Jainism and Sikhism: India's Paths of Non-Violence and the Saint-Soldier

Follows: The World's Religions, One Page Each, How the Sacred Texts Were Written and Kabir: The Weaver of the Heart. Companion pieces: the Religions long reads on Hinduism and on Buddhism, Pilgrimage: Why Humans Walk to Holy Places and If I Was Born in India.

Two numbers from the largest recent survey of religion in India say a great deal about two of its smaller faiths. Among India's Jains, 92 percent told the Pew Research Center that they are vegetarian, and 67 percent go further, refusing potatoes, onions, garlic and other root vegetables, because pulling a plant from the soil destroys it whole along with countless tiny lives around it. Among India's Sikhs, 40 percent said they go to a gurdwara, a Sikh house of worship, every day.

Jains are less than half of one percent of India's people; Sikhs are under two percent. Yet the Jain idea of ahimsa, non-violence, shaped Gandhi and through him many of the protest movements of the twentieth century, and the Sikh langar, the free kitchen where anyone of any caste or faith sits on the floor and eats the same meal, has become one of the most recognisable acts of hospitality in the world.

They are very different traditions. Jainism is one of the oldest living religions of India, with roots in the same era of wandering ascetics that produced the Buddha. Sikhism is one of the youngest of the world's major religions, born in the Punjab in the late fifteenth century. One centres on liberation of the soul through self-discipline, with no creator God; the other on loving remembrance of one God, lived out in ordinary working life. What they share is a homeland, a rejection of caste hierarchy in principle, a deep ethic of service, and the experience of being minorities whose identity has been contested, protected and sometimes paid for in blood.

A note on approach: this piece describes Jain and Sikh traditions as their followers understand them and sets beside that what historians have found, keeping the two clearly distinct and treating both with respect. Where branches disagree (Digambara and Shvetambara, Khalsa and non-initiated Sikhs, the Ravidassias), each is described as its own members would recognise it. Painful modern history, above all the events of 1984, is told through dated official inquiries and independent human rights reports, with disputed figures given as ranges. Scripture quotations come from public-domain translations: Hermann Jacobi's Jaina Sutras (1884) and Max Arthur Macauliffe's The Sikh Religion (1909).

In this long read

1. Two faiths of the Indian world
2. The Jinas: Mahavira and the twenty-four Tirthankaras
3. The vows: ahimsa, aparigraha and many-sided truth
4. Digambara and Shvetambara: how the community divided
5. Monks, nuns and lay life
6. Sallekhana: a vow of peaceful death, and India's courts
7. Jains in history and today
8. Guru Nanak and a new path (1469–1539)
9. The ten Gurus (1539–1708)
10. The Guru Granth Sahib: a scripture of many voices
11. The Khalsa and the five Ks (1699)
12. Gurdwara, langar and the Sikh day
13. From the Mughals to Ranjit Singh to the British (1708–1947)
14. Partition (1947)
15. 1984: Operation Blue Star, an assassination and the killings that followed
16. The diaspora and the questions Sikhs argue about today

Part 1 — Two faiths of the Indian world

Both Jainism and Sikhism grew up alongside the traditions now called Hinduism, and both share with them a common vocabulary: karma, rebirth, liberation, the guru, the sacred name. That closeness has been both a bridge and a source of friction. India's Constitution, in its article on religious freedom, says that references to Hindus "shall be construed as including a reference to persons professing the Sikh, Jaina or Buddhist religion", and the Hindu Marriage Act of 1955 covers Jains and Sikhs too. Many Jains and Sikhs regard that grouping as a failure to recognise them as distinct religions, a point their leaders have pressed for decades.

How close do they feel? Pew's survey found that two-thirds of Jains and about half of Sikhs say they have a lot in common with Hindus.

The world figures are estimates. Pew's global studies count both faiths within a combined "other religions" category, so the best numbers come from national censuses. India's last completed census was in 2011; the next is under way and will report after 2027.

JAINISM

Part 2 — The Jinas: Mahavira and the twenty-four Tirthankaras

The tradition's account

In Jain teaching the universe has no beginning and no creator. Time turns like a wheel, through a half-cycle of ascent and a half-cycle of decline (utsarpini and avasarpini). In each half-cycle, twenty-four great teachers appear. They are called Tirthankaras, "ford-makers", because they find and show the crossing over the river of rebirth, and Jinas, "conquerors", because they have conquered their own passions. The religion takes its name from them: Jains are followers of the Jinas.

In our present age of decline, the first Tirthankara was Rishabha, credited in tradition with founding civilised society itself, teaching farming, writing and the arts. The twenty-third was Parshva; the twenty-fourth and last was Mahavira. On the Jain view Mahavira did not found Jainism. He restored, in his own time, an eternal teaching.

Mahavira's story is told in the scriptures, above all the Kalpa Sutra, which is recited aloud each year during the festival of Paryushan. He was born Vardhamana, "ever-increasing", into a royal Kshatriya family at Kundagrama, near Vaishali in what is now Bihar. Tradition dates his birth to 599 BCE. At about thirty he renounced his position, gave away his possessions, and spent some twelve and a half years in fasting, silence and meditation, enduring heat, cold, insects and the hostility of villagers. He then attained kevala jnana, omniscience, the complete knowledge of a soul freed from all obscuring karma. He taught for about thirty years and gathered a community of monks, nuns and lay followers, and attained final liberation at Pavapuri.

The two great branches of Jainism tell his life with some differences. Shvetambara tradition says he married a princess, Yashoda, and had a daughter; Digambara tradition says he never married. Shvetambaras tell a striking story of his conception, in which the embryo was transferred by the gods from the womb of a Brahmin woman, Devananda, to that of the Kshatriya queen Trishala. The two branches also date his liberation differently: 527 BCE for Shvetambaras, the start of their Vira Samvat era, and 510 BCE for Digambaras.

What historians say

Historians do not doubt that Mahavira existed. He appears, as a rival teacher called Nigantha Nataputta, in early Buddhist texts, which makes him an older or near contemporary of the Buddha. Many scholars place him later than the traditional dates, often by up to about a century, in the fifth century BCE, though the Buddha's own dates are uncertain too.

Parshva is a harder case. Jain tradition places him in the ninth century BCE, about 250 years before Mahavira; many historians accept that a teacher of that name probably existed, somewhat later, in the eighth or seventh century BCE. Early texts mention followers of Parshva who met Mahavira's disciples, and Mahavira is credited with adding a fifth vow to the four that Parshva had taught. The earlier Tirthankaras, whose lives in tradition last hundreds of thousands of years, belong to sacred cosmology rather than history.

