Sirdar Kapur Singh (1909-1986), whose life spanned many of the significant decades of the twentieth century, is one of the most widely read theorists of the idea of a Sikh homeland as it was concretized in the decades following the Independence and Partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. 

In the postcolonial years, the demand for an autonomous Sikh homeland within the constitutional framework of independent India emerged as a distinctive and timely articulation of the Sikh aspiration to sovereignty. Though Sikhs had not enjoyed formal sovereignty in the Panjab for about a century before 1947’s Partition, the Partition represented a significant break. The territory of Panjab was now divided across two new nation-states, prompting the unprecedented movement of people across emergent borders. Postcolonial India’s new leadership, led by Jawaharlal Nehru of the Indian National Congress, had to consolidate a country famously diverse in ethnicity and religion. Sirdar Kapur Singh was in the early stages of his career at the time of Partition, serving as a bureaucrat in the Indian Civil Service.

Cambridge-educated Sirdar Kapur Singh came of intellectual age amid Partition and its aftermath. After a brief career as a bureaucrat, which he documented in his Sachi Sakhi (1972), Sirdar Kapur Singh had a long career as a writer and politician. He published his masterpiece on Sikh thought, Pārāśarapraśna (Parasar’s Questions), in 1959, and he continued to publish widely throughout the next two and a half decades on matters related to the Sikh past and present. 

Throughout his writing and speeches, both as a scholar and polemicist, he theorized the ideological and institutional aspects of a postcolonial articulation of Sikh nationhood.¹ Crucial to this articulation was Sirdar Kapur Singh’s theory of a Sikh homeland, which was at once a response to the violence and displacement of Partition and grounded in his reading of the Sikh past. Like other nationalist thinkers in the decolonizing world, from Panjab to the Caribbean, Sirdar Kapur Singh argued that the Sikh nation had to be recognized on its own terms, rather than absorbed into a centralized order shaped by the Indian National Congress and its Hindu-majoritarian assumptions. He drew on the Sikh past to argue for the durability of a Sikh nation, whose sovereignty ought to be recognized within the emergent postcolonial order. 

Elements of the demand for a Sikh homeland 

The Sikh homeland demand was stated in various forms as Sirdar Kapur Singh made the case for it. As a political person, he demonstrated continual flexibility amid shifting circumstances. In broad terms, however, he envisioned a Sikh homeland that would reintegrate Panjabi-speaking areas that had been separated out of Indian Panjab, including Chandigarh. The Sikh homeland—the East Panjab that fell within Indian borders—would possess considerable provincial autonomy within the structure of the Indian republic. In other words, his was not a separatist vision, but rather premised on the logical viability of an autonomous Sikh Panjab within India’s constitutional structure. The Indian nation-state would contain within it multiple national identities and formations organized as a federal arrangement between the center and provinces. Under such an arrangement, the Sikh Panjab would possess a constitution of its own framing. This constitution would not be theocratic; the Sikhs would not be codifying an existing corpus of divine law or create a “non-equalitarian, graded society wherein a class of citizens or section of society are more privileged than the rest.”² Rather, as he explained in an interview in the Current Weekly: “Sikhism sets up no exclusive society and recognizes no secular laws of Divine origin. The Sikhs cannot create a theocratic state, even if they wanted. If they could, they would have done it in the first half of the nineteenth century when they had the power to do so.” Instead, he imagined a constitution that would be framed through a democratic consensus.³ 

The Sikh homeland Sirdar Kapur Singh imagined would be premised on a power-sharing agreement between province and center. The Sikh homeland would enjoy a nested sovereignty within the Indian nation-state and derive its legitimacy from the long history of Sikh assertions of sovereignty, of a piece with Guru Nanak Sahib’s founding of Sikh Raj and Guru Gobind Singh Sahib’s vision of the Khalsa. As he elaborated his theory of a Sikh homeland, Sirdar Kapur Singh argued that an autonomous Sikh homeland in Panjab was at once inalienable from the Sikhs, historically inevitable, and politically necessary. 

