Reading Note

Soon after the Prophet Muhammad began preaching in the Arabian Penin-

sula in the seventh century C.E., his teachings made their way to India, brought by caravans from the Middle East and seafaring Arab traders. But despite these early arrivals, Islam had little impact on India for many more centuries, even though it was spreading broadly toward the subcontinent among Iranians, Turks, and Mongols of Central Asia and the Iranian Plateau. In these regions the original teachings emanating from Arabia mixed with local and newly sprouted ideas to form institutions of religion and kingship that would later transform India.

When Islam finally spread into India, it came in three not fully differenti- ated forms: Sunni, Shia, and Sufi. None of them is quite the form now taken in South Asia, after two centuries of colonialism, during which Indian Islam was deprived of Islamic rulers.

Islam begins, of course, far from India. In 610 in the Arabian Desert the Prophet Muhammad began to have visions in which the angel Gabriel dictated to him the words of Allah, which became the holy book, the Quran. As Muhammad communicated these visions, many followers were drawn to what became a new religion called Islam, meaning full and complete surrender to the divine will. He also attracted enemies who attempted to destroy the new faith. Muhammad and his followers defeated his enemies and conquered most of the Arabian Peninsula before his death in 632. Over the next 30 years most of the Middle East was conquered by his successors, and by a century later North Africa and Spain were conquered.

However, when the Prophet died his followers faced a severe dilemma: Who would succeed him? He left behind no son and no instructions for a suc- cessor. He had a large family, with multiple wives, a father-in-law named Abu Bakr, and a charismatic son-in-law named Ali, husband of his daughter Fatima. The elders chose Abu Bakr to succeed Muhammad as caliph, that is, to exercise both spiritual and political authority. However, another faction believed Ali was the true heir, and his son Husain, who was a blood descendant of the Prophet through Fatima, had been wrongly deprived of the succession. There followed 53 years of civil war as Ali’s followers tried to wrest power back from Abu Bakr and the next three successors. Thus began the great schism between the Sunnis (who accepted Abu Bakr and succession by choice of the elders and customs established by the Prophet) and the Shias (who believe succession should follow the actual bloodline of the Prophet himself). In 680, while on his way to join rebels in Iran, Husain was killed by Sunnis near Karbala (in mod- ern Iraq) and thus became the first martyr. The martyrdom of Husain is a cen- tral theme of Shia Islam; emotional laments for children killed at Karbala fill Muharram, the first month of the Islamic New Year (see box 6.1).

After the Prophet’s death, stories told by his wives and followers about his

early life and the years of conquest and civil war were collected in a series of

Box 6.1 Lament for Zaynab’s Sons

Zaynab, the daughter of Ali and Fatima, was the granddaughter of the Prophet. She joined the army of her brother Husayn in the march to Kufa to claim leadership of the Muslim community. However, Husayn and most of his army were slaughtered at Karbala (in modern Iraq), and Zaynab also lost her two sons, Aoun and Muhammad. The following text is a nauha, a poetic form chanted during gatherings in the Shia month of Muharram, accompanied by highly emotional ritual chest-beating in mourning.

Wept the mother over her dead sons, O Aoun, O Muhammad!

Alas, I offer myself to save you O Aoun, O Muhammad! You departed this world without wedding garlands O Aoun, O Muhammad! I longed to see you wed, then live in peace O Aoun, O Muhammad! But in the face of Fate my hands were tied O Aoun, O Muhammad! In place of two grooms lie two corpses

Let me be taken instead of you.

With what eyes can I look at you in this state? O Aoun, O Muhammad! In front of me, a mother, lie your corpses

How can I console my heart?

Why not beat my head in lamentation, O Aoun, O Muhammad! You lived up to your uncles’ ideals

But darlings, tell me this—

Was your mother not worthy of your love, too? O Aoun, O Muhammad! This was the mother’s lament, Baquir,

Over her sons’ corpses—

Let me be taken instead of you!

