The Founding of the Khalsa

The traditional account of the founding at Anandpur in 1699 is stark. Guru Gobind Singh addressed a great gathering and asked for a head. After a silence one man rose and followed him into a tent; the Guru returned alone with a bloodied sword and asked again. Five men in turn offered themselves. All five then emerged alive, and were initiated with amrit, sweetened water stirred with a double-edged sword, as the panj piare, the five beloved.

They came from different regions and different castes, which is the point the tradition emphasises hardest. They took the name Singh, lion, and women of the Khalsa took Kaur, and the caste names that had marked them were set aside. The Guru then asked the five to initiate him in turn, placing himself under the discipline he had created rather than above it.

The Khalsa took a code of conduct and the five articles of faith, of which uncut hair is the most visible and the most consequential, since it cannot be put on and taken off. Whether the whole scene at the tent occurred as described is not something the sources can establish, and Sikh writers themselves discuss the question. What is not in doubt is the institution that came out of that Baisakhi gathering, and the fact that it made initiated Sikhs permanently identifiable in public.

The founding settled more than discipline. It also settled, in effect, the question of succession, which every religion built around a living teacher eventually faces.

Guru Gobind Singh was the tenth and last Guru in the line of persons. Before his death at Nanded in 1708 he conferred the Guruship on the scripture, thereafter the Guru Granth Sahib, and Sikh tradition holds that authority in the community rests with the scripture together with the assembled Khalsa. There is no successor to be disputed, no office to be captured and no lineage to be claimed, and the tradition has been notably free of the succession crises that have divided other movements.

The consequences are visible in Sikh practice. The scripture is treated with the honours due to a living Guru: installed on a throne under a canopy, attended, put to rest at night, and consulted for guidance by reading the passage at which it opens. A gurdwara is defined by the presence of the volume rather than by any consecration of the building. Decisions binding on the community are taken by the Khalsa in assembly before the scripture.

That a religion should transfer the authority of a person to a text is not unique. That it should do so deliberately, in one act, with the reasoning recorded, and that the arrangement should hold for three centuries, is unusual enough to be worth stating plainly.