Fundamentalism and the Sikh Religious Tradition by T.N. Madan

ecommending the Partition of India. No wonder, he felt completely betrayad. Again,
while he was willing to send armies lo Kashmir, he was unwilling to recommend forced
entry of Harijans into Hindu temples, saying that God was in all human hearts, and
because it offended Hindu religious injunctions. And yet he kept a fast unto death,
forcing Ambedkar and the Government to withdraw separate reservation from the
Scheduled Castes. His objective was quite narrow in its scope, and in fact, was contrary'
to Niebuhr's Christian moral principle of giving political power to the downtrodden
classes of society. Of his dietary practice he wrote, "For years I have taken nothing but
fruit in Mohammadan or Christian households.... In my opinion that interdining and
intermarrying are necessary for national growth is a superstition borrowed from the
West." Obviously, with the Mahatma his committment to Hindu orthodoxy and
orthopraxy was of over-riding importance; and though a votary of Hindu pacificism, he
could neither avoid a combination of religion and politics, nor the use of force, when
required for a political purpose.
Madan's Views Examined:
Madan has created his own definition of Fundamentalism, which he employs in
a condemnatory sense. Fundamentalism is a known concept, which means belief in the
literal truth of the stories in the Bible. Nowhere Fundamentalism implies, either the
combination of religious and empirical lives or the use of force for a righteous cause,
including political ones. By Madan's definition, the Torah, the Bible, the Guru Granth,
and the holy Qoran are all Fundamentalist scriptures. The Guru Granth emphasizes that
man's religious life has to be in line with the Attributive Will of God, who is called Love,
Ocean of virtues, and Destroyer of evil-doers. In a whole-life system the religious man
has, therefore, to be compulsively altruistic in every field of life.
Madan also says that a Fundamentalist makes a selective retrieval, picking out of
the religious tradition certain elements of high symbolic significance, with a view to
organising his coreligionists. Here too, he makes contradictions. Being ignorant of the
classification of religions, he wrongly attributes two traditions to Sikhism, one of Guru
Nanak, and the other of the Tenth Master. Second, the question of symbolic selection
does not arise, when he himself attributes Fundamentalism to Guru Gobind Singh, whose
system, he says, has been revived by the Singh Sabha and the Akali Party. He makes such
a strained use of verbiage as facts hardly justify. His arbitrary definition appears just a
way to condemn a religion which is different from his own, and which all the same he
insists on calling a sect of Hinduism. Seemingly, he is unwilling to understand that
Sikhism is a whole-life system; nor is he inclined to study its doctrines as embodied in
the Guru Granth. Instead he tries to measure it by the principles of his own religion,
which is dichotomous and other-worldly, and where correct practice of rituals alone is of
the essence, and brings all kinds of benefits in this and the next world.
Often the position of relations between religious life and empirical life is
different in a dichotomous system. The Vedas and the Upanishads are the unchallenged
scriptures of the Hindus. The Vedas lay down, says Das Gupta, "First a belief that
Sacrifice, when performed with perfect accuracy, possesses a secret, mysterious power to
bring about or to produce as their effect, whatever we may desire either in this life or
hereafter. This being the unalterable religious dictum, and, the caste division, having been
prescribed in the Vedas itself, it is impossible for any Hindu, including Mahatma Gandhi,
to challenge the prohibitions involved in the Caste system, or the dichotomy