Author – Dr. Raj Kumar Hans Growing out of the powerful, anticaste sant tradition of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in northern India, the Sikh variant of Guru Nanak (1469–1539) and his successors evolved into an organized religious movement in Punjab in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It became a rallying cry for the untouchables and members of “lower castes” that they be allowed a respectable social existence. As a young, vibrant religion of the subcontinent, the Sikh religion has witnessed high and low points in its journey of five hundred years. So have the Dalits of Punjab, who joined it in great numbers in the seventeenth century and found dignity and equality within its egalitarian fold. But in the process of its growth and expansion in the last quarter of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth, its body politic came to be afflicted by casteism and untouchability from which the great gurus had tried to extricate its followers. Being a religion of the book from within the Indian tradition, Sikhism has received worldwide scholarly attention in the last hundred years. Whether due to the strong doctrinal position of egalitarian Sikhism or the hegemony of the … Continue reading Making Sense of Dalit Sikh History