Source: Syed Akbar Hyder and Carla Petievich, Shi’I Mourning in Muharram: Nauha Laments for Children Killed at Karbala. In Islam in South Asia in Practice, ed. Barbara D. Metcalf. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009.

texts known as the hadith (“traditions”), which became secondary texts to the Quran in prescribing morality and social life for Muslims. Teachers (imams) master these texts and instruct the faithful in Friday sermons and in religious schools. Judges (qadis or qazis) resolve disputes based on several different schools of Islamic law (sharia), all derived from interpretations of the Quran, the hadith, and traditions of legal reasoning and consensus that have developed over the centuries.

In later centuries, as Islam evolved in the Middle East and was adopted by non-Arab groups like the Turks, Persians, and Mongols, new forms emerged. In South Asia, traditions of religious practice such as we have already seen— sanyas, yoga, and bhakti—may also have influenced Indian Islam. From the tenth through the thirteenth centuries, Sufism became the dominant form of Islam, especially as it developed in the Iranian Plateau and India; its impor-

tance can hardly be overemphasized. Charismatic Sufi figures were patronized by sultans as “inheritors of charisma (baraka) derived through ‘chains of succes- sion’ from the Prophet himself ” (Metcalf 2009:8). Sufi elders were guides to inner realization of the divine, and miracles were evidence of divine interven- tion in everyday life. Their lodges and tombs became cult centers, places of pil- grimage and prayer.

An important theme of Sufism was the very great credence given to astrol- ogy to predict world-changing events. The movements of the known planets were carefully tracked. When Saturn and Jupiter came into conjunction in the seventh century, the Prophet Muhammad was born. Another conjunction occurred at the time of Timur (a.k.a. Tamerlane, d. 1405), who conquered much of Iran and Afghanistan and sacked Delhi in the late thirteenth century. These conjunctions were seen as heralding the rise of an Islamic savior (mahdi), an ideal sovereign, a true caliph. This cultural theme of a coming mahdi—an idea that could be claimed by a charismatic Sufi leader or military general— was another way in which Sufism shaped society and kingship.

The expansion of Islam into Asia is a story of vivid personalities and char- ismatic figures, as the Prophet had been, spiritual leaders who became warriors or miracle-working saints even lying in their sacred tombs, and world-conquer- ing kings with messianic claims. Charismatic holiness was passed down blood- lines from Genghis Khan (d. 1227) and Timur, similar to those of the Prophet himself. In Persia and Afghanistan there emerged a new type of mass-based Sufism centered on popular cults of the saints and hereditary forms of spiritual leadership a century before the rise of the Mughals. “These traditions were far more significant in shaping Muslim worldviews than the texts and traditions of doctrinal Islam” (Moin 2012).

We get a picture of this worldview from The Baburnama, a memoir written toward the end of his life by Babur, the Mongol prince who brought the Mughals3 to power in India in 1526. It is based in part on a journal that he dili- gently kept from his youth.4 Babur was highly intelligent and keenly interested in almost everything, both practical matters of conquest and rule and religious matters that he heard about in his travels from Afghanistan into India. In fact, the distinction between “practical” and “religious” matters would have made little sense to him, as these were far from separate domains of knowledge in his time. Azfar Moin provides many examples, such as the following:

In the year he came to Kabul, Babur was informed about a village shrine where the tomb moved when prayers were offered. Upon arriving at the shrine, Babur saw the miracle with his own eyes. Then he discovered that it was a trick: “They had put a screen over the tomb, which, when they made it move, made it seem as though the tomb was moving, just as it seems to people riding in a boat for the first time that the shore is moving.” Although Babur chastised the attendants and had the false screen destroyed, he did not condemn the “spurious” shrine. Instead, he had a proper dome built over it. (Moin 2012:65)

Sufi saints often combined powerful religious authority with political ambitions. One famous Sufi was Sayyid Muhammad of Jaunpur (d. 1505), with a following of thousands who led a movement against Akbar, the greatest of the Mughals. As a young man Sayyid Muhammad had led a band of 1,500 Hindu ascetics into battle against a Hindu raja. When he hacked open the Hindu raja’s chest he discovered the image of a Hindu god carved on his heart. This so shocked him that he went into a trance: if a Hindu could be this devout, what could devotion to the true God do for a Muslim? He left on a long spiri- tual quest to Mecca, where he declared himself the awaited Mahdi (Moin 2012:108). Back in India, he claimed anyone who did not accept him as the Mahdi was no true Muslim.

