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MCLEOD & FENECH AS SCHOLARS ON SIKHISM AND MARTYRDOM
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Singh, “served as the noblest bridge-builder between Sikhs and
Christians”. (Trilochan Singh, Earnest Trump & McLeod as Scholars of
Sikh History, Religion & Culture, Chandigarh, 1994, p.321)
Of the scholars with whom contact was established at Batala, a
choice had to be made giving one primacy in the scheme of things.
W H McLeod emerged quite on the top, because he was more
unscrupulous and anti-Sikh, the qualities that were needed to pursue
the given task. I shall come to that shortly.
The task before McLeod could be spelled out in terms of known
pan-Hinduism’s aspirations to absorb Sikhism, vis-à-vis, independent
existence of Sikhism. Obviously, the guidelines were:
“Here we are, the Hindu race, whose vitality, whose life principle,
whose very soul, as it were is in religion... I think that it is Vedanta,
and Vedanta alone that can become the Universal religion of man,
and no other is fitted for the role. Excepting our own, almost all
the other great religions in the world are inevitably connected
with the life or lives of one or more of their founders. All their
theories, their teachings, their doctrines and their ethics are built
around the life of a personal founder from whom they get their
sanction, their authority and their power, and, strangely enough,
upon the historicity of the founder’s life is built, as it were, all the
fabric of such religions. If there is one blow dealt to the historicity
of that life... if that rock of historicity is shaken and shattered,
the whole building tumbles down, broken absolutely, never to
regain its lost status.”
– Swami Vivekananda, Works, vol III, p 177
“Even Guru Nanak never said that he was not a Hindu nor did
any other Guru. It cannot be said that Sikhism, Hinduism,
Buddhism and Jainism are separate religions. All these four faiths
and their offshoots are one. Hinduism is an ocean into which all
the rivers run. It can absorb Islam and Christianity and all other
religions and only then can it become the ocean.”
– M K Gandhi, December 1947,
Collected Works, (CW) Vol 90, p 177
“I read your Granth Sahib. But I do not do so to please you. Nor