Jains do not say Mahavira invented their religion. They say he was the most recent person to walk all the way across, and to leave the ford open behind him.

Gods without a creator

Jains are sometimes described as atheists, which is accurate only in a narrow sense. There is no creator God, and the Jinas, being liberated, do not intervene in the world or answer prayers in the ordinary sense. But Jains worship the Jinas in temples, with offerings and hymns, as models of what every soul can become. Jain temples also house guardian deities, such as the goddesses Padmavati and Ambika, who can grant worldly help. The worshipper honours the Jina in order to become like the Jina.

Part 3 — The vows: ahimsa, aparigraha and many-sided truth

The soul and karma

Jain teaching divides reality into jiva, souls or living beings, and everything that is not soul: matter, space, time, and the media of motion and rest. Souls are numberless. They exist not only in humans, animals and plants, but in the elements themselves: in particles of earth, drops of water, flames and gusts of wind. The oldest Jain scripture, the Acharanga Sutra, opens by working through each class of life in turn, from earth-bodies to animals, and draws the same conclusion every time:

"Knowing them, a wise man should not act sinfully towards animals, nor cause others to act so, nor allow others to act so." — Acharanga Sutra 1.1.6 (Jacobi)

The formula is precise: do no harm, cause none, and permit none. What makes harm so serious is the Jain understanding of karma. In Jainism karma is not only a moral law. It is described as a kind of subtle matter that sticks to the soul when it acts with passion, weighing it down and keeping it in the cycle of rebirth. Liberation means stopping the inflow of new karma and burning off the old through austerity, until the soul, freed, rises to the top of the universe and dwells there in perfect knowledge and bliss.

The three jewels

The Tattvartha Sutra, composed by Umasvati sometime between the second and fifth centuries CE and the only text accepted by every Jain sect, begins with the formula of the whole path: right faith, right knowledge and right conduct together are the path to liberation. These are the "three jewels" (ratnatraya).

The five great vows

Right conduct is summed up in five vows, taken in full by monks and nuns and in lesser, adapted forms by lay people.

Aparigraha, non-possession, is the vow the modern world finds most surprising. It is not simply about owning little. It is about not being owned by what one has, since attachment itself binds the soul. Many Jain lay people voluntarily set lifetime limits on their wealth or possessions and give the rest away.

Many-sided truth

The most philosophically distinctive Jain teaching is anekantavada, "the doctrine of non-one-sidedness". Reality is complex and has many aspects, so any single statement about it captures only part. Jain thinkers illustrated this with the story of blind men who each touch one part of an elephant, the trunk, a leg, an ear, and each confidently describe a different animal.

From this came two refinements. Nayavada, the doctrine of standpoints, holds that every judgement is true only from a particular point of view. Syadvada adds the little word syat, "from a certain perspective" or "in some respect", to every claim. A pot, a Jain logician would say, exists in some respect (as this pot, here and now), does not exist in another (as a cloth, or elsewhere), and so on through seven possible combinations.

Anekantavada is ahimsa applied to thought: a refusal to do violence to the truth by pretending your part of it is the whole.

Jain writers have long presented anekantavada as a basis for tolerance between viewpoints and religions. Critics, including classical Hindu and Buddhist philosophers, argued that it collapses into contradiction or relativism. Jain logicians replied that it is not relativism, since it affirms that reality is definite but many-sided, and that each standpoint, properly qualified, is true.

The Tattvartha Sutra contains a short phrase that many Jains today treat as a motto: parasparopagraho jivanam, "souls render service to one another" (5.21). It appears on the Jain emblem adopted in 1975.

Part 4 — Digambara and Shvetambara: how the community divided

The two branches

Jainism's great division is between the Digambaras, "sky-clad", whose most advanced monks renounce even clothing, and the Shvetambaras, "white-clad", whose monks and nuns wear simple white robes. Jainpedia, the academic reference project on Jainism, describes the split as likely to have begun early in the Common Era and as more than 1,500 years old.

Each side tells its own story of the division. A well-known Digambara account links it to a twelve-year famine in the north in the time of the Mauryan emperor Chandragupta, when the monk Bhadrabahu led part of the community south to Karnataka, where they kept the strict rule of nudity; those who stayed behind, on this account, relaxed the discipline and adopted clothing. Historians treat the story as tradition rather than established history. The real differences grew gradually, around a few central disagreements.

The scriptures

The Shvetambara canon, the Agamas, is written mainly in Ardhamagadhi, an ancient Prakrit language. By Shvetambara tradition it was recited and preserved orally for centuries and finally written down at a council at Valabhi in Gujarat, under the monk Devarddhigani, about 980 or 993 years after Mahavira's death, which corresponds to roughly 453 or 466 CE. Both branches agree that some of the oldest texts, the Purvas and the twelfth Anga, were lost early. Digambaras go further and regard the whole original canon as lost; they revere later texts such as the works of the great teacher Kundakunda and the Shatkhandagama instead.

Branches within the branches

Each side later divided again, often over image worship.

• Murtipujaka ("image-worshipping") Shvetambaras are the largest group. They worship in temples and divide into monastic lineages called gacchas.
• Sthanakvasis grew from the reforms of a 15th-century layman, Lonka Shah, who rejected image worship; they meet in simple halls rather than temples, and their monks and nuns wear a cloth over the mouth.
• Terapanthis follow a reform led by Acharya Bhikshu, a former Sthanakvasi monk who led the new order from 1760 until 1803. Uniquely, the whole order is led by a single acharya, chosen by his predecessor. One of them, Acharya Tulsi, founded the Anuvrat movement in 1949 to promote "small vows" of non-violence and honesty among people of any faith.

Digambara communities are found across much of India, including Karnataka, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan; Shvetambaras are concentrated mainly in Gujarat, Rajasthan and coastal Maharashtra. The divisions are real, sometimes bitter, as in disputes over the control of shared pilgrimage sites, but both sides recognise one another as Jains, share the Tattvartha Sutra and celebrate many of the same festivals.

Part 5 — Monks, nuns and lay life

The mendicants

Jainism is organised around a fourfold community: monks, nuns, laymen and laywomen. The ascetics are its living ideal.