Inalienable: the Sikhs’ relentless struggle  

Sirdar Kapur Singh turned to the past to observe that a homeland for the Sikhs in Panjab was inalienable—which is to say, an inherent and non-negotiable component of the Sikh collective’s self-understanding and structure. However, the struggle for a Sikh Panjab had always been contested, from the earliest days of the Khalsa Panth’s attempts to exercise sovereignty over the Panjab through the postcolonial period. He understood the Partition’s fracturing of the Panjab into two, the resulting displacement of its peoples across new borders, and the Indian state’s attempts to further erode the Panjab’s territorial boundaries as marking the beginning of a new chapter in an ongoing story of contestation and struggle. Sirdar Kapur Singh situated the postcolonial Indian state’s dealings with the Sikhs within a long history of attempts to occupy, destroy, or otherwise undermine the sovereign status of the Golden Temple, which, within its precincts, crystallized what he referred to as the “peculiar Sikh doctrine of double sovereignty,” which described the cohesion between the realms of the seen and unseen worlds–between miri (the political) and piri (the spiritual). 

In his widely read “The Golden Temple: Its Theo-Political Status,” which first appeared in the Sikh Review in 1974, Sirdar Kapur Singh narrated the long history of attacks on the Darbar Sahib complex that began in 1721, five years after the execution of Banda Singh Bahadur by the Mughals, when “the Sikhs shifted their centre of activities, their spiritual and political capital and their acropolis to the Golden Temple, the lake that surrounds it, and the complex of buildings, including Akal Takht, that are attached to it.”⁴ He inserted the postcolonial Indian state’s orientation towards Darbar Sahib, specifically the assertion that using the space for this-worldly political matters constituted a transgression of its sacred status, within a longer narrative of 250 years of contestation and attack. These attacks ranged from Ahmed Shah Durrani’s assaults on the complex to the colonial state’s superficial recognition of the complex’s autonomous status. 

The struggle against the Indian state’s attempts to neutralize the space of the complex was part of the ongoing, “relentless jihad” of the Sikhs, a term Sirdar Kapur Singh used to describe the ongoing battle waged by the Sikhs against the idea that a ruling state could subsume the Darbar Sahib complex and alienate it from the Sikh collective. Since 1721, the space of the Darbar Sahib complex had faced multiple assaults. Now, the postcolonial state’s attempts to render the Darbar Sahib complex a sacred space ill-suited for the profanity of politics suggested its unwillingness to recognize the Sikhs’ collective autonomy within the structure of the Indian nation-state. But Sirdar Kapur Singh argued that the two-and-a-half century struggle against attacks on the complex demonstrated that any state’s attempts to absorb the Golden Temple into its purview would ultimately be unsuccessful: Specifically, a state that attempted to exercise its unrestrained power in the space of the complex and over the Sikhs as a whole would “forfeit its moral right to demand allegiance of the Sikhs.” Non-recognition of the Darbar Sahib complex’s autonomous status–including its implications for collective Sikh autonomy–would erode any state’s ability to work in alliance with the Sikh Panjab.

Inevitable: establishing a Sikh polity  

Though Indian nationalism was antagonistic to the recognition of Sikh national status, Sirdar Kapur Singh suggested that the emergent postcolonial order also contained within it a seed of possibility for the development of a Sikh political structure, a logical step towards the inevitable completion of Guru Gobind Singh Sahib’s vision of an egalitarian society. 

In one of the masterful chapters of Pārāśarapraśna, Sirdar Kapur Singh outlined the contours of a Sikh polity and its central institutions, including the inalienably sovereign Khalsa collective, legitimized by the two-pronged Guru Granth and Panth (Sikh collective) and by consensus-based decision-making models like the Sarbat Khalsa (Sikh Collective Assembly) and the Gurmata (resolution in the name of the Guru). He suggested that a Sikh polity would be organized around three principles: emphasis on the moral and ethical development of individuals, equality among individuals, and the recognition of “the validity of socio-economic life as the proper context for the highest spiritual activity.”⁵ In keeping with the fundamental non-contradiction of political and spiritual matters, a Sikh polity would not be an ethnostate that governed permissible piety, but rather an egalitarian society which encouraged ethical and spiritual development for all. 

