What is lost I will recover;
What is broken I will mend.
Unknowns I will discover,
And the best I will defend.
I.
Growing up as a Sikh boy in early nineties West Virginia, I asked my parents at age four if we were the only Sikhs in the world. They decided it was time our family moved. Catastrophic as this seemed to me then—I was fond of the apple orchards by our home and weekend jaunts to Harpers Ferry—by my present reckoning, their decision to relocate our family was the second mark of their parental sagacity, the first being the good taste my mother exhibited in giving birth to me just over the border in the great state of Virginia. Of course, West Virginia is a perfectly fine place to enter this world, but once I became sensible to this sort of thing, I naturally congratulated myself on beginning my life in the august company of eight American presidents.
To my relief, it turned out that Maryland, too, could boast streams and statesmen—if not a single president—but old tomes quickly supplanted nature as the overriding spur to my young imagination. I instinctively rebelled against the common prejudice that one must not judge a book by its cover, grasping—if not in quite these words—that any writer, so devoid of aesthetic scruples or courage so as to collaborate in the production of such atrociously garish covers as modish publishers inexplicably deem expedient in gaining the attention of readers, could not possibly possess the nobility of character befitting one entrusted with the responsibility of shaping a young mind. The happy consequence of my precocious snobbery was an acquaintance by the fourth grade with the tastefully-bound myths of ancient Greece, Arthurian legends, and writings of Dumas, Twain, and Stevenson.
Only my pre-slumber tales, morphing into the most spectacular dreams, were more riveting. Were Aristotle so fortunate as to share in my bedtime instruction comprising the history of the Gurūs and their Sikhs, he may well have reconsidered his famous position that poetry is more philosophical than history. Titans of the page—like Merlin and Athos—seemed undoubtedly realer to me than any of the people I knew—for they displayed greater virtues in the course of greater events—but greater still, and hence realer, were the sublime lives and peerless deaths of the GurSikh Gurūs. Listening to their revelatory utterances and the chronicles of their deeds, I was enraptured by their dazzling vision of existence and of the wondrous One from whom everything originates.
Five and a half centuries ago in Punjab, the transcendent was made immanent in the person of Gurū Nanak, who illumined the path of supreme beatitude whereby beings may realize their end by uniting with the eternal fount of all perfection. Singing the ambrosial Word of the Lord, they transformed the humblest souls into the most exalted luminaries, empowering those inured to tyranny to stand sovereign as children of the One. Gurū Nanak then bestowed his light to nine equally luminous mystic-statesman successors in turn and is thereby unexampled in sustaining a faithful line of dynamic succession for the realization of his founding intention of the highest consequence over two centuries. My earliest memories involve hearing of Gurū Nanak’s wondrous travels and contemplating the self-existent One through his Word.
II.
The gripping saga of the Gurū period exercised a powerful influence over my moral sensibility, particularly the pivotal martyrdoms of the fifth and ninth Gurūs. In 1606, Gurū Arjan endured a drawn out public execution at the hands of the Mughal emperor, who feared the refulgence of his spiritual and growing temporal authority. Throughout the unspeakable torture he underwent, GurSikh tradition remembers that Gurū Arjan sang melodiously of the sweetness of the Doer’s will. Gurū Tegh Bahadur gave his head in 1675 to safeguard the religious liberty of the Hindu Kashmiri Pandits, who were being forcibly converted to Islam. Steeled by his father’s singular sacrifice, Gurū Gobind Singh established the Khalsa confraternity of warrior-mystics in 1699, in part to defend Sikhs and non-Sikhs against the tyrannical exercise of power. All four of Gurū Gobind Singh’s hallowed young sons—aged eighteen, fourteen, nine, and six—ultimately embraced martyrdom with unbendable fortitude after Aurangzeb’s base perfidy at the siege of Anandpur.
When I first learned of my American forebears’ revolt against the capricious exercise of British Parliament’s newfound sovereignty, I immediately recalled, with a thrill, my Sikh forefathers’ prior stand against the vainglorious pretenses of the Mughal empire. The celebrated truths enshrined in the Declaration struck me as doubly “self-evident,” for where Runnymede and 1688 primed the Anglo-Saxon spirit for liberty, the holy blood of the martyrs and 1699 were inscribed on my soul. My exultancy on learning of the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown was matched only by my elation on hearing of the military victories and egalitarian policies of the Khalsa, led by Banda Singh Bahadur, and of his establishment of a Sikh polity at Lohgarh in 1710.