A Jain monk or nun takes the five great vows in full. They own almost nothing: robes (for Shvetambaras), a begging bowl, a water pot, scriptures, and a small broom or whisk to brush insects gently from their path and seat. Digambara monks carry a broom of peacock feathers and a water pot as almost their only equipment. They walk everywhere barefoot, moving from place to place, and settle only during the rainy season, when the ground teems with life. They eat only what lay families offer, following detailed rules about what may be accepted: Shvetambara image-worshipping monks and nuns go for alms twice a day, while a Digambara monk takes food from his cupped hands. They use only water that has been boiled, to limit harm to living beings. At initiation, and periodically after, they pull out their hair by hand rather than cut it, a ritual called keshalocha that is a test of endurance.

Among Shvetambaras, nuns outnumber monks; in the largest modern lineage, the Tapa Gaccha, by about three and a half to one. Among Digambaras, women can become nuns but, on the Digambara view, cannot attain liberation in that life.

Lay life

Most Jains are householders, and their religion is woven into ordinary days. The lay path adapts the great vows into smaller ones (anuvratas) and adds further vows of discipline and generosity.

Food is where Jain practice is most visible. Pew found that 92 percent of Indian Jains are vegetarian, most of them avoiding eggs as well, and 67 percent also avoid root vegetables. Many observant Jains do not eat after sunset, when insects are drawn to lamps and food, filter their water, and avoid honey and alcohol.

Worship may take place daily: 81 percent of Indian Jains told Pew they perform puja every day, and 73 percent pray daily. In a temple, worshippers bathe the image of a Jina, offer rice, flowers, sandalwood paste and lamps, and meditate on the Jina's qualities. Sthanakvasis and Terapanthis, who reject images, focus on meditation and the teaching of their mendicants.

Giving is central. Lay people support the mendicants with food and shelter, and Jain communities have long funded temples, libraries of manuscripts, schools, hospitals, and shelters for sick and aged animals.

The Jain year

On Samvatsari, Jains ask forgiveness of everyone they may have harmed in the past year with the Prakrit phrase micchami dukkadam, roughly "may the wrong I have done be in vain". The phrase is spoken to family, friends, colleagues and strangers, and in recent years is often sent by text message.

Holy places

Jain pilgrimage places include Pavapuri, where Mahavira was liberated; the temple-covered hill of Shatrunjaya in Gujarat; and Shravanabelagola in Karnataka, where a monolithic statue of Bahubali, a son of the first Tirthankara who stood in meditation so long that he attained liberation, rises about 17 to 18 metres from a hilltop. It was commissioned by the general Chamundaraya and consecrated around 981–983 CE. Every twelve years it is anointed from scaffolding with milk, saffron and other substances in the Mahamastakabhisheka, the "great head-anointing".

In Jain practice the smallest acts, what you eat, when you eat it, how you walk, become the place where the largest questions are answered.

Part 6 — Sallekhana: a vow of peaceful death, and India's courts

A note on this topic: this part discusses a religious practice of fasting at the end of life and the legal debate about whether it is suicide. It describes the practice and the arguments; it does not recommend it. If you are struggling with thoughts of ending your life, please reach out to a local crisis line or emergency service now.

What it is

The most controversial Jain practice is sallekhana, also called santhara: a vow to end one's life by gradually giving up food and then water, in calm meditation, when death is near or normal religious life has become impossible.

Jain texts set strict conditions. It is meant for those facing the approach of death through old age, incurable illness, extreme calamity or famine, not for people escaping suffering or despair. It should be undertaken with the permission and guidance of a monk or nun. The fast proceeds in stages. A classical lay manual, the Ratnakaranda Shravakachara, describes the gradual reduction: "Giving up solid food by degrees, one should take to milk and whey, then giving them up, to hot or spiced water" (verses 127–128, trans. Champat Rai Jain, 1917), before finally giving up water too.

Why Jains say it is not suicide

Jains insist that sallekhana is the opposite of suicide. Suicide, on their account, is an act driven by passion: despair, anger, shame or attachment. Sallekhana is meant to be free of passion, a final act of non-violence and non-attachment, in which a person who knows death is coming meets it consciously rather than in fear, without harming anyone else and while shedding karma. The jurist T. K. Tukol made this case in his book Sallekhana Is Not Suicide (1976), which was widely cited in court. The practice has deep roots: Jain tradition holds that the emperor Chandragupta Maurya and the monk Bhadrabahu died by fasting at Shravanabelagola, a story Jainpedia describes as historically dubious.

How many people take the vow is uncertain. One estimate cited in a 2016 article in the Indian Journal of Psychiatry puts it at around 200 to 600 Jains a year in India.

The court case

In 2006 a lawyer, Nikhil Soni, petitioned the Rajasthan High Court arguing that santhara was a form of suicide, and that helping someone undertake it was abetment, both crimes under the Indian Penal Code. Critics of the practice, including some doctors and rights advocates, raised concerns that elderly people, especially women, might be pressured into it, and that a "religious" death could hide neglect.

On 10 August 2015 the High Court agreed with the petitioner. It held that the Constitution's protection of the right to life does not include a right to end one's life, that the practice had not been shown to be an essential part of Jainism protected as religious freedom, and that it should be treated as suicide, with police cases filed against those who assisted.

Jain communities across India responded with silent marches and protests. Their organisations appealed, and on 31 August 2015 the Supreme Court of India stayed the High Court's ruling, allowing the practice to continue while the appeal was heard. In 2017 Parliament passed the Mental Healthcare Act, which largely removed the punishment for attempted suicide, changing the legal background.

The case raised questions that reach well beyond Jainism: how a secular state should judge which practices are "essential" to a religion, and how to distinguish a freely chosen death at the end of life from a death that society should prevent. Some ethicists compare sallekhana with modern debates about voluntarily stopping eating and drinking in terminal illness. Jains themselves point out that the vow has been practised for over two thousand years, under strict conditions, and that most people who take it are already dying.

Part 7 — Jains in history and today

Kings, merchants and scholars

Jain tradition remembers royal patrons from the Mauryan emperor Chandragupta onwards, and Jain monks were influential at the courts of many medieval kingdoms in the west and south. Jain authors wrote in Prakrit, Sanskrit, Kannada, Tamil, Gujarati and other languages, on philosophy, grammar, mathematics, astronomy and poetry, and composed their own versions of the Ramayana and Mahabharata. Jain temples, from the marble halls of western India to rock-cut caves, are among the masterpieces of Indian architecture, and Jain manuscript libraries preserved countless texts, Jain and non-Jain alike.

The Mughal emperor Akbar met the Shvetambara monk Hiravijaya at Fatehpur Sikri in 1582. The monk won imperial decrees banning the slaughter of animals during Paryushan and releasing prisoners. Akbar's successor Jahangir swung between favour and hostility, at one point banning Shvetambara mendicants from his court.

