Questions, answered with the evidence

Sikhs reject the description, and specialists, McLeod included, do not use it. Guru Nānak (1469–1539) called God by Hindu and Muslim names alike, Rām and Hari, Khudā and Allāh, and the Sikh scripture includes hymns by the Muslim Sufi Shaikh Farīd and by the Sant poets Kabīr, Ravidās and Nāmdev. But Guru Nānak rejected the idols, pilgrimages and ritual purity of the one and the authority of both Brahmin and qāzī, and his successors selected the outside poets' hymns, set them in their own order and in places answered them in verses of their own. The frame of 'Hindu and Turk' as two communities, and of a devotee who stands outside both, is already in a hymn attributed to Nāmdev, by the usual dating from before Guru Nānak, and a hymn of the fifth Guru says 'I am neither Hindu nor Muslim'. Even W. H. McLeod, who placed Guru Nānak within the north Indian Sant tradition, described its sources as chiefly Vaiṣṇava devotion and Nāth yoga, with only a small Sufi element. What scholars argue over is how far Guru Nānak belonged to that Sant milieu and how far he began something new; whether Sikhs are a separate religion from Hindus became a political question in the nineteenth century, and remains one.

Sikh tradition says he did, on a journey west that also took him to Medina and Baghdad, and the story is early: Bhāī Gurdās, the scribe of the Sikh scripture, told it in the early seventeenth century, within about seventy years of Guru Nānak's death and before any surviving janamsākhī. In his telling Guru Nānak slept in the mosque with his feet towards the miḥrāb, a man named Jīvan dragged him by the legs, and Mecca turned with them. But no Muslim or other outside source records the visit, the janamsākhīs give different routes, and the story is a miracle story from its first telling. A stone at a Baghdad shrine once read as naming 'Bābā Nānak' in his lifetime was dated by the Ottomanist V. L. Ménage to the early nineteenth century. W. H. McLeod judged a visit to Mecca highly improbable and one to Baghdad a remote possibility; most historians since treat the western journey as unproven. Guru Nānak's hymns show that he knew Muslim practice well; they do not say where he travelled.

Not as final rewards. The Sikh scripture keeps the Indian picture of rebirth: what binds a person to the round of eighty-four lakh births is haumai, the self-centred ego, and release (mukti) comes by grace (nadar), through remembering the divine Name, not through ritual or asceticism. The hymns do use the images of judgement and hell: Dharamrāj reads out each person's good and bad deeds, the one without the Name goes bound to the city of Jam, and both the Indian and the Persian words for hell and heaven appear. But they set heaven and hell below release. Guru Nānak (1469–1539) counts them among the things that did not exist before creation, Guru Arjan (1581–1606) makes them stations on the round of rebirth and asks for nothing but love of God, and the scripture keeps Kabīr's line 'What is hell, what is heaven? The saints reject both.' The goal is release, which can come while still alive; in W. H. McLeod's reading the soul then merges with God, like light in light. In the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism's words, 'Sikhism does not stipulate heaven or hell wherein good and bad actions of men are rewarded or punished.' Translators and commentators still differ over whether karam in one line of the Japjī means action or grace.

Sikhism began in Punjab in the first decades of the sixteenth century with Guru Nānak (1469–1539). Sikh tradition dates his call to about 1500, at Sultānpur Lodhī, when he vanished for three days in a river and came out to preach; that date and story are the tradition's. More securely, his own hymns show him composing in the 1520s; in the same decade he founded Kartārpur, on the Rāvī, where his disciples lived to a daily order of worship sung in his hymns; and in 1539, before he died, he named a disciple, Lahaṇā, as Guru Aṅgad in place of his sons, the first of nine successions. Most historians place the beginning of a distinct community in those years, with the Kartārpur settlement and the first succession. For Sikhs the religion begins with a revelation: God, in Bhāī Gurdās's words, 'sent Guru Nānak into the world'. Much that people now picture as Sikh came later and can be dated, from the scripture of 1604 to the Khālsā of 1699.

