Sikhs: the first people to wear underpants in India and give women rights

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

The Sikhs are an Indian people making up only 2% of the country's population - or 20% of the Indian army's officer corps. Before you decide that it is caste injustice, here's another fact: most Sikhs are farmers or children of farmers who have chosen a different career. The Sikhs are famous for the murder of Indira Gandhi and for the doctrine that preaches mercy and renunciation of anger. And the Sikhs are the undisputed fashion stars of Instagram, although they do not deviate from the custom of their ancestors to wear turbans.

A nation of disciples

"Sikh" means "disciple", and for good reason: this people first appeared as a sect that combined the features of Islam and Hinduism and just the personal philosophy of the founder, Guru Nanak Dev. Since for such "apostasy" one could get both Muslims and Hindus, very quickly, regardless of caste origin, the situation turned towards the fact that every Sikh man became a warrior. If we remember that the majority of Sikhs are farmers, we get a picture similar to the Cossack community in the South of Russia. Only with its own separate Cossack religion.

Nanak Dev is known for starting to say prayers in his native language for him and those around him, Punjabi and allowed women to social religious life. Pious Sikh women can be seen at the temple, preserving the shoes of the pilgrims. What are men doing? Before entering, they wash a step or two stairs to the temple. One of the first Sikh gurus after Nanak forbade killing widows or forcing them to commit suicide after her husband and allowed them to marry again. The first Sikh gurus also announced that there are no castes for the Sikhs inside the temple and everyone shares food with their brothers and sisters. And so it happened.

The Sikh faith is bizarre and contains many incomprehensible prohibitions. It is forbidden to remove hair from the face. This, by the way, is the reason why the famous bearded girl named Harnaam Kaur adopted Sikhism: she was tired of fighting both with facial hair and with relatives who require her to undergo painful procedures for long-term hair removal. Now she has one answer to all claims: my faith does not allow! As for the Sikh men, so that the beard does not interfere, they tuck it in a special way and tie it on the back of the head.

Sikhs don't cut their hair. Men put them in a special way under their famous turbans made of a six-meter strip of fabric. Sikhs do not wear gold jewelry; the warrior wears iron.

It is forbidden for Sikhs to beg and give alms. Money is something that you can get for work and pay, but not give. If a Sikh wants to help a poor man, he will buy food or clothing.

One of the early Sikh gurus, Govind, introduced rules for those Sikhs who are part of the fighting brotherhood: two rules related to the hair on the head and face, two more rules prescribed to always wear a dagger on the belt and a comb in the hair, and, finally, the fifth rule introduced a mandatory wearing underwear. Govind also banned Sikhs from drinking, smoking, chewing tobacco and touching Muslim women as women (the latter advocated preventing military rape). It was under Govinda that Sikh women began to wear male names and add "Kour" to them, and men added "Singh" to their names.

Although at some point almost all Sikhs were part of the fighting brotherhood, now many in the community avoid it, so you can see quite a few young people with bobbed hair and beards. True, they still wear underwear.

How hard it is to follow your own rules

Among the highest virtues of the Sikhs is hard work. Indeed, the Sikh farmers are the richest and most productive. Not only do they manage to deal with their fields, they are also hired at the same time to cultivate other people's lands. Sikhs do not know idleness. In the army they are zealous campaigners, in the city they are owners of hundreds of different professions; they never sit down on unemployment benefits (giving up alms!) and no one has seen a Sikh lying on the couch waiting for their dream job while his wife is killed trying to feed his family.

At the same time, it is this people, preaching mercy and rejection of malice, known as having started many wars with neighbors, who passed through the North Indian land with fire and sword. Sikhs should be united - but many times in the old days, Sikh leaders led their warriors against the warriors of other leaders.

At the end of the twentieth century, a crowd of pogroms and massacres swept across India - Hindus attacked the Sikhs. This was revenge for the murder of Indira Gandhi. Indira Gandhi was also killed out of revenge, already Sikhs - for the bloody suppression of the rebellion of the Sikh separatists. But the rebels were not filled with philanthropy and calmly slaughtered the Muslims. If the Sikhs followed their own slogans of mercy, this whole bloody chain would be interrupted somewhere at the very beginning.

Cleanliness, quite ordinary household cleanliness, is part of the religious worldview of the Sikhs, a necessary condition for the life of every believer. Nevertheless - cleanliness is important for everyone, and almost all the work to maintain it falls on the shoulders of women. Washing the steps of the temple and washing the car are some of the few exceptions. It is easy to proudly announce how important cleanliness is to you and how clean you live, if in fact this cleanliness is created by someone else's hands, and you just have to evaluate the final result with the air of a judge! By the way, it is precisely because of the principle of purity that Sikh women are prohibited from applying makeup on their faces.

The hardworking average Sikh is also not at the expense of his own strengths. Most of the farmers have enough farm laborers. On the other hand, in India anyone who creates jobs for the army of the poor is blessed.

Yet, despite their bloody history, the last years of the Sikhs are one of the most peaceful peoples. They live not only in India, but also in English-speaking countries; for example, the Minister of Defense in Canada is a Sikh. And young Sikh guys have recently conquered Instagram as fashion bloggers. And this despite the beards and the unchanging blue turbans - the same ones that were once used by their ancestors as a universal repository of documents, money and household items that will be needed in a military campaign. Keeping traditions alive, Sikhs, like their famous gurus once, continue to look to the future and blaze new trails.

For those who are interested India without embellishment: Pictures of controversial Indian photographer Raghu Raya, who tells the world the truthare really impressive.