Because ahimsa ruled out farming (which destroys life in the soil) and warfare, many Jains turned historically to trade, moneylending and banking. Jain merchant families became prominent across western India. In the 17th century the Ahmedabad jeweller Shantidas Jhaveri sold jewels to the Mughal elite and obtained imperial decrees that helped his business. Jain business communities remain prominent today, and their ethic, honesty in dealing, frugality and generous giving, is a point of community pride. The same prominence has made Jains, at times, the target of resentment or of stereotypes about wealth, which many Jains reject as a caricature of a community that includes ordinary families of every income.

Gandhi and the Jain connection

Jainism's greatest modern influence came through someone who was not a Jain. As a young lawyer, Mohandas Gandhi befriended the Jain poet and teacher Rajchandra (1867–1901) in Bombay, and later wrote of him: "In my moments of spiritual crisis, he was my refuge." Gandhi's lifelong commitment to ahimsa, his fasts, his vows of simplicity and his habit of seeing truth as many-sided all show the mark of the Jain world of his Gujarati youth. Through Gandhi, and through those he inspired, from Martin Luther King Jr to anti-apartheid activists, Jain ideas reached people who have never heard of Mahavira.

Jains today

In January 2014 India's central government granted Jains the status of a national minority community, the sixth group to receive it, a long-standing demand that protects the community's educational and religious institutions. Jain communities abroad, in Britain, North America, East Africa and elsewhere, have built temples, many of which, in the United States for example, house Shvetambara and Digambara images under one roof, setting aside divisions that still matter in India.

Questions Jains debate

• Strict practice in a modern economy. How can a family keep the dietary rules while travelling, working in offices, or eating with others? Some Jains, in India and especially abroad, have extended ahimsa to veganism, arguing that modern commercial dairy production harms animals; others point out that the classical texts never forbade milk.
• Women and liberation. The Digambara teaching that women must be reborn as men to be liberated is defended by some as part of the tradition and questioned by others.
• Numbers. Very low fertility and marriage outside the community worry some leaders about the future size of a small faith.
• Recognition. Many Jains want to be seen as a distinct religion in law and in public life, not as a branch of Hinduism.
• Sallekhana. The Supreme Court appeal, and the ethics of end-of-life choices, remain open.

Jainism's oldest promise is also its most demanding: that a person can live in the world while doing it as little harm as possible.

SIKHISM

Part 8 — Guru Nanak and a new path (1469–1539)

The tradition's account

Nanak was born in 1469 in the village of Talwandi, now Nankana Sahib in Pakistan, into a Hindu family of the Khatri trading caste. The janamsakhis, the traditional life stories of Nanak written down in the generations after him, describe a child who questioned rituals, who refused as a boy to put on the sacred thread of the high castes, and who preferred the company of holy men to the business his father planned for him.

As a young man he worked as a storekeeper for the Muslim governor Daulat Khan at Sultanpur. A much-loved story says that when weighing out provisions he would reach the number thirteen, tera in Punjabi, which also means "yours", and keep repeating it, "yours, yours", lost in devotion to God. Another says that he went to bathe in the river one morning and disappeared for three days. The townspeople thought he had drowned. When he returned, he gave away all he had and, after a day of silence, spoke the words that the Sikh tradition remembers as the start of his mission:

"There is no Hindu and no Musalman." — Guru Nanak, as remembered in the janamsakhis (Macauliffe, The Sikh Religion, vol. 1)

Sikhs have understood the saying in several ways: that both Hindus and Muslims had forgotten the true meaning of their faiths; that before God there are only human beings, not religious labels; or that Nanak was beginning something that was neither.

The janamsakhis then describe long journeys, the udasis, to holy places of Hindus and Muslims across South Asia and, in some accounts, as far as Mecca and Baghdad, accompanied by the Muslim minstrel Mardana, who played the rebec while Nanak sang his hymns. Historians treat these accounts as devotional literature, written down long after Nanak's death, with a core of historical memory and many legendary details.

Kartarpur

In his last years Nanak settled at Kartarpur, on the river Ravi, and lived as a farmer and teacher among a community of disciples. Macauliffe's account, drawn from Sikh tradition, describes the rhythm of the day there: the morning hymns, Japji and Asa di Var, sung before dawn; teaching through the day; the evening hymn Sodar; all the community eating together; and the night prayer Sohila before sleep. That daily pattern, worship, work and a shared meal, is recognisably the Sikh life of today. Nanak died at Kartarpur in 1539.

Kartarpur is now in Pakistan, a few kilometres from the Indian border. In November 2019 the two countries opened the Kartarpur Corridor, allowing Indian pilgrims to visit without a visa; India suspended it in May 2025 during a military crisis with Pakistan, and its reopening has been a recurring Sikh demand.

What Nanak taught

The heart of Nanak's message is in the opening lines of his great hymn, the Japji, recited by devout Sikhs every morning. They begin with the numeral one, Ik Onkar, "One Creator":

"There is but one God whose name is true, the Creator, devoid of fear and enmity, immortal, unborn, self-existent; by the favour of the Guru." — Japji, the Mul Mantar (Macauliffe, 1909)

God is one, formless and beyond description, and yet present in all creation and within every person. The human problem is haumai, self-centredness or ego, which separates us from God and keeps us in the cycle of rebirth. The remedy is not renunciation, ritual or pilgrimage, which Nanak criticised when they became empty forms, but living as a gurmukh, a person turned toward the Guru and God, rather than a manmukh, turned toward the self. Sikh teaching summarises the practical path in three phrases:

Nanak rejected caste distinctions in worship, honoured women, and taught that the spiritual life is lived as a householder, not by leaving the world. These convictions, taught by one man in a farming village, were turned into the institutions of a community by the nine Gurus who followed him.

Part 9 — The ten Gurus (1539–1708)

Before he died, Nanak passed his authority not to his sons but to a devoted disciple, Lehna, whom he renamed Angad. Sikhs believe the same divine light passed from each Guru to the next, as one flame lights another.

Martyrdom and the turn to arms

The fifth Guru, Arjan, completed the great temple at Amritsar, the Harmandir Sahib, which the world knows as the Golden Temple. According to the SGPC, the body that manages it today, its foundation stone was laid by a Muslim holy man from Lahore, Mian Mir, and it was built with a door on each of its four sides, a sign that it was open to people of every caste and creed. In 1604 Arjan installed in it the scripture he had compiled.

