The past is something which is no more with us and yet the past is often the foundation of the present. We have constantly to evoke the past to live better in the present. It is now past more than two hundred years since Maharaja Ranjit Singh was coronated on April 12, 1801 and yet we have to hark back to those days to provide us a direction for our future course of action. It was the tact, imagination and valour of this extraordinary hero of the Punjab that had elevated the Sikhs from the category of ‘robber noblemen’1 (as termed by an American historian) to the position of a great nation in the diaspora.

The Sikh (Shishya?) or disciples of Guru Nanak could have remained one of the many syncretist philosophical cults like the Kabirpanthis, or the followers of Ramananda, that India had witnessed at the crossroads of Hinduism and Islamic culture in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Their peaceful moral philosophy was transformed into an ideology of militancy primarily as a reaction to the ‘ideological zealotry’2 of the Mughal Emperors since Akbar. Guru Arjun Dev’s widespread popularity among his followers as the Sachcha Padshah (true emperor) and his support for the rebel prince Khasrau led Jehangir to make the same mistake that the Jewish King Herod had committed on an earlier occasion crucifying Jesus Christ. Following Guru Arjun Dev’s execution in 1606, his son Guru Hargovind gave up the usual seli-topi and the necklace of renunciation and, instead, wore two swords – the piri and the miri symbolizing the fusion of temporal and spiritual power in his own person. He started keeping a standing army, and built the Akal Takht facing the Har Mandir at Amritsar, to pledge the Sikhs to a course of avenging the wrong. Guru Teg Bahadur’s execution in 1675 followed the same pattern and brought ‘the moment of final denouement’3 leading to the creation of the Khalsa Panth by Guru Govind Singh on the Vaisakhi of 1699. The mode of its initiation through the unquestioning and unwavering readiness to die at the call of the Guru signified by the call to the panj piyare summed up the spirit of the transformation which the Sikh belief system as well as the entire Sikh society now underwent.4 The close association of religion with politics in Sikhism was thus an answer to the unequal distribution of power between the rulers and the ruled experienced by the Sikhs under the Mughals. The same unwillingness to be submerged into the dominant nationalist ideology persists into the Sikh psyche even down to the present times, and is perhaps the key to the controversies centering around the demand for a Sikh homeland until recently.

Present day thinkers often credit Ranjit Singh as the author of a "Punjabi identity" quite distinct from the present day fissured identity of the Punjabis into three distinct linguistic, religious and political entities. It is one of the ironies of history that most of the areas that once formed the kingdom of Maharaja Ranjit Singh have now gone to Pakistan. It is therefore easy to imagine that most of Ranjit Singh’s subjects were followers of Islam. And yet Ranjit Singh had succeeded in making his rule acceptable to all his subjects. "All the communities", writes Fakir Syed Waheeduddin, "looked upon him not only as their protector but as one of themselves".5 While he conducted the administration in the name of the Khalsa and called himself a sevadar (servant) of God and conformed to the outward norms of Sikhism, he never allowed his personal devotion to degenerate into fanaticism. His charities ran equally towards the Har Mandir at Amritsar, towards the Yogis of Jakhbar,6 the Vaishnavas of Pindori7 and to Muslim shrines8 and he wiped the dust of the feet of holy men of all the communities, Muslim, Sikh and Hindu, with his beard. Victor Jacquemont writes that he made regular visits to the shrines of several Muslim saints.9 Amongst his most important officers and administrators figured the names of Fakir Azizuddin, the foremost among his counselors, Fakir Syed Nuruddin, his Home Minister and personal physician and Fakir Syed Imamuddin, one of his principal administrative officers. Ranjit Singh did not wear a crown, did not sit on a throne and did not issue any coin and seal in his name. And inspite of all his loyalty to the tenets of Sikhism he did not interfere with the established custom of the country and retained Persian as the court language. Ranjit Singh can thus be said to have bridged the gap between the ruler and the ruled and the more recent linguistic, religions and political encounter between indigenous communities themselves seemed to be singularly absent during his reign. His reign can thus be seen as having given rise to a "Punjabi identity"10 which eludes modern secularists even to the present day. While the onslaught of colonialism and the threat from Christian missionaries broke up Punjabi society into three hostile communities threatening to destroy each other as distinct religious categories, Muslim, Sikh and Hindu, each of which was mutually exclusive.11 Some modern thinkers would not credit the Indian version of secularism with much of an improvement calling it ‘the subordination of genuine secularism to a nationalism of the Hindu majority’ and the present day political scene ‘a hiatus between majority fundamentalism as against many competing minority fundamentalisms’.12