Babur’s grandson Akbar was also part of the cultural milieu of Sufi Islam. In addition to being a brilliant conqueror who expanded the Mughal territories in India and created an effective state organization, he used Sufi practices and symbols in creating a “messianic sovereignty” along the lines of Sayyid Muhammad of Jaunpur. He, too, could go into a “divine rapture,” which he did in full view of the public while on a hunting trip in 1578. The Akbarnama, the chronicle of his reign written toward the end of his life, reports that a year after this divine rapture, he issued an edict declaring himself “the imam and mujtahid” of the age (Moin 2012:139). Akbar invited religious leaders from all over his empire to court to discuss their doctrines: Shias, Sunnis, Sufis, Hindus, Zoroastrians, Jews, Buddhists, and even Portuguese Jesuits from Goa (who were confident Akbar would convert to Christianity). He did not convert to any of these creeds but was keenly interested in all of them. Rather, he gathered them using his own charisma as emperor (padishah) with high spiritual status. To enhance his spiritual status he created an imperial order of disciples who greeted each other with the phrase “Allahu Akbar,” which means “God is Great,” but also suggests “Akbar is God.”

Akbar was certainly more Sufi than Sunni or Shia. He lived at the time when the first thousand years of Islam were coming to an end, considered by Sufis as a time ripe for a mahdi. He was the first of the four “Great Mughals,” followed by Shah Jahan, Jahangir, and Aurangzeb, who died in 1707. Already in Aurangzeb’s time, the charismatic, mystical openness of Akbar’s form of Islam was giving way to a stricter form of Islam. By the end of the eighteenth century, British power in the form of the East India Company was changing political and economic conditions for the Islamic elite as the final Mughals went into decline. Indian Islam began to change in the uncertain times, and new Muslim identities and values emerged.

In British India, before Independence and Partition, the Shias were few in number: not more than 4 percent of Muslims in any of the provinces (Hasan 1996). The highest percentage was to be found in Lucknow, where in the 1882 and 1921 censuses, Shias were 10 percent of the Muslim population. And yet,

by far the most important Muslim event was the holy month of Muharram, a very specifically Shia commemoration of the death of Husain.

Firsthand accounts from the nineteenth century illustrate the widespread participation in Muharram. “The truth is that in those days the whole year was spent waiting for Muharram. . . . After the goat sacrifices of Baqr Id the prepa- rations for Muharram began. Dadda, my father’s mother, started to softly chant elegies about the martyrs. Mother set about sewing black clothes for all of us; and my sister took out the notebooks of laments and began to practice them” (Rahi Masoom Reza, quoted in Hasan 1996). As the moon was sighted over the Gomti River in Lucknow, the loud and clear call to prayer marked the beginning of the holy month of Muharram.

They would renew and reaffirm their unflinching devotion to those Islamic principles for which Imam Husain, grandson of the Prophet, had laid down his life in 680 C.E. . . . They marched through the lanes and bylanes of Luck- now in fervent lamentation chanting “Ya-Husain,” “Ya-Husain,” rhythmi- cally beating their chests, self-flagellating, carrying replicas of Husain’s tomb, his coffin, and standards and insignia, and his horse. (Hasan 1996:543)

It was not only the tiny numbers of Shias who engaged in this emotional 10-day mourning for an event from the seventh century that was the founda- tional narrative of Shia Islam. Sunnis as well, and even Hindus, participated in Muharram. Hindu princes in central and southern India, including Brahmans,