In 1606 Arjan was arrested on the orders of the Mughal emperor Jahangir and died in custody at Lahore on 30 May 1606. Sikhs remember him as the first Sikh martyr. Historians debate the emperor's motives, which seem to have combined suspicion of the Guru's growing influence with his support, or perceived support, for a rebel prince.

Arjan's son Hargobind responded by wearing two swords, one for piri, spiritual authority, and one for miri, temporal authority. Opposite the Harmandir he raised the Akal Takht, "the throne of the Timeless", in 1606, as the seat of the community's temporal authority. The Sikhs began to bear arms.

In 1675 the ninth Guru, Tegh Bahadur, was executed in Delhi on 11 November by order of the emperor Aurangzeb. Sikh tradition holds that he went to his death defending the right of Kashmiri Brahmins, who were not Sikhs, to practise their own religion against forced conversion; for this he is called Hind di Chadar, "the shield of India". Mughal and Persian sources tell a different story, of a rebel or bandit, and some historians, such as Satish Chandra, note that no contemporary source mentions a persecution of Hindus in Kashmir. The memory of a Guru dying for another community's freedom of religion is central to Sikh identity today.

Two Gurus executed by the Mughal state turned a devotional community into one that was ready, if it had to, to fight.

Part 10 — The Guru Granth Sahib: a scripture of many voices

How it was made

The Sikh scripture is unusual among the world's holy books: it was compiled by the founders of the faith themselves, and it includes the words of saints from other traditions.

Guru Arjan gathered the hymns of the first four Gurus, which had been preserved in collections within the community, added his own, and had the volume written out by the scholar Bhai Gurdas. In 1604 he installed it in the Harmandir Sahib, with Baba Buddha as its first reader. This first version is known as the Adi Granth, "the first book". According to the SGPC, in 1706 Guru Gobind Singh, staying at Damdama Sahib, dictated a final version to Bhai Mani Singh, which includes the hymns of his father, Guru Tegh Bahadur. Before he died in 1708 he declared that after him there would be no more human Gurus: the scripture, now called the Guru Granth Sahib, would be the Guru for ever.

What is in it

The standard printed edition has 1,430 pages. It is arranged not by author but by musical mode: its hymns are set in 31 ragas, because they were composed to be sung. According to the SGPC's count it holds 5,894 hymns.

The fifteen bhagats are Hindu and Muslim saints from across India and several centuries: Jaidev, Namdev, Trilochan, Parmanand, Sadhna, Ramanand, Beni, Dhanna, Pipa, Sain, Kabir, Ravidas, Farid, Surdas and Bhikhan. They include a Muslim Sufi, Sheikh Farid; a weaver, Kabir; a leather-worker, Ravidas, from a caste then treated as untouchable; a barber, Sain; and a Brahmin, Ramanand. Their presence is a deliberate statement: holiness does not depend on caste or creed. Kabir, whose life the library tells in Kabir: The Weaver of the Heart, speaks in it in his own voice:

"Kabir is a child of Ram and Allah, and accepteth all gurus and pirs." — Kabir, in the Guru Granth Sahib (Macauliffe, vol. 6)

The language is mostly a mixture of old Punjabi and other north Indian languages, with some Persian and Sanskrit, written in the Gurmukhi script.

The living Guru

Sikhs do not treat the Guru Granth Sahib simply as a book. In Pew's survey, 94 percent of Indian Sikhs said it is the word of God. In every gurdwara it is installed on a raised throne under a canopy, a person waves a whisk (chaur) over it as an attendant would over a king, and everyone who enters bows before it. Each night it is ceremonially closed and carried to a resting room; each morning it is brought out again. A decision taken in its presence by an assembly of Sikhs carries the authority of the Guru.

It is opened at random each day for a hukamnama, "order", the hymn on the left-hand page read as the day's guidance. Complete readings, unbroken over about 48 hours (akhand path), mark births, weddings, deaths and anniversaries.

A second collection, the Dasam Granth, contains writings attributed to Guru Gobind Singh, some of which are used in daily prayers. The authorship of parts of it has long been debated, and some Sikhs question its authenticity.

Part 11 — The Khalsa and the five Ks (1699)

Vaisakhi, 1699

The most famous event in Sikh history took place, by tradition, at the spring festival of Vaisakhi in 1699 at Anandpur. Guru Gobind Singh, before a great gathering, drew his sword and asked for a Sikh willing to give his head. One man came forward and went with him into a tent; the Guru emerged alone with a bloodied sword and asked for another. Five in all came forward. Then the Guru brought out all five, alive (in some tellings, the blood was that of goats). These were the Panj Pyare, "the five beloved ones". They came, tradition stresses, from different castes and regions.

The Guru initiated them with amrit, water and sugar stirred in an iron bowl with a double-edged sword while hymns were recited. Then he asked them to initiate him in turn: the Guru became a disciple of his own disciples. The initiated formed the Khalsa, "the pure", a community of saint-soldiers. Men took the name Singh, "lion", and women came to take Kaur, often translated "princess" (the name became the standard identifier for Sikh women in the twentieth century). By taking a common name, they also gave up the caste names that marked their place in the social hierarchy.

What historians say

Historians accept that Guru Gobind Singh founded the Khalsa at the end of the 17th century, and that it transformed the Sikh community. Details of the event come from later sources. Some early 18th-century accounts place the founding a few years before 1699; the familiar date became fixed largely through 19th-century histories. Sikh tradition and scholarship agree on the substance: a deliberate creation of a disciplined, egalitarian and armed community, bound by a common initiation and a common appearance.

The five Ks

Initiated Sikhs keep five articles of faith, each beginning in Punjabi with the letter K:

Initiated Sikhs also undertake to avoid four prohibited acts: cutting hair, eating meat slaughtered in the ritual Muslim way (kutha), sexual relations outside marriage, and using tobacco, alcohol or intoxicants.

Not all Sikhs are initiated. Those who take amrit are called Amritdhari; many others keep their hair uncut (Keshdhari) without being initiated; some cut their hair while still identifying fully as Sikh (often called Sahajdhari or simply non-practising). In Pew's survey, 76 percent of Indian Sikhs said they keep their hair long. How far the Khalsa discipline defines a "real" Sikh is one of the community's most sensitive questions, with legal consequences for who may vote in elections for gurdwara management.

India's Constitution protects the kirpan explicitly: "The wearing and carrying of kirpans shall be deemed to be included in the profession of the Sikh religion." In other countries, the turban and kirpan have prompted long arguments over school uniforms, motorcycle helmets, airport security and military dress codes, most of them resolved over time with accommodations.

