sikh People itself and the other, Guru Gobind Singh the New Gita Himself. None else has ever expressed himself with such fervour of devotion to the Tenth Master as Puran Singh here, though of course, devotion all through is the inspiring force in his writings. To draw attention to some of the most striking features of this remarkable work, the like of which on Sikhism or on religion for the matter of that, is rare, depending on the mystical vision in the writer. In the chapter Guru Gobind Singh the New Gita Himself already referred to, is brought out the essence of the nishkām karma philosophy of the Gita as it manifested itself in the life-long endeavour of Guru Gobind Singh to establish by the force of self-sacrificing and ascetic heroism, justice and right, of which the Gita and later, Guru Gobind Singh’s own Bachittar Natak have given the splendid vision. This part is highly creative, though of course, the entire work is imaginative and creative to a high degree. In the chapter The Sikh People is presented the idealized image of the Sikh—a simple peasant and worker, devoted to the Guru’s teaching, sacrificing himself and in the course of his life eschewing the inanities of the speculative gossamers for which India is famous, but which often find mention here in pejorative terms. The much misunderstood Sikh in this chapter, and in these volumes as a whole, will find his way of life held up for admiration and justification. One other chapter to which particular attention may be drawn, and which present-day critics of Punjabi may take note of, is that entitled, The Sikh-Muslim School in the Punjab. This school is a mystico-cultural tradition that after the message of the Gurus was delivered and percolated to the masses, caught on among the Muslim Sufi poets of the Punjab. They spoke in a terminology, composed of elements Indian and at the same time tinged with the hues of Punjabi Sufism, which the Gurus themselves had fashioned to give expression to their own message, meant for the simple rural masses, Muslim no less than non-Muslim. That this message was the expression characteristically of the soul-force of the Punjab, with its freedom from acrimonious dogmatism, Brahmanical or Muslim, is further proved by the fact that it found such loving echoes in the songs and lyrics of the Muslim Sufi poets of the Punjab, such as Bullah Shah, Shah Hussain and others. Earlier, such a school may be said to have begun in the shabdas and slokas of Baba Sheikh Farid Shakarganj, whom the holy Gurus made an inalienable part of the Sikh tradition by incorporating his Bani, brief though, in the pages of the holy Granth Sahib. It is to be regretted that this chapter, so pregnant with meaning and insight, is so brief and leaves the reader craving for more. Before closing, a few passages, rich with the high gifts of imagination and eloquence may be referred to. These are meant only as brief instances, to whet the reader’s appetite for more, which he will find scattered all over the work. These come suddenly upon the reader’s attention, like a sublime vision behind a tuft of trees on a hill, leaving him almost reeling with the ‘inebriation’ of ecstasy. One such may be taken from one of the earlier chapters, Nam and Simrin, a theme as central as it was dear to the author’s heart. On the emancipating quality of Nam and Simrin thus opens this paragraph: “In these dark regions of the spirit-world live all the desire-bound beings, who do not let man go safe beyond. In these dark regions are the slums of those who have violated their purity. Here is man, self-fettered by his own violent deeds which have been suicidal to him in as much as they created a “curvature” in his soul, and he cannot be freed even after physical death. Unless one has by luck been introduced to the higher regions of absolute freedom, men rot in their own desires for centuries, in their own violent crimes, in their own filth and more of sin that sticks to them even beyond death. A Sikh saint of Simrin (whom I have seen) told us one day that there are souls that by their own heaviness sink into the earth, others live on its surface. Very few rise up and they are caught by their earthly relatives who died before them—mothers and fathers and uncles and grandfathers. Then there are men gurus, the mental hypnotists and charlatans who crushed men here by their mental power. Many a soul like that of “Lilith” flutters like birds caught in the noose of someone’s mental powers. Many souls are rotting in the eternal prisons of unillumined dungeons of the minds of those occults, divines, those who passed as great saviours of men, by the excitement of their intellect here on earth. Both masters and disciples are fettered to each other. And there are innumerable soul-worlds where many such live. The Yogis who make on earth tremendous effort to be something extraordinary, live eternally in their own little cocoons. They have no power. After death, they come to know that their best religions and best efforts were their undoing.

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