Elation gave place to lamentation as I learned of Banda Singh Bahadur’s capture by the Mughal army and the barbaric ordeals that he and his fellow warrior-saints dauntlessly withstood in the captivity preceding their execution. With bated breath, I traced the plight of the remaining Sikhs, who took to the forests to avert total extermination, through the rise of the Sikh Confederacy with twelve independent chieftains vying for supremacy, to Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s triumph in capturing Lahore, thereby consolidating temporal power within Punjab and establishing the Sikh Empire in 1799, a century after the Khalsa’s founding. The māhārājā’s reign was marked by the abolition of the death penalty, record male and female literacy surpassing Britain’s, and a robust policy of religious liberty for all, not without non-Sikhs holding key civil and military offices. Yet training a worthy heir did not number among the māhārājā’s considerable accomplishments, and a decade after his death, replete with courtly intrigue and defeated in the two Anglo-Sikh Wars, Punjab in 1849 was the final region of India to be annexed by the British.
While some Sikhs prospered individually—enlisting in the British-controlled Indian Army or competing for administrative posts in the colonial government—the GurSikh nation, I was devastated to observe, failed to rally as such since the empire’s fall. This presented an opening for Christian missionaries and Hindu ideologues to vie for annexation of the Sikh psyche throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. The Singh Sabha revitalization movement led by elite Sikhs in Lahore and Amritsar—some of whom had collaborated with the British imperial machine—confronted this existential threat with a rich outpouring of Punjabi literature, including influential apologetics and polemics. Designating the Khalsa the sole authentic expression of a legibly independent Sikh identity, they effectively contained the overt threat to the GurSikh body politic. Yet in retrospect, the Singh Sabha’s battlefield triage may have weakened the Sikh community’s long-term wellbeing in its self-amputation of more complex limbs of GurSikh tradition.
III.
In the seventh grade, I began coming to grips with the unfathomably harrowing Sikh twentieth century. Though Sikhs soldiers served the Allied causes with distinction in both World Wars, the aftermath of the first saw the notorious massacre of over four hundred Sikh civilians, maiming at least a thousand more, in 1919 at Jallianwala Bagh. Despite—or perhaps on account of—the Sikhs’ disproportionately great contributions in agriculture, military service, and the struggle for independence, Sikh leadership at the time of the Partition did not carve out an independent Sikh state for the Sikh nation.
As a majority of Sikhs from the Gurū period to the present have called Punjab home, its partition into India and Pakistan in 1947 proved especially damaging—beyond familial tragedies—for GurSikh institutions and cultural traditions. My maternal and paternal grandparents hail from western Punjab in present-day Pakistan. I ardently hope someday to walk upon my ancestral soil in the land of Bābā Nanak’s advent. The contentious 1960s saw the further fragmentation of Indian Punjab along linguistic lines into a Punjabi-speaking state of Punjab, as well as Hindi-speaking Haryana and Himachal Pradesh. Riparian injustices and fallout from the Green Revolution continue to haunt Punjab, literally the ‘Land of Five Rivers,’ and breadbasket to the subcontinent. The 1970s saw the drafting of the Anandpur Sahib Resolution, an attempt at identifying a coordinated agenda drawing upon GurSikh values to combat the crisis in Sikh political and spiritual affairs.
The deepest wounds in the contemporary Sikh psyche were inflicted in the 1980s. This turbulent decade began with a period of Khalsa revitalization among the people spearheaded by Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, the charismatic head of the Damdami Taksal. Speaking forthrightly, he exhorted Sikhs to abandon intoxicants and materialism in exchange for a life of spiritual upliftment among a community of the faithful. Indira Gandhi did not take kindly to his intimately-related political mobilization around the Anandpur Resolution’s decentralizing call for India’s diverse states to be allowed greater scope for self-governance, implausibly discovering secession in a demand for genuine federalism.
I still cannot shake the uncomprehending horror I experienced when I first learned of Operation Blue Star, the Indian Army’s June 1984 weeklong assault on the Golden Temple and Akal Takht complex, where Bhindranwale made his last stand. In retaliation for the Indian state’s desecration of the holiest of Sikh gurdwārās on the anniversary of Gurū Arjan’s martyrdom—slaughtering upwards of five hundred Sikhs, the majority of whom were non-militant pilgrims—Indira Gandhi’s two Sikh body guards assassinated the Indian prime minister on October 31, 1984.