The turban makes a Sikh visible in any crowd. That was the point: a Sikh, the Gurus taught, should be someone others can find when they need help.

Part 12 — Gurdwara, langar and the Sikh day

The gurdwara

A gurdwara, "door of the Guru", is any place where the Guru Granth Sahib is installed. It is open to all. Visitors cover their heads and remove their shoes; inside, everyone sits on the floor at the same level, with the scripture on its raised throne before them. Services consist mainly of kirtan, the singing of hymns from the scripture with harmonium and tabla, a reading or explanation, and the Ardas, a standing prayer that recalls the Gurus and the community's martyrs and asks God's blessing on all humanity. At the end, everyone receives karah prashad, a sweet offering of flour, sugar and ghee.

Langar

Every gurdwara has a langar, a free community kitchen. Tradition credits the first Gurus with founding it and Guru Amar Das with making it a rule that everyone, including the rich and powerful, should eat in the langar before meeting the Guru. Its meaning lies in its form: all sit together on the floor in rows (pangat), whatever their caste, religion, wealth or gender, and eat the same simple vegetarian meal, cooked and served by volunteers. In a society where caste rules governed who could eat with whom, this was a radical act, and it remains one. The kitchen at the Harmandir Sahib in Amritsar serves very large numbers of people every day, and gurdwaras worldwide feed the homeless, travellers, and victims of disasters.

Volunteering in the langar, cleaning the gurdwara or the shoes of worshippers, is seva, selfless service, regarded as a form of worship in itself.

The Sikh day and year

Devout Sikhs rise before dawn, bathe, and recite morning prayers, the Nitnem ("daily rule"), beginning with the Japji, with further prayers at sunset (Rehras) and before sleep (Sohila), echoing the routine of Nanak's Kartarpur. In Pew's survey, 37 percent of Indian Sikhs read or listen to the Guru Granth Sahib daily.

Sikh marriages are performed in the Anand Karaj ceremony, in which the couple walk four times around the Guru Granth Sahib while four verses by Guru Ram Das, the laavan, are sung; the form became standard after the Anand Marriage Act of 1909, replacing the older circling of a sacred fire. At death the body is cremated with hymns and prayers. Mourning is meant to be restrained, since death is the soul's return to God.

Part 13 — From the Mughals to Ranjit Singh to the British (1708–1947)

Persecution and resistance

After Guru Gobind Singh's death in 1708, a disciple he had commissioned, Banda Singh Bahadur, led a Sikh uprising in the Punjab. In May 1710 his forces defeated the Mughal governor of Sirhind at Chappar Chiri and took the city; Banda is remembered for giving land to the peasants who tilled it. After an eight-month siege he was captured at Gurdas Nangal in December 1715 and executed in Delhi in June 1716, with many of his followers.

For much of the 18th century Sikhs were hunted by Mughal governors and by the Afghan invader Ahmad Shah Abdali (Durrani), who attacked Amritsar repeatedly; by the SGPC's account he demolished the Harmandir Sahib in 1757 and blew it up with gunpowder in 1762. Sikhs organised in bands called misls, rebuilt the shrine each time, and gradually won control of the Punjab.

The Sikh empire

Ranjit Singh (c. 1780–1839), leader of one misl, took Lahore in 1799 and was proclaimed Maharaja on 12 April 1801. He united the misls into a single kingdom, the Sikh empire, and extended it to Multan (1818), Kashmir (1819) and Peshawar (1834). His army, modernised with the help of European officers, was one of the most formidable in Asia. His court was strikingly diverse: his foreign minister, Fakir Azizuddin, was a Muslim, and his prime minister, Dhian Singh, a Hindu. He restored and gilded the Harmandir Sahib, the work that gave it its golden appearance.

After his death in 1839, the kingdom fell into succession struggles. Two wars with the British East India Company, in 1845–46 and 1848–49, ended with Britain's annexation of the Punjab in 1849.

Under the British

The British, impressed by Sikh soldiers, recruited them heavily into the Indian army, where Sikhs served in numbers far beyond their share of the population, in both world wars and across the empire. The colonial period also brought a religious revival, the Singh Sabha movement, founded in Amritsar in 1873 in response to Christian missionary conversions and later Arya Samaj campaigns, which sought to restore what it saw as pure Sikh practice through schools, Punjabi newspapers in the Gurmukhi script and the promotion of the Khalsa ideal.

On 13 April 1919, at the Vaisakhi festival, British troops under Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer opened fire on an unarmed crowd in the Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar, near the Golden Temple. The official Hunter Committee counted 379 dead; Indian National Congress estimates were around 1,000. The massacre turned many Indians, Sikhs among them, against British rule.

In the 1920s the Gurdwara Reform Movement (the Akali movement) campaigned, through non-violent protest, often met with beatings and arrests, to take control of gurdwaras from hereditary custodians (mahants) who had treated them as private property. In November 1920 a Sikh assembly at the Akal Takht formed the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC). The Sikh Gurdwaras Act of 1925 placed the main shrines under an elected Sikh body, a form of democratic religious self-government that still exists.

Within a century the Sikhs went from a hunted community to the rulers of an empire, then to soldiers of the empire that conquered them.

Part 14 — Partition (1947)

When British India was divided in August 1947, the line between India and Pakistan ran through the middle of the Punjab, the Sikh homeland. The Sikhs had no state of their own. Many of their most sacred places, including Nankana Sahib, Guru Nanak's birthplace, and Kartarpur, where he died, ended up in Pakistan, along with some of the richest farmland Sikh families owned.

The violence that accompanied partition was among the worst of the 20th century. Muslims on one side, and Hindus and Sikhs on the other, killed one another in massacres, attacks on refugee trains and the abduction of women. Across the subcontinent, scholarly estimates of the dead range from about 200,000 to 2 million, and some 12 to 20 million people were displaced. Almost the entire Sikh and Hindu population of what became Pakistani Punjab moved east, and almost all Muslims of East Punjab moved west. Sikhs were both victims and perpetrators of the violence, a history that Sikh, Muslim and Hindu families still remember in different ways.

The new Indian Punjab became, through the Green Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, the granary of India. But disputes over river waters, the status of the shared capital Chandigarh, and the degree of autonomy Punjab should have left many Sikhs dissatisfied, setting the stage for the crisis of the 1980s.

Part 15 — 1984: Operation Blue Star, an assassination and the killings that followed

A note on this part: it describes events in which thousands of people were killed, and it relies on official inquiries and independent human rights reports. Casualty figures are disputed; official counts and other estimates are both given.

