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 sacred writing, the sacred text of Sikhism. Images and videos of the evacuees’ arrival in Delhi were being widely shared on social media, with one particularly going viral — that of Union minister Hardeep Singh Puri, who was seen carrying one in every of the saroops on his head.
What are saroops
The saroop, also called Bir in Punjabi, may be a physical copy of the Guru religious text. Every saroop has 1,430 pages, and every page is termed an ang.
Guru Arjan Dev, the fifth Sikh guru, compiled the primary Bir (physical copy) of the Guru sacred writing in 1604 and installed it within 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 Adi Granth to be the living guru and treat it with utmost respect. it absolutely was in 1708 that Guru Gobind Singh declared the Guru sacred text because 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.
Code of conduct for transportation
Since Guru sacred writing is considered the living guru for Sikhs, there's a strict code of conduct for its transportation, which is in line with the principles of the Sikh Rahit Maryada.
Under these rules, five baptised Sikhs should transfer the holy book from one place to a different. While transporting the saroop or Bir, the Guru sacred writing is carried on the top, 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 in the dark. this is often for the night when the Guru Granth Sahib is ceremoniously shut. However, within the morning it's again installed in an exceedingly ceremony called prakash.
In 1984, during Operation Bluestar, the saroop, which was within the sanctum sanctorum of the Golden Temple, was damaged by a bullet. Earlier this year it absolutely was restored and showcased for public viewing. According to reports, the bullet damaged the quilt 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, encompasses a long history with the country. In his book, Afghan Hindus and Sikhs: History of 1000 Years, historian Inderjeet Singh explained that the history of Sikhism in medieval Afghanistan began all the way back within the 15th century with the founding father of Sikhism, Guru Nanak.
It has been reported that religious leader visited Afghanistan within the early 16th century. in line with the history of his travels recorded within the janamsakhis, it absolutely was during 1519-21 when he together with his companions visited present-day Kandahar, Kabul, Sultanpur and Jalalabad. apart fromGuru 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 an exceedingly research paper wrote that Afghan Sikhs were “likely to be made of those members of the indigenous population who resisted the method of conversion from Buddhism to Islam which happenedduring this area between the ninth and thirteenth centuries, and who subsequently aligned themselves with the teachings of Nanak — himself a Khatri and therefore thefounding father of the Sikh tradition — during the course of the fifteenth century.”
Apart from religious leader and Har Rai, Baba Sri Chand, the son of Nanak and founding father of the Udasi Sect, also visited Afghanistan. Besides this, Gurdwara Baba Sri Chand was established by Baba Almast in Kabul when he visited town. During the second Anglo-Sikh war of 1848-49, Sikhs were supported by the Afghans. And it absolutely was after this, within 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.