Every year at Muharram, Shia Muslims commemorate the death of Husain with proces- sions and self-flagellation that brings blood dripping off their heads, chests, and backs.

commemorated Muharram with “illuminations and processions . . . brilliant and costly” (Hasan 1996:545). Thousands of Hindus chanted mourning songs along with the Shias and Sunnis. In the North Indian town of Amroha, “accounts of Muharram . . . describe all religious communities attending Muharram sermons and parading effigies of Husain’s tomb, while the most ardent of Shias came out onto the town’s streets to engage in matamdari, self- flagellation as a form of penitence” (Jones 2009:879).

Several things are striking about this collective participation in the annual Shia commemorations. First, these accounts come from late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century observers. At that time, the sectarian rift between Sunni and Shia was not as severe as it later became. Wajid Ali Shah, the nineteenth- century nawab of Awadh, said: “Of my two eyes, one is a Shia and the other is a Sunni” (Jones 2009:545). Second, the story of the assassination of Husain at the hand of the tyrant Yazid is understood as the beginning of Sunni persecu- tion of Shias in the Middle East. In British India, however, there were reso- nances with colonial dominance and the destruction of the Mughal dynasty. Husain was the perfect man who becomes a martyr for God against the rulers of the world. Finally, the wide sharing of Muharram is evidence that Islam in South Asia only slowly pulled away from a cultural matrix in which Hindu, Sufi, Sunni, and Shia ideas and practices were widely availed; identities were not entirely fixed and bounded as religious categories. However, by the end of the nineteenth century, this was no longer true. Muharram ceased to be a com- mon symbol but became an exclusively Shia concern as Sunni–Shia conflicts became commonplace in North India.

These changes began in the mid-eighteenth century, when Indian Islam was influenced by the movement to purify the faith that came out of Arabia, where Shaykh Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab, whose movement became known as Wahhabism, urged stripping Islam of “un-Islamic” practices, many of them associated with Sufism. This movement was more extreme in Arabia, a more isolated and homogeneous place than India with all its ethnic, linguis- tic, political, and religious diversity. But there were similar reform efforts in India against Sufi practices like the concept of baraka, the worship of saints and veneration of tombs. All the Sufi innovations of the previous centuries were repudiated; the sole basis of the faith should be the Quran and the Sunna (hadith); that is, the text of the actual Quran transmitted to the Prophet (in Ara- bic), and the collected accounts of the early centuries of the believers. In Ara- bia, anyone resisting these reforms was considered apostate; Indian reformists such as Shah Wali Allah (d. 1762) urged Muslims to focus on the teachings of the Quran and the hadith, to discipline their lives according to sharia (Ibrahim 2006), and model one’s life on that of the Prophet. These were above all Sunni reforms. Into the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they intensified. Islamic schools, madrasas, which carefully differentiated between Shia, Sunni, and other sects, were established to educate youths in textual Islam. Sunnis tried to suppress mention of Ali and Husain; Shias complained they were

underrepresented in Muslim colleges. Instructive tracts for Muslim women emphasized the need to observe purdah. Communal conflict was expressed in competing religious festivals. Identities firmed up and enmity increased.

As Indian politics was moving toward independence, Muslim leaders set their sights on a separate Islamic state. Toward this goal, they attempted to unify India’s varied Muslims into a harmonious community. Islam provided a useful concept: the umma. The umma is an ancient vision of the total community of Islam, an idealized unity encouraged by events like the hajj (the pilgrimage to Mecca) and collective prayers in the great mosques. It has always been an ideal- ized value of pan-Islamic unity, never an actuality. But it became a key concept for Muslim leaders in building momentum for Partition. Some of this has been dis- cussed in the introduction to part III, but we return briefly to the religious forces that led to the Partition of India and the creation of Pakistan and Bangladesh.

The Islamic umma in India grew out of opposition to Hindus with the encouragement of Muslim political leaders like Jinnah. There had never been strong shared identities as Muslims among the millions of Muslims in India, which may seem a strange thing to say, but let’s look at who was a Muslim prior to the political movements of the early twentieth century.

