Bandi Chhor Divas

The two fall on the same night, and the shorthand is common in non-Sikh writing. Sikhs generally object to it, and the objection is not about pedantry.

The events are unrelated. Diwali gathers several narratives, chiefly Rama's return to Ayodhya, and it is worshipped into with lamps for Lakshmi. Bandi Chhor Divas marks a release from a Mughal prison in 1619 and a Guru who refused to leave without the men imprisoned alongside him. The lamps at Amritsar are lit for that.

The coincidence of date is genuine and old. Amritsar was already drawing large seasonal gatherings at this point in the year in Guru Amar Das's time, decades before the imprisonment, and Guru Hargobind's return to the city was received into a season that already had crowds in it. So the overlap is not modern invention. What is modern is the insistence on the separate name, which spread through the twentieth century and is now standard in gurdwara usage worldwide.

That insistence belongs to a larger and unfinished argument about whether Sikh practice is distinguishable from Hindu practice or a variant within it, an argument conducted through the Singh Sabha reform movement, through the legal definition of Sikh identity in Indian law, and through the calendar. Naming this day is one of the places the argument is carried on. Describing it as Sikh Diwali takes a side in that argument while appearing not to.

The story as the tradition tells it: Jahangir, having imprisoned Guru Hargobind at Gwalior, agreed to free him. The Guru refused to leave while fifty-two princes remained held. The emperor conceded that as many could go as could hold onto the Guru's cloak as he walked out. The Guru had a cloak made with fifty-two tassels, and every prisoner left with him.

The episode is central to Sikh memory and is what the festival's name means: the day of the release of prisoners.

What can be said about it historically is narrower. The imprisonment at Gwalior is not in doubt, and neither is a release; Jahangir's own memoirs and later Sikh chronicles both place the Guru there. The number fifty-two, the condition, and the tassels come from later Sikh sources rather than contemporary record, and their earliest attestation postdates the events by a considerable margin. Some accounts also place the release a few days before Diwali rather than on it, with the observance settling onto Diwali afterwards.

Reporting this is not a challenge to the observance. The tassels carry the meaning the day exists to carry, that liberation is not taken alone, and that meaning is not contingent on whether a garment was made to specification in 1619.