New Delhi: Around four dozen Sikhs and Hindus, who had taken shelter at Gurdwara Guru Gobind Singh Karte Parwan in Kabul following the Taliban takeover, were evacuated from Afghanistan on an IAF plane last week. Among them were three Afghan Sikhs who were seen carrying saroops of Shri Guru Granth Sahib, the holy scripture of Sikhism.
Images and videos of the evacuees’ arrival in Delhi were being widely shared on social media, with one in particular going viral — that of Union minister Hardeep Singh Puri, who was seen carrying one of the saroops on his head.
ThePrint explains what saroops are, the code of conduct for transporting them, and history of Sikhism in Afghanistan.
What are saroops
The saroop, also called Bir in Punjabi, is a physical copy of the Guru Granth Sahib. Every saroop has 1,430 pages, and each page is called an ang.
Guru Arjan Dev, the fifth Sikh guru, compiled the first Bir (physical copy) of the Guru Granth Sahib in 1604 and installed it in the Golden Temple in Amritsar. After him, the tenth Sikh guru, Guru Gobind Singh, added more verses and compiled the Bir for the second and last time.
Sikhs regard the saroop of Guru Granth Sahib to be the living guru and treat it with utmost respect. It was in 1708 that Guru Gobind Singh declared the Guru Granth Sahib as the living guru of the Sikhs.
The Guru Granth Sahib can only be distributed and printed by the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee, a 100-year-old organisation that manages Sikh shrines across India.
There were initially 13 saroops in Afghanistan, of which seven had earlier been shifted to India. Now, with the transfer of three more saroops to India, three are left in Afghanistan.
Also read: An Afghan gurdwara testifies to visit of Guru Nanak’s son, another had text signed by 10th Guru
Code of conduct for transportation
Since Guru Granth Sahib is regarded as the living guru for Sikhs, there is a strict code of conduct for its transportation, which is according to the rules of the Sikh Rahit Maryada.
Under these rules, five baptised Sikhs should transfer the holy book from one place to another. While transporting the saroop or Bir, the Guru Granth Sahib is carried on the head, while the Sikhs walk barefoot.
Gurdwaras have a separate resting place for the saroops, called ‘Sukh Asan Sthan‘, which is where the ‘living guru’ rests at night. This is for the night when the Guru Granth Sahib is ceremoniously shut. However, in the morning it is again installed in a ceremony called prakash.
In 1984, during Operation Bluestar, the saroop, which was in the sanctum sanctorum of the Golden Temple, was damaged by a bullet. Earlier this year it was restored and showcased for public viewing.
According to reports, the bullet damaged the cover and 90 pages (angs) before getting lodged into the saroop.
History of Sikhism in Afghanistan
The Sikh community, now only a thousand-odd people strong in Afghanistan, has a long history with the country.
In his book, Afghan Hindus and Sikhs: History of a Thousand Years, historian Inderjeet Singh explained that the history of Sikhism in medieval Afghanistan began all the way back in the 15th century with the founder of Sikhism, Guru Nanak.
It has been reported that Guru Nanak visited Afghanistan in the early 16th century. According to the history of his travels recorded in the janamsakhis, it was during 1519-21 when he along with his companions visited present-day Kandahar, Kabul, Sultanpur and Jalalabad. Aside from Guru Nanak, the seventh Sikh Guru, Har Rai, also sent Sikh missionaries to Kabul and established a dharamsaal (earlier name for a gurdwara).
Explaining the presence of Sikhs in Afghanistan, anthropologist Roger Ballard in a research paper wrote that Afghan Sikhs were “likely to be made up of those members of the indigenous population who resisted the process of conversion from Buddhism to Islam which took place in this area between the ninth and thirteenth centuries, and who subsequently aligned themselves with the teachings of Guru Nanak — himself a Khatri and the founder of the Sikh tradition — during the course of the fifteenth century.”
Apart from Guru Nanak and Har Rai, Baba Sri Chand, the son of Guru Nanak and founder of the Udasi Sect, also went to Afghanistan. Besides this, Gurdwara Baba Sri Chand was established by Baba Almast in Kabul when he visited the city.
During the second Anglo-Sikh war of 1848-49, Sikhs were supported by the Afghans. And it was after this, in the late nineteenth century, that Sikh scholar and preacher Akali Kaur Singh spent a year in Afghanistan, going door-to-door trying to spread Sikh doctrine.
(Edited by Neha Mahajan)
Also read: ‘Burn my degrees, photos of me without hijab’: Afghan women in India tell families back home