He derived these elements of an ideal Sikh polity from a study of popular governance models of pre-modern Panjab and the experiments in Sikh governance dating to the more recent Misl period. Guru Gobind Singh Sahib’s Khalsa was the realization of a Sikh polity in concrete terms, and the era immediately following the Guru’s joti jot⁶ was an attempt to enact Khalsa Raj as a collective. The period of the Misls, which he calls the confederacies, represented a new stage in the attempt to establish a Sikh polity. “There were twelve such Misls,” he wrote, “autonomous Sikh militias, in charge of territories, each with a definite and clear objective of consequent and preliminary consolidation before itself.” Together, he argued, these Misls aimed towards establishing “Sikh Raj in the land based upon the true principles of Sikh polity in accordance with the ancient precedents and the precepts of Guru Gobind Singh.”⁷

Now, amid the heady possibilities of decolonization, it seemed that a Sikh polity could finally be realized. Sirdar Kapur Singh argued that the postcolonial transition was hospitable to a return to indigenous Sikh and Panjabi models of democratic governance, though the recent past represented a break from this tradition. Specifically, he argued that the genuine heritage of popular, democratic governance that was once found in Panjab had been lost with the arrival of Ranjit Singh, who consolidated the Panjab and governed it as emperor of a centralized Sikh state, often referred to as the Sarkar-i-Khalsa or Lahore Darbar, beginning in 1799. According to Sirdar Kapur Singh’s polemic, though sovereignty was formally defeated by the British annexation of the Panjab in 1849, its defeat could be traced half a century earlier to the ascendance of Ranjit Singh as maharaja of the Lahore Darbar. 

Sirdar Kapur Singh argued that the Lahore Darbar’s Sarkar-i-Khalsa represented a fall from the republican potential exhibited in the previous century. He did not have kind words for Ranjit Singh or for his experiments in Sikh Raj. He described a man who neglected to nourish the ethical and institutional foundations of the Khalsa, vesting himself with monarchical power in keeping with a long tradition of Hindu monarchy, which was oriented around the trinity of “god, Brahmins, and ministers.”⁸ Ranjit Singh gathered “all the power and authority of the state” in “his own person.” Any adherence he displayed to norms of popular, consensus-based models of Sikh governance, including the form of the Gurmata, was merely lip service. He wrote scathingly: “The royal ‘Daily Diaries’ of the closing years of his reign are full of uninteresting and boring details of lavish and indiscriminate alms-giving to Brahmins, a duty which every Hindu monarch is enjoined to perform scrupulously and without fail in the ancient Hindu texts.”⁹

Sirdar Kapur Singh’s critique of the erstwhile maharaja (a title he called “un-Sikh”) ought to be understood as his attempt to evaluate how the Khalsa strayed from a path towards a genuine Sikh polity, rather than a solely intellectual exercise.¹⁰ By narrating the era of Ranjit Singh as a lapse in the Sikh past, Sirdar Kapur Singh could detail how the current phase of postcolonial self-governance contained the seed of the realization of a genuine Sikh polity. 

To integrate Indian Panjab into the nationalist vision of a unified India, especially after the truncated Panjab that emerged after the granting of the Panjabi Suba 1966, the Khalsa’s collective status had to be denied in favor of a model that would govern individual Indian citizens. At the same time, the wave of decolonization in the middle of the twentieth century enabled national visions to be narrated anew across the decolonizing world. As a result, Sirdar Kapur Singh invoked the power of the Khalsa to meet the needs of the present, as it had attempted to do during the time of Ranjit Singh. In the final years of the Lahore Darbar, the Khalsa army carried the standard of the Sikh polity. The Khalsa, structurally antagonistic to “any totalitarian or autocratic monarchical system of organization of power,” was thus antagonistic to both the Lahore Darbar and the British East India Company.¹¹ He described the Khalsa army as stuck “between the devil and the deep sea,” between the “anti-Sikh social impulses of the Sikh Darbar and the British menace to the existence and viability of the Sarkar-i-Khalsa.”¹² The Khalsa was then and remained for Sirdar Kapur Singh the great check on the “individualism of the great cats of the jungle”—who might ascend as ruling political elites —and “the colorless collectivism of the beehive or the anthill.”¹³ 

Necessary: the failures of independence 

If inevitability named, for Sirdar Kapur Singh, the unfinished trajectory of Sikh political history, necessity named the pressures of the postcolonial present: the danger that the Sikh collective would be dissolved into a homogenizing national framework. As a political actor, Sirdar Kapur Singh recognized the crisis facing Sikhs in postcolonial India. A Sikh homeland was not only in keeping with the progression of Sikh history and thought, but it was a necessity in the wake of the broken promises of Partition and the failures of independence. 