The foundational social order of India was, and has always been, the caste order. Although Islam declares equality of all before Allah, Islam in India has never been able to fully free itself from caste-linked sensitivities. Over many long centuries of conversions to Islam (almost never by the sword, inciden- tally), the social origins of families and groups converting did make a differ- ence. Muslims were not all equal in India.

Indian Muslims distinguished between those whose origins were in low, peasant, artisan, and serving castes (the ajlaf), and those who came in from Per- sia, Central Asia, and the Middle East with the conquerors. The ajlaf continued to be dominated and exploited even after their conversion (Saberwal 2006). They include such groups as the Ansari, formerly weavers; or dyers, who were low caste because they used urine in the process of dyeing, prior to conversion. Many in eastern India (now Bangladesh and West Bengal state) were peasant castes. The ashraf were those who, during the Sultanate and Mughal period, had been part of the elite, descending from immigrants and proud of their lin- eages. They spoke Persian or Arabic and participated in the learned culture of poetry, art, and philosophy. They lived in urban areas like Delhi, Calcutta, Hyderabad, and Madras, or else lived comfortably in smaller rural towns on revenue-free grants of land from the Mughals (Jones 2009). They had little sense of commonality with Muslim converts from the lower castes. There were, as well, especially in the south, other Muslim groups of traders and merchants. All of these diverse Muslim communities had to be brought together into a common umma for political reasons. They had to get over the instinct in Islam to take religious differences so seriously that rivals were declared as kafir, mis-

guided, apostates or not even Muslims at all. The key was to heighten the sense of Muslim opposition to Hindu. What united all Muslims? They were not Hindu. This was how contemporary communalism grew on the Muslim side. A corresponding heightened sense of Hindu-ness (i.e., Hindutva) was growing on the Hindu side. The unexpectedly horrendous violence of Partition solidified these two communal identities and embedded themselves in the relationship between India and Pakistan. At Partition, 30 million of India’s then-population of 390 million went into West Pakistan and another 30 million became East Pakistan (later, Bangladesh). Muslims in India are now only 13 percent of the population (as of the 2011 census), an often oppressed minority whose contin- ued presence has been exploited by Hindu nationalism in recent decades.

Sikhism is not a blend or a reproduction of earlier religions but it is a new revelation altogether. . . . Sikhism rejects all fasts, rites, and rituals. It rejects the claims of Yoga, mortification of body, self-torture, penances and renun- ciation. Sikhism does not believe in the worship of gods and goddesses, stones, statues, idols, pictures, tombs or crematoriums. Only One God, the Formless, is to be Glorified.

Thus begins a Sikh missionary tract, explaining the core concepts of the Sikh faith. The statement makes it clear: Sikhism is not some variant of Hinduism.

No polytheism, no rigorous asceticism, no renunciation. A little more subtly, it is also not Islam, although it is profoundly monotheistic (“Only One God, the Formless . . .”); but no holy tombs. It is a “new revelation altogether.”

Like both Buddhism and Islam, it has a historic founder, Guru Nanak, who lived 1469–1539 in the Punjab area of northwest India. These were the years of Mughal arrival; Babur was conquering India during Guru Nanak’s life- time and died nine years before Guru Nanak died. We have seen the cultural environment of that period, with the widespread practices of Sufism and bhakti Hinduism. It was a period when many sants—charismatic figures with blends of religious ideas who had visions, wrote hymns, taught under spreading fig and banyan trees, established mosques, temples, and tombs, and sometimes led militant groups of disciples into political adventures—established followings.