The ensuing anti-Sikh genocide, coordinated by Indira Gandhi’s ruling Congress Party, resulted in brutal reprisals in the form of rapes and murders, claiming between eight thousand and seventeen thousand Sikh lives over four days. The perpetrators and the survivors have yet to receive justice. Outspoken journalists, activists, and Sikh youth were routinely tortured and murdered over the following decade. Though my parents had planned to emigrate to the United States in pursuit of higher education and greater professional opportunities before the attack on Darbar Sahib, as with many families who thereafter fled as refugees, their trust in the Indian state was grievously wounded. Once a model state, Punjab now leads India in crippling drug addiction and farmer suicides. The plight of Punjab’s farmers and the resilience of the Sikh grassroots are receiving increasing global attention in 2020 as hundreds of thousands of farmers and volunteers who converged on New Delhi—braving the elements, police blockades, and the novel coronavirus—remain camped in the streets in months-long opposition to new agricultural legislation.
IV.
The summer before high school began, I accompanied my aunt on a trip to Punjab. Leaving her job as a professor of economics, she was driven to seek out the remaining threads of Sikh musical heritage, which ultimately led her to complete a second doctorate. Our base was Chandigarh, at the residence of my maternal grandfather, who gifted me my first tablā set when I was three years old, and who has lovingly nurtured my intellectual and musical development in the years since. From age five onwards, I applied myself to the study of north Indian classical percussion, entering a world of elaborate drum poems, where grownups entrusted me with keeping time, holding me responsible for preserving every fraction of a beat. The tablā showed me that with careful observation and diligent practice, I could reliably gain initiation into subtler and more powerful mysteries. It also placed me—in a pattern to recur throughout my life—on a path apart from my peers, as most Sikh children my age were taught to sing with the aid of a harmonium, a crude, portable organ from the colonial era too few outgrow.
My internet excursions supplemented weekly tablā lessons at the gurdwārā in deepening my appreciation for the depth of classical music, both Indian and Western. I found myself ashamed at the obvious inferiority of the music to which professional Sikh musicians with harmoniums sang the revelatory verses of the Gurūs, as compared with the orderly beauty of Bach’s Goldberg Variations or the effortless bravura of Panḍit Ram Narayan’s Pīlū Rāgmālā on the sarangī. It was inconceivable that the music of Gurū Nanak’s Sikhs could be so underwhelming if the Gurū himself sang. But if this was the music of the Sikhs, was it any wonder that the Sikh Empire fell to the British Raj? Was it inevitable that it should be colonized by an evidently more melodious civilization?
That summer in Chandigarh, I learned tablā in the evenings, devoting mornings to study of the ‘hundred-colored’ sarangi, a hauntingly expressive bowed instrument, whose gut strings are stopped by the cuticle, the skin just above the fingernail. My Indian cousins, fans of cricket and Hollywood flicks, thought I was insane when they noticed my bleeding, not-yet-calloused cuticles. I was more than recompensed for the considerable pain by the beauty of the sound I could elicit from its strings. Truth be told, I would have feared I unknowingly entered into a Faustian bargain if so bewitching a sound were not purchased at so palpable a price. My music lessons in Chandigarh were interspersed with periodic trips to meet with eminent kīrtanīās as part of my aunt’s fieldwork. The then-nonagenarian Bhāī Gurcharan Singh, son of the illustrious Bābā Jawala Singh, exhorted me to seek out his nephew, if indeed I had a wish to serve the musical tradition initiated by Gurū Nanak.
It was thus that I came to study with Bhāī Baldeep Singh, the polymath thirteenth-generation exponent of Sikh sacred music. In our memorable first encounter, he ruthlessly demolished the misconceptions about Sikh history, doctrine, and praxis I unknowingly harbored during my fourteen years of life. The maestro then dazzled me with ancient percussive repertoire of such verve I could imagine an iota of the Gurūs’ élan. Singing masterpiece after masterpiece as originally revealed to the Gurūs, he rendered song clearly transcending anything of human provenance. The existence of such distinctively GurSikh heritage more than justified the right of Sikhs to an independent existence, to wear the crown of the turban, to help guide the course of civilization. Convinced I must preserve the riches he recovered from the brink of extinction, I came to be initiated into the core center of the nascent GurSikh renaissance, thereby gaining a grounding in the GurSikh tradition’s self-understanding.