It was to the young Khalsa that Sirdar Kapur Singh often emphasized the urgent necessity of fervent political action. For example, in a speech he delivered in December 1968, he invoked Guru Gobind Singh Sahib, in addition to the wider, global uprisings of young people of the 1960s, to assert that “young Sikh students, men and women, must join together, without fear and freeing themselves from all duress, to transform themselves into, what the Rider of the Blue Horse intended them to be.”¹⁴ In his address to the All India Sikh Students’ Federation earlier in 1968, Sirdar Kapur Singh warned students that “deliberate and persistent efforts” were being made to “disintegrate and dissolve the Khalsa” ever since Independence in 1947. He warned that the logical end of secular Indian nationalism would be the suppression of the Khalsa’s “history-making potency and dynamism” in favor of transforming the Khalsa into a “secular proletariat of hewers of wood and drawers of water” at the service of the Hindu elite. As he saw it, the ruling elites of postcolonial India were attempting to disintegrate the Khalsa’s power and absorb the Sikhs as secular citizens of the new nation. In “They Massacre Sikhs,” a 1978 white paper authored by Sirdar Kapur Singh under the auspices of the Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee, the central body convened in 1920 to oversee the management of gurduaras. He indicted India’s nationalist political elites for treating the Sikhs as “expendable, as manure and as a vanishing quantity in the crucible of the Indian political laboratory.” “Psycho-economic offensives have been continuously planned and mounted against us to reduce our numbers in the country,” he continued, “to obliterate our political significance, to eliminate our natural preeminence in the armed forces and to sap our basic spiritual vitality and lower our civic dignity.”¹⁵ The massacre of Sikhs in the Vaisakhi Saka of 1978 represented the culmination of such offensives.¹⁶ 

Sirdar Kapur Singh alleged that India’s nationalist elite were collaborating to convert the members of the Khalsa into productive citizens of free India. Under this vision, the collective sovereign capacity of the Khalsa, crystallized in the space of the Darbar Sahib complex through the Akal Takht’s position in relation to Harimandir Sahib, would be dissolved in favor of a model of individual citizens belonging to the Indian nation-state. This would betray the collective character of the Sikh nation, oriented around the enmeshed nature of political and religious activity. Sirdar Kapur Singh showed repeatedly that Sikh thought insisted that religious activity was necessarily conducted in the realms of the social and the political. In a speech to the AISSF, Sirdar Kapur Singh elaborated on the distinct necessity of fighting to sustain Guru Gobind Singh Sahib’s vision for the Khalsa. He explained that the Khalsa was never meant to be simply a “religion” or “band of disciples,” a group of “followers” or even “fighting comrades.” The Khalsa was, after all, Guru Gobind Singh Sahib’s “Ideal, Dream, his Divinity and his Aspirations, his Support and his Destiny.”¹⁷ It was the inauguration of a new kind of society—a society of “revolutionary dynamism” that would necessarily capture political power to create an egalitarian society. 

Thinking with Sirdar Kapur Singh today 

Sirdar Kapur Singh observed India’s transition out of colonialism and contended with the challenges of postcolonial nation-building. Throughout his career, he demonstrated flexibility, adapting his arguments to meet the contradictions of the present crises. He remained attuned to the contingency of the present. For example, of the Panjabi Suba demand of immediate post-Partition period, he explained: “The unilingual Panjabi state was demanded by the Sikhs not because they considered any particular language as necessary for their spiritual survival or cultural viability, but because they wanted to employ a fashionable political idiom to salvage their identity and to realize their destiny.”¹⁸ The political goal of a Sikh homeland was “divinely fixed,” as he once put it, and therefore immutable, but “its form and content” could–and ought to–be adapted continually.¹⁹ The Sikhs would have to be ready to forge new demands to meet shifting conditions. 