Guru Nanak was a member of the Khatri caste, a Kshatriya group whose traditional occupations were military and administrative. At age 30 he disap- peared for three days after bathing in a river, emerging to declare: “There is no Hindu, there is no Muslim.” He had had some kind of vision or enlightenment that caused him to reject the dominant religious categories available to him and espouse the necessity of inner transformation by listening to the True Guru in the heart. After lengthy travels, he settled in the Punjab and gathered a follow- ing, writing verses, hymns, and long poetical works—now the basic part of Sikh scriptures—and establishing the Sikh Panth (path), on which tobacco and alcohol were prohibited.

Guru Nanak was followed by a sequence of 10 gurus, all members of his family and Khatri caste (much as the Shias believed Muslims should be led by persons of Muhammad’s own bloodline), who led the growing community of Sikh believers. The Fifth Guru, Arjun, founded the Golden Temple at Amrit- sar, known as the Harimandir, in 1604 and compiled the hymns and teachings of previous gurus, including his own, in the authoritative Adi Granth, Sikh- ism’s sacred book. The growing influence of the Sikhs came to be seen as a threat to the Mughals, and Guru Arjun was executed by Shah Jahan, becoming the first martyr.

But Sikhism kept growing. In the seventeenth century, there were large- scale conversions from a powerful landowning and agricultural caste, the Jats. Both Khatris and Jats were large and powerful Hindu castes, which may partly account for the continued political success of the Sikhs, and a worry to the Mughals, who were now at their height.

The Ninth Guru, Tegh Bahadur, was executed in Delhi. His son, Guru Gobind Singh, would be the Tenth and last Guru. He reorganized the commu- nity around himself, much like a court, and established an elite community among the Sikhs known as the Khalsa (pure). It was founded in 1699 when Sikhs of five different castes ceremonially drank from the same bowl and were given a new name, Singh, while their women took the name Kaur. The Khalsa also adopted a set of identifying markers for Sikhs, which have made male

Celebrating the birth of Guru Nanak, these five men are dressed as the panj pyare, or “five beloved,” the elite community founded in 1699 by Guru Gobind Singh. They wear the militant dress for which Sikhs became famous, leading the defense of Sikhs against the Mughals.

Sikhs instantly identifiable ever since: “Five K’s”—kesh (uncut hair), kangra (a wooden brush for the hair), kirpan (dagger), kacha (distinctive undergarments), and kara (steel bracelet). The even more distinctive Sikh turban was not one of the Five K’s but became a unique additional marker of identity. No one dressed like this could be mistaken for a Hindu. There is a this-worldly asceticism here, but no renunciation. These symbols were clearly militant, signaling a strongly masculine culture that would defend its community against the Mughal state. For Sikhs, it added a sense of military self-discipline to the spiritual one coming from Guru Nanak, and over the next centuries Sikhs became a powerful and dominant community in the northwest of India.

Guru Gobind Singh’s sons were killed in the course of fighting against the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, and the Tenth Guru himself was killed by a Mus- lim assassin. Realizing that their spiritual leaders were marked and vulnerable in the prevailing politics of North India, and that anyway it was not the Gurus themselves but the collective teachings coming down from Guru Nanak that was the core of the faith, ultimate Sikh authority was transferred to the sacred book, the Guru Granth Sahib, which contained the writings of Guru Nanak, Guru Arjun, Guru Tegh Bahadur, and Guru Gobind Singh. This sacred book is addressed as a Guru itself: Sri Guru Granth Sahib, always placed on a dais under a canopy in Sikh gurdwaras, where a living Guru might sit.

These organizational changes had important political consequences. The Sikhs were far from just a religious sect, followers of a founding sant. Because of their militancy, the mass conversion of a cohesive caste, the Jats, and the eco- nomic power of the Jat Sikhs, by the eighteenth century numerous small Sikh kingdoms dotted the Punjab region, competing with small Rajput and Muslim states. At the end of the eighteenth century, these kingdoms were united into a single Sikh Empire by Ranjit Singh, the “Lion of the Punjab” (as a historical reference point, Ranjit Singh was a contemporary of Napoleon). From a start- ing point in Lahore (now Pakistan), he led his Khalsa Sikh army in conquests from Kabul to Kashmir. The Sikh Empire controlled a region covering most of northern modern Pakistan and the Indian Himalayan states. He was a foe of the Mughals but made friends with the British, with whom they made an agreement to consider the Sutlej River a boundary between their competing interests. After Ranjit Singh’s death, the empire weakened and eventually was absorbed into British India. The Sikhs were admired by the British for their many virtues, especially their military discipline, and they became the core of the British Indian army.