V.
As a high schooler, I thus found myself in possession of an incredibly rich, terribly thorny, and excruciatingly undigested inheritance. Then there was being visibly Sikh in America in the aftermath of 9/11. This was all on top of a potent case of existential perplexity, overlaid with the pugnacious omniscience only an adolescent’s reading of Adam Smith, the Austrian economists, and Ayn Rand can impart. There existed little in English or any language I knew to offer a halfway plausible account of my historical situation and moral obligations. Where some of my diasporic coreligionists came to identify with radical critiques of America, I could not square cultural dyspepsia with my moral realism and admiration for American institutions. Rather, I saw myself as a latter day pilgrim tasked with the vital trust of safeguarding this precious “city upon a hill.”
With these moorings, I read catholically, conceiving of myself as an exilic prince—a student of statesmanship by necessity—charged with rekindling the GurSikh and American legacies. I set out for Berkeley, desirous of whetting my nascent interpretation of the GurSikh historical situation against its most formidable ideological adversaries. It soon became evident that a prince in exile would need to cast a deeper net, so I followed the tributary of Locke’s classical liberalism back into the ocean of western civilization. Edmund Burke’s prudential conservatism took me by storm. Somehow, this eighteenth century statesman came down correctly on the American Revolution (qualifiedly for), the French Revolution (foresightedly against), Irish-Catholic persecution (humanely against), and East India Company abuse (incisively against). His eloquent prose immortalized the sound judgement of a good man responding as best as he knew how to the great questions of his age.
The American founding won my enduring admiration for its melding of humane ambition with a prudential realism. As Gurū Nanak called all humans—irrespective of worldly station—to spiritual perfection, the Declaration articulated a vision of civic freedom and responsibility irreconcilably opposed to the perpetual domination of any group by another. Our constitutional system acknowledges the necessity of individual virtue without spurning institutional safeguards, securing conditions under which self-interest and the common good may coincide. The American republic favors voluntary local association over forced homogeneity, conceiving of an educated, propertied, and heterogenous civil society as a further bulwark against tyranny. This way of life enables principled cooperation across principled differences, allows parts to bear the costs and reap the profits of innovation that benefits the whole, and creates opportunities for industrious quantity to gain aristocratic quality.
Sympathetic to the Founders’ protection of religious liberty in principle and as a matter of survival, I came to inherit a profound mistrust of any impulse hostile to—rather than aiming to more perfectly realize—their vision. Fellow citizens equally vigilant in their defense of liberty and fellow GurSikh heirs of an anti-statist tradition can guess my distress in learning of how the Constitution’s federalism and separation of powers gave way to an administrative leviathan of de Tocqueville’s nightmares. This deepened my concern with the interpretation of fundamental texts and my ambition to recover a more sovereign self-understanding.
Among the ancients, Socrates showed me that knowledge is necessary, and that we possess remarkably little. Plato revealed the dangers of impolitic philosophizing. Aristotle taught me to observe the functional and discern its end. Cicero persuaded me that persuasion matters. In Augustine and Aquinas, I recognized guides committed to reconciling the legitimate claims of revelation and reason. Petrarch vindicated poetry’s power to spark a renaissance. My readings were marked by a profound hunger for solutions to the crisis underlying the quotidian. These writers did not furnish readymade answers, but offered an invaluable glimpse of first-rate intellects grappling with like perplexities. I discovered clues in Lincoln and Frederick Douglass helping America come to terms with the evils of slavery, in Emerson and Nietzsche’s meditations on the self in modernity, in Strauss, Voegelin, and Hayek’s theoretical bulwarks against totalitarianism, and in the metaphysical receptivity of T.S. Eliot and Aldous Huxley.
Over the years, I cultivated a sprawling library with more books than answers and a greater appreciation for the difficulties ahead. I have even been so fortunate as to find a handful of allies among the living, who possess enough courage to confront the discordancies of our age and build upon true foundations for posterity. Not unlike medieval monks diligently copying manuscripts of ancient learning as barbarism encroaches, I sit at the feet of my maestro, committing to living memory extraordinary percussive literature rescued from Bābā Nanak’s darbār, otherwise lost to civilization. Perhaps my younger self was right to believe that we are real insofar as we display great virtue in the course of great events. If so, ours is a time for real friendships and real heroism.
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