Sat Sri Akāl Members, my name is Simran Sidhu. I am a Sikh filmmaker (writer-director) born and based in London, U.K.
I have spent my life asking questions about Sikhi that many people seem unable or unwilling to answer.
The problem started when my parents explained Sikhi to the six-year-old Simran like this:
"When Guru Nānak was born, people believed in superstitions, in lots of different gods, and people from different religions were fighting with each other. So Guru Nānak taught people to stop being superstitious, to believe in just one God, and to love everyone...because we are all children of the same God."
The problem was that the janam sakhian (life stories) of the Gurus, which my parents would give me to read as innocuous bedtime stories as a child, contained things that even my half-formed brain recognised as a form of "superstition".
The sakhi of Guru Nānak spinning Mecca on its axis, for example, formed the basis of one of many questions that would drive my parents and other senior family members crazy with my insistence on them providing an explanation that was in line with the "no superstition" version of Sikhi that parents had initially told me about.
"When you meditate on God, you get these kinds of powers," people would say.
I left open the possibility that this may well be the case, that maybe I just wasn't privvy to all the metaphysical workings of the universe that were accessible to "spiritually accomplished" men and women.
But it still didn't explain why Guru Nānak felt the need to unnecessarily display these abilities, especially when he refused to display "miracles" in front of the master yogis in the Sidh Goshat, and speaks at length in Gurbāni about the irrelevance of ridhian sidhian.
I started to question the validity of these sakhis (as a child, I didn't even know that this is what these supposedly "historical" events were called), wondering if – like Chinese Whispers – these events had changed in the process of their telling and re-telling over hundreds of years.
But I stuck a bookmark in these issues and went about my life...
...until I got into an animated discussion with a Hindu Panjabi gentleman on Facebook who claimed to be a student of the Udassi movement and said that Guru Nānak never rejected Pandit Hardyal's janeu and that all the Gurus lived within Hindu rassam ravāj and were, for all intents and purposes, Hindu.
He cited the "B40 janamsakhi" among others (remember, I'd never heard the term janamsakhi until this point) which then opened the door to my learning about Max Authur MacCauliffe's rejection of the janamsakhis as "deviations" of "spurious authorship".
Suddenly, everything I had been taught about the Gurus since childhood was thrown into question.
My doubts were beginning to be proved right.
And then...
...I came across Dr. Karminder Singh Dhillon.
Here was a man who expressed all the concerns I had for the inconsistencies of the Gurus' life stories. In addition to that, he also translated and explained passages of Gurbāni that I had also felt sounded suspect for many years.
And he had citations.
His historical dilineation of how the Sikh Panth was reinterpreted through the lens of Yogic, Puranic and Vedic paradigms to distort the original message of Gurbāni begins at least to explain the inconsistencies that had troubled me since childhood.
Since Gurbāni uses the language of its time(s) and place(s) – as all texts must – it appears Sikhs may have lost the forest for the trees, focussing on references to Vedic words, to Yogic concepts, and to Puranic deities, and jumping to the conclusion that these traditions are foundational to Guru Nānak's paradigm.
This doesn't mean I have completely ruled out the possibility of supernatural occurenes. It just means that, with Dr. Dhillon's work, I am able to at least form a line of enquiry about it.
Nor is this to denegrate other peoples' religious worldviews. The Gurus and Shaheeds sacrificed their lives and the lives of their families for other peoples' Freedom of Religion, after all.
But that also means that we Sikhs should have the freedom to ask questions about our own religion, and to decide what is "authentic Sikhi", as Dr. Karminder Dhillon phrases it, and what is a distortion.
These are my cards on the table. My heart on my sleeve. My soul bared.
So be gentle.
Sat Sri Akāl.