In the 1970s and 1980s a Sikh nationalist movement began agitation for an independent state known as Khalistan, inspired by the old Sikh Empire, the creation of Pakistan, and the reorganization of the Indian states along linguistic lines. The movement received much enthusiastic support from the one million diaspora Sikhs who lived in the UK, the US, and other parts of Asia. Militant separatists in the state of Punjab clashed with the Indian government, which finally, in 1984, raided the Golden Temple, where militants were sheltering and

Maharaja Ranjit Singh, the Sher-i-Punjab, “Lion of the Punjab,” unified many small Sikh and Muslim states into a Sikh Empire that lasted from his coronation in 1801 to 1849, when it was absorbed into British India. Ranjit Singh also possessed a famous diamond, the Koh-i- Noor, which had a much longer and fascinating history of its own, and now belongs to Queen Elizabeth II.

storing their weapons. The raid, with loss of life on both sides, was seen as a desecration of the holiest Sikh temple. In vengeance, on October 31, 1984, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her Sikh guards. This prompted anti-Sikh riots in which 3,000 Sikhs lost their lives. These un- fortunate outcomes largely ended the Khalistan movement.

The Sikhs are perhaps India’s most visible and prosperous minority, thanks to their coherent faith, their distinctive symbols of identity, their cultural values of diligence, discipline, and loyalty, and their aptitude in busi- ness, administration, and agriculture. Though they are only 2 percent of the population of India, and Punjab is the fourth smallest state, it is one of the most prosperous with the highest lit- eracy rate and average life expectancy (Jetly 2008). Yet, this coherent iden- tity, at least from the outside looking in, masks significant inequality with- in. Despite Sikhism’s core beliefs in equality before God symbolized in shared meals, the old caste hierarchy continues to divide upper- and lower- ranking Sikhs. The Jat Sikhs are clearly the elite; they control all the Sikh organizations like gurdwaras, schools, and political parties (Ram

2007). Although thousands of Scheduled Caste groups converted to Sikhism in order to escape the disabilities of Hindu caste society, many feel that Jat Sikhs treat them as badly in the gurdwaras as they do in their farmlands, where they have been forced to live in separate settlements away from the main Sikh com- munity. They are not allowed to cremate their dead in the main cremation grounds and must establish separate gurdwaras, which are often in dispute between Sikhs of Scheduled Caste background, such as Balmikis (sweepers), and the Jat Sikhs. These caste-like groups among the Sikhs also do not inter- marry; in matrimonial ads in Indian newspapers, Jat Sikhs specify they will consider only other Jat Sikhs. This lingering casteism is not unique to Sikhism (it is also a social fact among Muslims and Christians in India), but it accounts

for the fact that some Scheduled Caste Sikhs are beginning to separate them- selves into local hamlets and communities with their own schools and gurd- waras that are beginning to look like separate caste identities.

1 Dates for the Buddha’s life vary. Sri Lanka chronicles place it at 563 B.C.E.; a mainland tradi- tion puts it at 450 B.C.E.; more recent research puts it at 485 B.C.E. (Gombrich 1984).

2 And a few centuries later, as we have seen, Ashoka opened these stupas, removed all but a frag-

ment from each, and built “84,000” more stupas (or at least quite a lot) throughout his empire.

3 Mughal is the Indianized term for the Mongols of Central Asia, and the name of the dynasty that conquered and ruled India from 1526 to 1857.

4 He lived and conquered India during the time of the High Renaissance in Italy, when young

men like Leonardo da Vinci were also keeping meticulous private journals.

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232 Part III: South Asia