In the early postcolonial period, Sirdar Kapur Singh settled on a political goal that seemed both achievable and necessary within India’s constitutional structure and territorial boundaries. That is, he put forth a theory of national autonomy within a broader Indian republic, stating in clear terms that “the concrete realization of this status of the Sikh people is possible within the sovereign and territorial integrity of India.”²⁰ He pointed to the federal structures of the United States and the now former Soviet Union as examples of political experiments that balanced center-state relations in a manner similar to that which India ought to aspire to. 

As we read Sirdar Kapur Singh’s writing today, we might revise his questions for the present. Can we extend his assessment of the Sikh past into the present by taking account of the forty years that have passed since his death in 1986? Just as the violence and dislocations of 1947’s Partition shaped both Sirdar Kapur Singh’s cynicism and hope for the fate of the Sikhs, the long aftermath of the 1984 Ghallughara continues to haunt our political imagination today. In the spirit of the Sirdar, we might ask: How may we struggle against unrestrained state power today, when postcolonial nationalisms have taken novel transnational forms? Which strands of our past can be cultivated today as we work to analyze and transform the historical conjuncture we inhabit? How can we strive to be the standard bearers of Guru Gobind Singh Sahib’s vision of a society characterized by revolutionary dynamism? 

Bibliography 

Kapur Singh. “The Golden Temple: Its Theo-Political Status.” The Sikh Review 22, no. 248 (1974).

Kapur Singh. Documents on Sikh Homeland and Speeches in Parliament. Edited by Gurtej Singh. Satvic Media, 2020. 

Kapur Singh. Pārāśarapraśna: The Baisakhi of Guru Gobind Singh. Edited by Madanjit Kaur and Piar Singh. 1959; Guru Nanak Dev University, 2001.

Kapur Singh. “They Massacre Sikhs: A White Paper by the Sikh Religious Parliament.” Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee, 1978.

References

¹   As a politician and a writer, Sirdar Kapur Singh often made arguments primarily in service of making persuasive arguments. Though his writing was always intellectually rigorous, he did not always write with scholarly even-handedness.

²   Kapur Singh, “Press Statement at Jullundur,” 27 April 1969.

³  “Separate Homeland for the Sikhs,” interview with Kapur Singh in the Current Weekly, Bombay, 12 April 1969.

⁴   Kapur Singh, “The Golden Temple: Its Theo-Political Status,” The Sikh Review 22, no. 248, 1974.

⁵   Kapur Singh, “The Sikh Raj,” Pārāśarapraśna: The Baisakhi of Guru Gobind Singh, Edited by Madanjit Kaur and Piar Singh. 1959; Guru Nanak Dev University, 2001, 243.

⁶   Literally, “light merged with light,” a phrase used to describe Guru Gobind Singh Sahib’s departure from earthly life.

⁷   Kapur Singh, “The Sikh Raj,” Pārāśarapraśna, 229.

⁸    Ibid., 204.

⁹    Ibid., 233.

¹⁰  Ibid., 231. 

¹¹  Ibid., 240.

¹²  Ibid., 237.

¹³  Ibid., 240.

¹⁴  Kapur Singh, “Awake! Young Khalsa,” The Sikh Review 17, no. 185, 1968.

¹⁵  Kapur Singh, “They Massacre Sikhs,” Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee, 1978.

¹⁶  On referring to the massacre as the “Nirankari clash”, Kapur Singh wrote: “A ‘clash’ is where two objects or factions strike noisily against each other. Where the striking and the sound is wholly one-sided, there is no ‘clash,’ and yet the Government handout and almost the entire non-Sikh press, refer to this massacre of Sikhs as a ‘clash.’” in Kapur Singh, “They Massacre Sikhs,” 2.

¹⁷  Kapur Singh, “Presidential Speech,” in Documents on Sikh Homeland and Speeches in Parliament, 91.

¹⁸  Ibid., 96.

¹⁹  “Sikhs’ Political Goal is Divinely Fixed,” interview with Kapur Singh in The Statesman, New Delhi, Nov. 1968, 111.

²⁰  Ibid., 111.