Singh Sabha Movement
Singh Sabha Movement is the general term used for various networks of socio-religious reform movements among the Sikhs of the Panjab from the late 19th century. The first such Singh Sabha was founded in 1873 by conservative Sikhist elites (large landowners, regional princes, chiefs of Gurdwaras , i.e. Sikhist places of worship) in Amritsar . Your approach, rather oriented towards the preservation of the current status quo in the Sikhist religious community against external influences and the like. a. by Christian missionaries, could not prevail in the medium term against another current of Singh Sabhas under the leadership of the Lahore Singh-Sabha, which was founded in 1879. This was better organized and adapted to the modern media and administrative structures (e.g. press, fundraising, lobbying and communication with the colonial authorities) and increasingly determined the appearance of the Sikhist community in public, especially towards the colonial rulers and among the urban elites. Nowadays, the term "Singh Sabha Movement" is mostly one-sidedly related to the branch emanating from Lahore .
The work of the Singh Sabhas in transforming the Sikh tradition
The Singh Sabhas quickly spread to other urban centers of the Panjab and established regional branches. A targeted penetration was also made into rural areas in order to convey to the Sikhs living there a form of religious practice developed according to urban standards (based on western values of religiosity). Their self-image as Sikhs should be sharpened to distinguish them from other religious communities such as Hindus and Muslims. (Previously this was hardly pronounced in rural areas of north-west India and all three groups often had common places of worship.) Against this background, various elements of local folk belief (worship of saints or nature, worship of idols, pilgrimage to certain places of pilgrimage) were criticized and the Attempted to spread a uniform form of religious practice.
From the existing scriptures, one, the Adi Granth, was selected as the sole authoritative and the worship of charismatic religious leaders was limited to a group of 10 "historical" gurus (starting with the founder, Guru Nanak ) (this subsequently led to tension with others charismatic leaders who did not accept this limitation and claimed to follow the Gurus). The religious area was limited to the Gurdwaras as the only legitimate places of worship (opposite various natural shrines , tombs of miraculous personalities, etc.). In addition, separate forms of religious rites of passage (birth, death) were created and existing rituals were declared generally binding and standardized (initiation, marriage). In this area too, Sikhs often hardly differed from other surrounding religious groups.
Finally, and central to the present day, the Singh Sabhas generalized the various religiously based identifiers of Sikhism to the 5 Ks that are valid today (dagger, punjabi: kirpan ; uncut hair, kes (including the turban as headgear); comb, kanga; steel bracelet , Kara; specific trousers, Kachha). Before that there were very different ideas about the external identifying marks of Sikhs (if they existed at all there were often 5 in number) and these were only worn by a small elite of the Khalsa Sikhs.
The Khalsa is an order-like organization within Sikhism (with the mythical founding date on March 30, 1699), which imposes particularly strict rules of conduct on its members. Through the agitation of the Singh Sabhas, the role of the Khalsa for the Sikhist community was strongly idealized and gradually a Sikhist practice of faith outside the Khalsa (and without its identifying mark) was stigmatized and devalued as insufficiently. Such evaluations are still valid today - especially in the West it is believed that Sikhs can be reliably recognized by their turbans. The number of Sikhs in the diaspora (i.e. outside India) who were not initiated in the Khalsa is now likely to be close to zero; that of those in the country is not known, as no statistics are produced on this question. (India regards itself as a secular country with no interest in such matters and also Sikhist orthodoxy has no motivation to disseminate such numbers.)
Motivations
The interests of the urban elites in the spread of such a uniform religious form of "Sikhism" - which in its religious representation and everyday practice, if not newly invented, at least massively redesigned - were based on an improved visibility compared to the colonial administration. These distributed jobs in local administrative institutions and places at state educational institutions increasingly on the basis of religiously based quota regulations. Therefore, many educated Sikhs in the cities could only hope to be able to share in the social resources of power, prosperity and prestige by being perceptible as a separate religious group.
In addition, the traditional religiosity of the Sikhs increasingly no longer met the requirements of the modern world in which many urban members of the religious community lived. Western education and the intellectual influences of Christian missionaries (who had been active in Panjab since 1835) had shifted the religious standards of the urban elites and the demands on their own religiosity changed. So it can be understood why a large part of the Singh Sabhas' religious homogenization program was related to and reacted to the missionary criticism of native paganism (idol worship, rampant rituals, confused ideas of the divine, ...). Harjot Singh Oberoi writes in his book "The Construction of Religious Boundaries": "The elites tried, in their endeavor to generalize their own [political and professional] ambitions, to transform the rest of the Sikhist tradition into a reflection of themselves."
Socio-political background
Another factor that promoted the creation of religious awareness and its implementation in a standardized religiosity was the simultaneous appearance of other socio-religious reform movements such as the Hindu Arya Samaj (from 1877) and the Muslim Ahmadiyya movement (from 1889), to which the Singh Sabhas soon entered into competition for membership and socio-political influence. In this context, the necessity of external recognizability of one's own group (and therefore the demarcation from the others) became more and more important and discharged in the context of various, also violent tensions, especially in connection with the conversion rituals of the Arya Samaj ( Shuddhi ) towards Sikhs. As between the different wings of the Singh Sabha movement, there was a real press war, a journalistic mud fight between the representatives of the different camps in books, magazine articles, leaflets and the like. the like, which were often further contested through legal means.
Socio-religious influence in retrospect
Against this background, the Singh Sabha movement gradually succeeded in largely pushing through its demands regarding the religious practice of Sikhism and its ideological foundation and in suppressing the influence of the traditional elites. Although the Singh Sabhas were marginalized as institutions from 1919 (because of their proximity to the colonial administration and its support) in the general political dynamics of the anti-colonialist movement under the leadership of the Congress Party and Mohandas Gandhis as institutions, their socio-religious reform work continued . In 1950, after long discussions about detailed questions and formulations, the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC) (founded in 1925, still dominant and recognized as Sikhist orthodoxy) published the Sikh Reht Maryada, a kind of Sikhist catechism with authoritative information on all dogmatic questions around about Sikhism, from everyday practice to the most abstract teaching content. This can in large part be seen as a late legacy of the work of the Singh Sabhas.
literature
- Harjot Oberoi: The Construction of Religious Boundaries. Culture, Identity and Diversity in the Sikh Tradition. New Delhi 1994. (The only useful, but very good and detailed work on the subject of the Singh Sabhas, their social environment and their impact within the Sikhist tradition)
Proof of citation
- ↑ cf. Oberoi 1994: pp. 147-169
- ↑ cf. Oberoi 1994: pp. 316-317
- ↑ cf. Oberoi 1994: pp. 334-344
- ↑ cf. Oberoi 1994: pp. 182-190
- ↑ cf. Oberoi 1994: pp. 328-334
- ↑ cf. Oberoi 1994: p. 220
- ↑ "The elites, in seeking to universalize their own aspirations, sought to turn the rest of Sikh tradition into a mirror image of themselves." (P. 304)