The Sikhs. By Khushwant Singh. (George Allen & Unwin. 16s.)
IT is ambitious to condense into less than two hundred pages an account of the Sikh religion, its foundation and its nature, a history of the Sikh people, a description of recent political groups and movements, an estimate of the Sikh cultural achievement, and an attempt to forecast the future. In so small a compass it is difficult not to over- simplify ; Sardar Khushwant Singh under- estimates Ranjit Singh for instance, surely an astute diplomatist fit to rank after Akbar and Warren Hastings but after no one else in modern India. And he attributes to English policy in the period after Ranjit Singh both a malignancy and a consistency it did not possess. But he brings out admir- ably the eclectic nature of Sikhism, its borrowings from the mystical elements in both Islam and Hinduism, its sturdy refusal of an other-worldly asceticism, and the tendency, repeatedly made manifest, of Hinduism to reabsorb in its own vortex this Puritan revolt against forms and insti- tutions, which must therefore constantly re- purify itself. The tendeticy to absorption is stronger than ever today ; independence has led to some abatement of the old internal strife between the Jat Sikh and the Khattri Sikh, to some blurring of the line, never clear-cut, between Sikh and Hindu. Sardar Khushwant Singh believes that fifty years 'from now this last division will have dis- appeared altogether. But oddly enough he says very little of the virility of the Sikhs ; they are a people to whom issues usually present themselves simply, yet there was surely unusual wisdom and restraint in their leader's attitude to partition and one may hope that a community who have produced an ethos so different from the Hindu, so many fine soldiers and by con- trpt so outstanding a painter as Amrita Sher Gill, will perhaps not disappear so easily as Sardar Khushwant Singh supposes.
P. W.
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