Guru Nānak (1469–1539) was the founder of the Sikh tradition and the first of its ten Gurus. Born at Talvaṇḍī, now Nankāṇā Sāhib in Pakistan, into a Khatrī family of the Bedī clan, he kept the stores of the Lodī governor Daulat Khān at Sultānpur Lodhī, married and had two sons, spent many years travelling with the Muslim minstrel Mardānā, and in the 1520s founded Kartārpur on the Rāvī, where he lived as a householder-teacher among his disciples until his death in 1539. Before he died he named a disciple, Lahaṇā, as Guru Aṅgad, in place of his sons. Nearly a thousand of his hymns survive, among them the Japjī and four on the Mughal invasions he witnessed; they teach one formless God, known through the divine Name and the divine order (hukam), and the life of the working householder over that of the ascetic. Almost everything else told of his life, the miracles and the journeys to Mecca and Baghdad among it, comes from Bhāī Gurdās's poem of some seventy years later and from janamsākhīs written a century and more after him.

Its hymns are by six of the ten Sikh Gurus, the first five, Guru Nānak, Guru Aṅgad, Guru Amar Dās, Guru Rām Dās and Guru Arjan, and the ninth, Guru Tegh Bahādur; by fifteen bhagats, devotional poets from outside the line of Gurus, among them Kabīr, Nāmdev, Ravidās and the Sufi Shaikh Farīd; and by minstrels and bards of the Gurus' courts. The Gurus all sign their hymns 'Nānak' and are told apart by number. Guru Arjan, the fifth Guru, compiled the collection as the Ādi Granth in 1604, with Bhāī Gurdās as scribe, from earlier collections such as the Goindvāl pothīs of about 1570–1572, and his own hymns, about two thousand compositions, are its largest part. The standard text adds the ninth Guru's hymns; by tradition Guru Gobind Singh had that version prepared at Damdamā about 1706, though manuscripts containing them are older, and in Sikh belief it became the Guru in 1708; the tenth Guru's own writings are not in it. The text has been stable in substance since the seventeenth century. For Sikhs it is gurbāṇī, the word of God revealed through the Gurus, a belief that historical method can neither confirm nor refute.

Bandī Chhoṛ Divas, 'the day of release', is the Sikh name for the festival kept on the same day as Dīvālī. Sikh tradition links it to Guru Hargobind, the sixth Guru, who is said to have reached Amritsar at Dīvālī after his imprisonment in Gwalior fort and to have secured the release of fifty-two princes held with him, hence his title Bandī Chhoṛ, 'liberator of prisoners'. The imprisonment is attested early, by Bhāī Gurdās and a Persian survey of c. 1645–1658; the fifty-two princes and the Dīvālī homecoming are found only in later Sikh texts. The Sikh gathering at Dīvālī is older than the story: by the usual account, Guru Amar Dās fixed it in the sixteenth century, before Guru Hargobind was born. The name Bandī Chhoṛ Divas for the Sikh Dīvālī is modern; Eleanor Nesbitt notes it as part of an effort to mark Sikh festivals off from Hindu ones.

Guru Tegh Bahādur, the ninth Sikh Guru, was arrested near Ropar in July 1675 and beheaded in Chāndnī Chowk, Delhi, on 11 November 1675, on Aurangzeb's orders according to the earliest Persian notice (1710s); no order survives. No contemporary document gives a reason, and Aurangzeb's official chronicle does not mention the execution. The earliest Sikh account, the tenth Guru's Bachitar Nāṭak, says he protected 'their tilak and sacred thread' and gave his head rather than his resolve; Sikh histories from the eighteenth century, the one usually cited being Kesar Singh Chhibbar's of 1769, add that Brahmins from Kashmir facing forced conversion had asked his help. The earliest Persian notice, from the 1710s, says he was executed after refusing to become a Muslim; a hostile Persian history of the 1780s says he raised followers and levied money. Most historians combine Aurangzeb's harder religious policy of the 1670s with the state's suspicion of a Guru with a large following.