The road to Blue Star

In 1973 the main Sikh political party, the Akali Dal, adopted the Anandpur Sahib Resolution, calling for greater autonomy for Punjab within India. Its supporters saw it as a federalist programme; the central government treated it as a step toward secession. In 1982 the Akalis launched a mass campaign, the Dharam Yudh Morcha.

Around the same time, a charismatic preacher, Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, rose to prominence, calling for a return to strict Sikh practice and denouncing the government's treatment of Sikhs. To his followers he was a defender of the faith; to the government and many others he was responsible for, or tolerated, a wave of killings of political opponents and Hindus. Some militants demanded a separate Sikh state, Khalistan. Bhindranwale and armed followers occupied and fortified the Golden Temple complex, including the Akal Takht.

Operation Blue Star (June 1984)

In early June 1984 Prime Minister Indira Gandhi ordered the army to remove the militants. Operation Blue Star ran from 1 to 10 June, with the main assault on the complex on the night of 5–6 June. Bhindranwale was killed on 6 June. The army used tanks; the Akal Takht was largely destroyed.

The attack came at the time of the anniversary of Guru Arjan's martyrdom, when the complex was crowded with pilgrims. The government's White Paper put the dead at 83 soldiers and 493 militants and civilians combined. Sikh organisations, eyewitnesses and independent researchers have long argued that the true toll, especially of pilgrims, was far higher, with estimates in the thousands. No independent inquiry has settled the figure.

For Sikhs worldwide, the assault on their holiest shrine was a profound wound, regardless of their views of Bhindranwale. Prominent Sikhs resigned posts or returned honours in protest; the writer Khushwant Singh, for one, gave back his Padma Bhushan. The government rebuilt the Akal Takht, but Sikhs refused to accept a structure rebuilt by the state that had damaged it; in early 1986 they demolished it and rebuilt it themselves through voluntary service.

The assassination and the killings

On 31 October 1984, Indira Gandhi was shot dead at her home in New Delhi by two of her Sikh bodyguards, in revenge for Blue Star.

Over the next three days, mobs in Delhi and other cities hunted down Sikhs. Men were dragged from homes, beaten and burned alive; gurdwaras, homes and shops were set alight. The official Ahuja Committee counted 2,733 Sikhs killed in Delhi alone; the government's nationwide figure is about 3,350, and other estimates are considerably higher. Human Rights Watch, summarising the findings of later inquiries, noted that the violence could not have spread so swiftly without the backing of influential people, and that the police largely failed to act.

The inquiries

In all, ten government commissions and committees examined the violence. By 2014, Human Rights Watch noted, only about 30 people, mostly low-ranking party supporters, had been convicted, and no police officer. On 11 August 2005 Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, India's first Sikh prime minister, told Parliament: "I have no hesitation in apologising not only to the Sikh community but the whole Indian nation." In December 2018 the Delhi High Court sentenced the former Congress MP Sajjan Kumar to life imprisonment for murders committed in the violence, and in February 2025 a Delhi court convicted him in a second case and again sentenced him to life.

The insurgency

Punjab then endured a decade of insurgency. Sikh militant groups killed civilians, Hindus and Sikhs alike, along with politicians and police officers; on 23 June 1985 a bomb attributed to Sikh militants of the Babbar Khalsa, operating from Canada, destroyed Air India Flight 182 over the Atlantic, killing 329 people. The security forces' counter-insurgency was marked, according to Human Rights Watch, by arbitrary detention, torture, extrajudicial executions and "disappearances" of thousands of young Sikh men. The human rights activist Jaswant Singh Khalra documented more than 6,000 secret police cremations in Amritsar district alone; he was abducted and killed by police in 1995, and six officers were later convicted for his murder. The insurgency was crushed by the mid-1990s; Punjab's chief minister, Beant Singh, was assassinated on 31 August 1995. Government figures count more than 11,000 non-combatants and thousands of militants and security personnel killed.

1984 remains the open wound of Sikh memory: an attack on the holiest shrine, followed by the killing of thousands of innocents, followed by decades in which few were held to account.

How the period should be remembered is still contested. For many Sikhs, the events of 1984 were an organised pogrom and Bhindranwale a martyr. For many other Indians, Blue Star was a tragic necessity against an armed separatist movement, and Bhindranwale its cause. Almost everyone now agrees that the November killings were a crime and that justice was long denied.

Part 16 — The diaspora and the questions Sikhs argue about today

A global community

Sikhs began emigrating in the late 19th century, many as soldiers and policemen of the British empire, to Malaya, Hong Kong, East Africa and the Pacific coast of North America. After the Second World War, and especially from the 1960s, large communities grew in Britain, Canada and the United States.

Canada has the largest Sikh share of population of any country outside India, and Sikhs have held senior offices there. In September 2023 the Canadian prime minister told Parliament that Canadian security agencies were pursuing allegations of a potential link between agents of the Indian government and the killing, in June that year, of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Sikh separatist activist shot outside a gurdwara in Surrey, British Columbia. India rejected the allegations as "absurd and motivated". The dispute led to the expulsion of diplomats on both sides in October 2024. The affair showed how the unresolved politics of the 1980s, including the Khalistan demand, which most Sikhs in India do not support but which retains some backing in the diaspora, continue to shape the community's relations with India.

Diaspora Sikhs have also faced hostility from people who mistake them for others. After the attacks of 11 September 2001, Sikhs in the United States were targets of hate crimes; the first, Balbir Singh Sodhi, a turbaned petrol-station owner in Mesa, Arizona, was shot dead on 15 September 2001 by a man who took him for an Arab Muslim. Sikh organisations have campaigned for recognition of the turban and kirpan in schools, workplaces and the military.

Sikhs in India today

Most Sikhs in India are deeply attached to the country: 95 percent told Pew they are very proud to be Indian, and only 14 percent said Sikhs face a lot of discrimination. Sikhs are prominent in farming, the armed forces, business and sport, and Manmohan Singh, prime minister from 2004 to 2014, became one of the most respected statesmen of his era. The farm protests of 2020–21, led by farm unions mainly from Punjab and Haryana and fed around the clock by langars at the camps on Delhi's borders, which ended when the government repealed the three farm laws in November 2021, showed how Sikh institutions can mobilise.

