Chapter 6 Religions of South Asia 227guided, apostates or not even Muslims at all. The key was to heighten the sense
of Muslim opposition to Hindu. What united all Muslims? They were not
Hindu. This was how contemporary communalism grew on the Muslim side. A
corresponding heightened sense of Hindu-ness (i.e., Hindutva) was growing on
the Hindu side. The unexpectedly horrendous violence of Partition solidified
these two communal identities and embedded themselves in the relationship
between India and Pakistan. At Partition, 30 million of India’s then-population
of 390 million went into West Pakistan and another 30 million became East
Pakistan (later, Bangladesh). Muslims in India are now only 13 percent of the
population (as of the 2011 census), an often oppressed minority whose contin-
ued presence has been exploited by Hindu nationalism in recent decades.Sikhism
Sikhism is not a blend or a reproduction of earlier religions but it is a new
revelation altogether.... Sikhism rejects all fasts, rites, and rituals. It rejects
the claims of Yoga, mortification of body, self-torture, penances and renun-
ciation. Sikhism does not believe in the worship of gods and goddesses,
stones, statues, idols, pictures, tombs or crematoriums. Only One God, the
Formless, is to be Glorified.
Thus begins a Sikh missionary tract, explaining the core concepts of the Sikh faith.
The statement makes it clear: Sikhism is not some variant of Hinduism.
No polytheism, no rigorous asceticism, no renunciation. A little more subtly, it
is also not Islam, although it is profoundly monotheistic (“Only One God, the
Formless.. .”); but no holy tombs. It is a “new revelation altogether.”
Like both Buddhism and Islam, it has a historic founder, Guru Nanak,
who lived 1469–1539 in the Punjab area of northwest India. These were the
years of Mughal arrival; Babur was conquering India during Guru Nanak’s life-
time and died nine years before Guru Nanak died. We have seen the cultural
environment of that period, with the widespread practices of Sufism and bhakti
Hinduism. It was a period when many sants—charismatic figures with blends
of religious ideas who had visions, wrote hymns, taught under spreading fig
and banyan trees, established mosques, temples, and tombs, and sometimes led
militant groups of disciples into political adventures—established followings.
Guru Nanak was a member of the Khatri caste, a Kshatriya group whose
traditional occupations were military and administrative. At age 30 he disap-
peared for three days after bathing in a river, emerging to declare: “There is no
Hindu, there is no Muslim.” He had had some kind of vision or enlightenment
that caused him to reject the dominant religious categories available to him and
espouse the necessity of inner transformation by listening to the True Guru in
the heart. After lengthy travels, he settled in the Punjab and gathered a follow-
ing, writing verses, hymns, and long poetical works—now the basic part of
Sikh scriptures—and establishing the Sikh Panth (path), on which tobacco and
alcohol were prohibited.