Saturday (Jan. 5) was a date in the religious pantheon that most North Americans weren't aware of. It was the birthday of the 10th Sikh guru: Gobind Singh. It was not a date that registered on my calendar either until I visited Paonta Sahib.
That was 16 months ago on a hot September day about 200 miles north of New Delhi. I and photographer Mary Calvert were researching the horrors of female feticide and several Sikh doctors were helping us research this. India's highest rates of aborted females is in the Sikh heartland of Punjab and Haryana, states immediately to the north of Delhi. We wanted to photograph an Indian wedding and our "fixer;" a brilliant man named Sabu George, had found one for us. But it was a dusty four-hour drive to the north. The town was called Yamunanagar, as it was situated on the Yamuna River in Haryana's farm belt. We stopped by a strip mall to pick up a Sikh radiologist, Dr. Tajinder Sikh, an earnest, bearded man with 3 daughters whose passion was to stop women from killing their unborn children solely because they were girls.
His 11-year-old daughter, Vermeet, wanted to come with us, so we packed into a car and drove 60 kilometers further north up a small mountain and through a monkey preserve to arrive at Paonta Sahib, a pleasant spot on the river with Himalayan foothills in the background. The couple we were photographing were in a reception hall at first but then they wanted to visit the local gurdwara (temple) for a blessing. This turned out to be a series of courtyards around a main prayer hall with a museum to one side. We had to take off our shoes at the entrance to the shrine and women had to cover their heads. I was dressed in a salwar kameez (long tunic and pants outfit) that came with a scarf; however, the scarf sent my body temperature soaring.
The Sikh temple at Paonta Sahib, India. (Photo by Julia Duin)
The wedding ceremony took some time, so I wandered over to the much cooler museum, which had paintings of the history of the Sikhs, a religion founded more than 500 years ago. Its founder, Guru Nanak, was born to the west near Lahore in 1469, about 15 years before Martin Luther. It didn't take long for me to realize that this was a religion that knew persecution and torture intimately. The Moghuls (Muslim rulers in the area) saw the Sikhs as infidels and spared no atrocity in finding horrific ways to kill their leaders. I wandered from painting to painting, open-mouthed at the sheer carnage that spanned hundreds of years. I understood a lot better why the Sikhs pride themselves on being top fighters as they've withstood endless gruesome attacks from Muslim and Hindu alike. Their tenacity and refusal to capitulate are closest in western tradition to the Spartans of Greece.
The Sikh religion began as a reform movement against the caste system of Hinduism and elements of Islam and was built on the efforts of 10 gurus, the last of which, Gobind Singh, died in 1706. In 1685, (about the same time William Penn was traveling about Europe, trying to persuade the English, Germans and Dutch to settle in what would become Pennsylvania) the guru temporarily set up shop on land at a bend in the Yamuna River. He called the place Paonta, after a word meaning "foot" in Sanskrit as the site is where his favorite horse first placed its foot. He was only there about four years; long enough for his eldest son to be born there, before moving back west to a more secure place. Paonta Sahib is on the eastern frontier of Sikh territory and it was extremely pleasant spending part of the afternoon gazing down at the river from a temple plaza with the mountains as a backdrop. Mussoorie, one of the hill stations, was only 93 kilometers away.
When I returned to the U.S., I began delving into Sikh history. Fortunately, "The Sikhs" by Patwant Singh was on my bookshelf at work and it explained to me the background to my quick afternoon visit to this city. Gobind Singh, as it turns out, had a tragic end. His two youngest sons were captured and tortured to death by the Moghuls. They were only 6 and 8 years old. His eldest two sons died in battle. Paonta Sahib was a tranquil moment in time for him at the beginning of his marriage where all things seemed hopeful. He was one of the most brilliant of the 10 gurus at systematizing the religion and for motivating the Sikhs to live exemplary lives. Many of the distinctives of the religion: all mens' last names being Singh (lion), the wearing of turbans over mens' uncut hair, the short sword kept on one's person at all times and an insistence of male-female equality that was very rare during that era, began during this guru's reign. Women were told they didn't have to take their husband's last name; hence all Sikh women's surnames are Kaur, meaning lioness.
Arriving back that night in Yamunanagar, we visited Tajinder Sikh's home and dined and chatted with his wife, Kanualjeer, and other two daughters: Gurpreet and Manjvot. They asked us to accompany them to Amritsar, the beautiful Sikh capital about 300 miles to the west, the next day, but our schedules were packed and we could not spare the extra two days. The next time I get to that area of the world, maybe I'll go.
-- Julia Duin, assistant national editor/religion, The Washington Times