Open questions inside Sikhism

Who is a Sikh? The SGPC's code of conduct, the Sikh Rehat Maryada, (approved in its final form in 1945) defines a Sikh as a person who believes in one God, follows the ten Gurus and the Guru Granth Sahib, and believes in the amrit initiation of the tenth Guru. Whether a Sikh who cuts their hair, or who has not taken amrit, is fully Sikh is argued in families, in gurdwara elections and in courts.

Caste. The Gurus rejected caste, and the langar enacts that rejection. Yet caste persists among Sikhs, in marriage choices, in separate gurdwaras built by some caste groups, and in tension between landowning Jat Sikhs and Dalit Sikhs. The most dramatic result came after a 2009 attack in Vienna that killed a leader of the Dera Sachkhand Ballan, a community devoted to the bhagat Ravidas: in 2010 the dera declared the Ravidassia faith a separate religion, with its own scripture, the Amritbani. Mainstream Sikh bodies urged them to reverse the decision.

Authority and the calendar. The SGPC adopted a new solar Nanakshahi calendar in 2003; it has been highly controversial and is not universally accepted. The relationship between the SGPC, the Akal Takht and political parties is itself a subject of debate.

Living gurus and deras. Popular deras, centres led by living spiritual masters, attract many followers, especially poorer and lower-caste Punjabis, and orthodox Sikhs often object to any living person being treated as Guru alongside the scripture.

Memory and justice. Demands for full accountability for 1984, for the reopening of the Kartarpur corridor, and for an honest account of the insurgency years remain central to Sikh politics.

Sikhism was founded on the claim that God is found in ordinary life, among ordinary people, at a shared table. Its arguments today are about how to keep that table open.

The takeaway

Jainism and Sikhism are two of India's minority faiths, and both have shaped the world far beyond their numbers. Jainism, taught by twenty-four Tirthankaras of whom Mahavira was the last, offers a path to liberation without a creator God: freeing the soul from karmic matter through right faith, knowledge and conduct, above all through ahimsa, non-possession and a many-sided view of truth. Its monks and nuns live that path to the limit; its lay families live it through food, worship, giving and forgiveness, and its end-of-life vow, sallekhana, led to a Supreme Court case still unresolved. Sikhism, founded by Guru Nanak in 1469 and shaped by ten Gurus, teaches remembrance of one God, honest work and sharing, embodied in the langar, the Khalsa and a scripture that includes Hindu and Muslim saints and is treated as the living Guru. Its history runs through Mughal persecution, a Sikh empire, British rule, partition and the trauma of 1984, and its global community today argues about identity, caste and justice.

Try this: visit a gurdwara and eat in the langar. Cover your head (a scarf is fine; gurdwaras usually lend them), take off your shoes, sit on the floor in the row and accept what is served. If there is a Jain temple near you, visit during Paryushan, usually in late August or September, and ask a member of the community what micchami dukkadam means to them. Then think of one person you would like to say it to.

Sources & Further Reading

Sources
- Pew Research Center, Religion in India: Tolerance and Segregation (29 June 2021; 29,999 adults surveyed Nov 2019–Mar 2020): Jain vegetarianism, root vegetables, puja and prayer; Sikh gurdwara attendance, hair, views of the Guru Granth Sahib, pride, discrimination; shared ground with Hindus.
- Pew Research Center, "Religious Composition of India" and "Population growth and religious composition" (21 September 2021): census trends, Jain fertility, caste categories; Pew, "How the Global Religious Landscape Changed From 2010 to 2020" (9 June 2025).
- Census of India 2011; Statistics Canada, 2021 Census (26 October 2022); Office for National Statistics, Religion, England and Wales: Census 2021.
- Constitution of India, Articles 17 and 25, via constitutionofindia.net.
- Jainpedia (Institute of Jainology and partner universities): Mahavira; sects; the Shvetambara canon and Valabhi; the Tattvartha Sutra; Divali; Paryushan; mendicant lifestyle; Terapanth; Shravanabelagola; Jains and the Mughals; Rajchandra.
- Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Jain Philosophy" (vows, karma as matter, anekanta, syat, naya).
- Hermann Jacobi (trans.), Acharanga Sutra, Sacred Books of the East 22 (1884).
- O. Somasundaram et al., "Jainism: its relevance to psychiatric practice, with special reference to the practice of Sallekhana", Indian Journal of Psychiatry 58:4 (2016): conditions, the Rajasthan High Court ruling of 10 August 2015 and the Supreme Court stay of 31 August 2015, estimates of numbers.
- SGPC, "Sri Guru Granth Sahib" and "Sri Harmandir Sahib": compilation and installation in 1604, contributors and hymn counts, the Damdama recension, the shrine's history; Max Arthur Macauliffe, The Sikh Religion (1909), vols. 1 and 6: the janamsakhi narrative, the Japji and Kabir's hymns.
- The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism (Punjabi University, Patiala), via thesikhencyclopedia.com: the Akal Takht, the Punjab history timeline.
- Human Rights Watch, "India: No Justice for 1984 Anti-Sikh Bloodshed" (29 October 2014); Protecting the Killers: A Policy of Impunity in Punjab, India (17 October 2007).
- Al Jazeera, "Canada investigating possible link between India, killing of Sikh activist" (18 September 2023).
- Dates of the Gurus, the Khalsa, Banda Singh, Ranjit Singh, Jallianwala Bagh, the SGPC, partition, the insurgency, the inquiries and later convictions were cross-checked against standard reference summaries; where official and independent figures differ, both are given.

Go deeper
- 📘 The Jains — Paul Dundas (Routledge; the standard scholarly introduction to Jain history, sects, scriptures and practice)
- 📘 The Jaina Path of Purification — Padmanabh S. Jaini (a classic account of Jain doctrine and ascetic practice by a scholar raised in the tradition)
- 🌐 Jainpedia (an academic encyclopedia of Jainism, with manuscript images, festivals and biographies)
- 📘 Sikhism: A Very Short Introduction — Eleanor Nesbitt (Oxford; clear, fair and compact, from the Gurus to the diaspora)
- 📘 A History of the Sikhs — Khushwant Singh (two volumes; a readable narrative history from the Gurus to the 1980s by one of India's best-known writers)
- 🌐 SGPC — Sri Guru Granth Sahib (the Sikh community's own account of how its scripture was compiled and what it contains)
- 🌐 Human Rights Watch — India: No Justice for 1984 Anti-Sikh Bloodshed (a concise account of the November 1984 killings and the inquiries)
- 🌐 Related pieces in this library: Kabir: The Weaver of the Heart; How the Sacred Texts Were Written; Pilgrimage: Why Humans Walk to Holy Places; If I Was Born in India; and the Religions long read on Hinduism