The Five Ks are the five articles an initiated (amritdhārī) Sikh keeps, each beginning with k in Punjabi: kes (uncut hair), kaṅghā (a wooden comb), kaṛā (a steel bracelet), kachhahirā (short breeches) and kirpān (a sword). The Sikh Rahit Maryādā, the code approved by the SGPC in 1945 and published in 1950, requires them, and Sikh tradition holds that Guru Gobind Singh prescribed them at the founding of the Khālsā in 1699. The earliest sources confirm uncut hair and the bearing of arms, and eighteenth-century codes mention the comb, the breeches and the bracelet among other rules; but they do not list five items beginning with k. W. H. McLeod found the first full list in 1883, in the Singh Sabhā period; J. S. Grewal holds that the items were worn from 1699 and only the formula is late; others cite earlier texts of disputed date. The dating is contested and politically charged.

At the Vaisākhī festival of 1699 at Anandpur, Guru Gobind Singh, the tenth Sikh Guru, founded the Khālsā: an order of Sikhs initiated with water stirred with a double-edged sword (khaṇḍe dī pāhul), who took the name Singh, kept a code that began with uncut hair and the bearing of arms, and owed allegiance directly to the Guru. It ended the authority of the masands, the agents who had run the congregations. The earliest account, by the court poet Sainapati, written within a few years of the Guru's death, confirms the founding and the removal of the masands. The famous scene of the Guru calling for five heads, and the Five Beloveds (Pañj Pyāre) initiated first, is told in full only in texts written decades later. Much of the form Sikhs know today, from the list of Five Ks to the name Kaur for every woman, was fixed over the following two centuries.

The Dasam Granth, 'the book of the tenth [Guru]', is attributed to Guru Gobind Singh (1666–1708), but most historians date its compilation after his death; tradition credits it to his companion Bhāī Manī Singh, and its earliest manuscripts, from the early eighteenth century, differ in what they contain. Who wrote it is argued part by part. Some of it is widely accepted as the Guru's: the hymn Jāp and the Persian letter to Aurangzeb, the Zafarnāmā, and most historians add the Bachitar Nāṭak, his story in his own voice. The long retellings of the goddess Chaṇḍī's battles and of Viṣṇu's avatars, and the Charitropākhyān's four hundred stories of deceit, are the disputed parts. Three positions are held: that all of it is the Guru's, the traditional view of many Khālsā Sikhs; that the hymns and the autobiography are his and the rest is poetry of his court, the most common view among historians; and that little of it is his. The argument is fierce because its prayers are recited every morning and at the Khālsā initiation.

Because Khālsā Sikhs keep their hair uncut, and Sikh men keep it under a turban. Uncut hair (kes) is one of the oldest Khālsā rules: Sainapati, a poet at Guru Gobind Singh's court, already names it in the earliest account of the order founded in 1699, and the codes of conduct written over the eighteenth century forbid cutting the hair. The turban itself is not one of the Five Ks; kes is. Its place as the mark of every Sikh man was fixed later, and written down in the Sikh Rahit Maryādā of 1950, which requires every Sikh man to wear a turban and says that a Sikh woman 'may or may not tie turban'. Under British rule the army required Sikh recruits to keep uncut hair and the turban, and the Singh Sabhā reformers made the Khālsā form the standard of what a Sikh should be. Since 1976 statutes, courts and armies in Britain and the United States have decided where a turbaned Sikh may go: on a motorcycle, to school, into the army.

Because, by Sikh belief, Guru Gobind Singh, the tenth Guru, named no human successor before he died at Nanded in October 1708, and the Guruship passed to the scripture, the Guru Granth Sāhib, and to the Khālsā community, the Guru Panth. The book itself is older: Guru Arjan completed it as the Ādi Granth in 1604, and the standard text adds the ninth Guru's hymns. No document of 1708 records the command. The belief is attested in the eighteenth century, by the court poet Sainapati and by Kesar Singh Chhibbar in 1769, and the Khālsā's assemblies took their decisions in the scripture's presence. The couplet Sikhs recite, 'every Sikh is commanded to accept the Granth as Guru', is first found in later texts, in its familiar form in 1880. Rival lines that recognised living Gurus, such as the Nāmdhārīs, did not prevail.

Because Maharaja Ranjit Singh paid for its upper storeys and domes to be covered with copper plates overlaid with gold leaf, in the early nineteenth century. The Harmandir Sāhib itself is older. Guru Rām Dās began the pool at Amritsar, by tradition in 1577; Guru Arjan built the temple in the middle of it, by tradition from 1588, and installed the Ādi Granth there in 1604. Ahmad Shāh Abdālī blew it up in 1762, and the Sikh chiefs rebuilt it from 1764. Ranjit Singh took Amritsar in 1802 and gave the building its present look: white marble inlaid below, gilded copper above. Popular accounts put the first gilt plate in 1803; an inscription at the entrance, as Sikh accounts report it, is dated Sammat 1887 (1830–31); and in December 1838 the British visitor Emily Eden found it 'covered completely with gold'. The English name comes from that gilding; Sikhs call it the Harmandir or the Darbār Sāhib.

Sikhs' own institutions define Sikhism as a separate religion; India's Constitution names it as a religion of its own while counting Sikhs as Hindus for a few purposes, and British law treats Sikhs as an ethnic group. The Sikh Gurdwaras Act has required anyone whose status as a Sikh is disputed, since 1930, to declare that he has 'no other religion', and the Sikh Rahit Maryādā of 1950 says the same. But the boundary has a history. The scripture contains the line 'I am neither Hindu nor Muslim', and an enemy chronicler wrote in 1765 that the Sikhs were 'not from amongst the Hindus'; yet into the nineteenth century many people who revered the Gurus kept Hindu rites and shared Hindu shrines. The line was drawn hard by the Singh Sabhā reformers, in Kāhn Singh Nābhā's Ham Hindū Nahīṅ ('We are not Hindus', 1898). Since 1950 Explanation II to Article 25 of India's Constitution has counted Sikhs as Hindus for laws on temple entry and religious endowments, and the Hindu Code Acts of 1955–56 do so for marriage and inheritance. Sikh leaders have objected from the start.

After Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was shot by two of her Sikh bodyguards on 31 October 1984, Sikhs were attacked in Delhi and other cities of northern and eastern India. Men and boys were beaten and burned to death, homes, shops and gurdwaras set alight and women assaulted; the worst of the killing in Delhi was on 1 and 2 November. The official count, made by the Ahuja Committee and accepted by the Nanavati Commission in 2005, is 2,733 dead in Delhi; in 2014 the Home Minister gave 3,325 for all of India. Sikh bodies have claimed more. Within three weeks the civil liberties groups PUDR and PUCL called the attacks 'the outcome of a well organised plan', and the Nanavati Commission found that 'an angry outburst became an organized carnage', with many affidavits implicating local Congress(I) leaders and workers. Official usage has been 'riots'; many Sikhs call the killings a genocide.

Operation Blue Star was the Indian army's assault, in the first week of June 1984, on the Harmandir Sāhib (Golden Temple) complex in Amritsar, ordered by Indira Gandhi's government to remove Jarnail Singh Bhiṇḍrāṅwāle and his armed followers, who had fortified the Akāl Takht. A curfew was imposed on 3 June, the anniversary of Guru Arjan's martyrdom, with pilgrims still inside; troops entered on the night of 5–6 June, a tank was brought against the Akāl Takht, and resistance ended in the night of 6–7 June, when Bhiṇḍrāṅwāle's body was found. The Akāl Takht was wrecked and the Sikh Reference Library burned. The government's White Paper counted 493 civilians or 'terrorists', in one category, and 83 soldiers killed in the complex; India Today reported that close to 1,000 was a safe assumption, and Sikh organisations give figures in the thousands. No independent inquiry was held.

In doctrine, no; in practice, yes. The Gurus' hymns reject caste as a measure of a person before God, the laṅgar seats everyone in one row, and the Sikh Rahit Maryādā tells Sikhs to marry 'without giving thought to the prospective spouse's caste and descent'. Yet the Gurus themselves were Khatrīs, and they married their children within their caste, as most Sikhs have done since. Among Sikhs today the landowning Jaṭs are the largest group in rural Punjab; Khatrīs and Aroṛās were traditionally merchants; Rāmgaṛhīās come from castes traditionally assigned carpentry and smithing; and Mazhabī and Ravidāsīā Sikhs from Dalit castes. Most marriages are arranged within caste, and in many Punjab villages Dalit Sikhs have their own gurdwaras and cremation grounds. Scholars disagree over whether this is caste in the Hindu sense or a hierarchy of land and status, and in 2010 a Dalit ḍerā declared a separate religion.