On the Gift of Recognition and the Image of the Enemy
Mahāvīra Siṅgh
- “It is only by being ‘recognized’ by another, by many others, or—in the extreme—by all others, that a human being is really human, for himself as well as for others.” (Alexandre Kojève)
- “We are constantly reminded that only a concrete, concretely determined enemy can awaken the political; only a real enemy can shake the political out of [. . .] the abstract ‘specularity’ of its concept; only the concrete can awaken it to its actual/effective life.” (Jacques Derrida)
- “ਸਮਾ ਪਾਇ ਰਿਪੁ ਤੇ ਨ ਚੁਕੈ ਕਿਮ ਨਿਸਚੈ ਕਰਹਿ ਸੁ ਘਾਤੀ ।— At the opportune moment, do not turn away from the enemy; with determination, destroy him.” (Mahakavi Santokh Singh)
The promise of Recognition
ਮਾਨਸ ਕੀ ਜਾਤ ਸਬੈ ਏਕੈ ਪਹਚਾਨਬੋ ॥— The race of man, recognize the whole as one. The word commonly translated to ‘man’ here is ਮਾਨਸ, which derives from mánas, ‘thought, of the mind,’ i.e. the competency that distinguishes man from beast. This implies a capacity for thought, for discernment, discrimination, judgment: the refinement of ਬਿਬੇਕ. To be human is to affirm this principle. Man is expected to look upon all as one, to know, recognize all as one. To look, to know, to recognize, ਦੇਖਹੁ, ਜਾਨ, ਮਾਨਿ: the onus being on man and man’s decision, judgment, ਬਿਬੇਕ: “I recognize you, for I can. And since I can, I must.”
From beast, man. ਮਾਨਸ, thus qualified.
Kojève: “And we can say that social Recognition is what distinguishes Man, as spiritual entity, from animals and everything that is merely Nature.” Folded into ‘ਪਹਚਾਨਬੋ’ is this promise of Recognition: to overcome the differences and limits that inherently separate man from man, never selfsame upon the worldly plane, ever-shifting, Other even in identity. To overcome these differences, and, in embracing this Other as the same, emancipate it. This promise, the Guru’s command, can only be offered by the higher man, from a position of Lordship rather than Bondage. One possessed with sovereignty, kingship, patishahi.
ਜਿਸੁ ਚੀਤਿ ਆਵਹਿ ਸੋ ਸਾਚਾ ਸਾਹਾ ॥— He who keeps you in his mind is truly a king. This figure is the Guru-mukh, the Guru-facing, the Guru-faced, coincident with the Guru. In a world riven with vast taxonomies of oppression, the House of Nanak offered the promise of Recognition, the ennoblement and dignity of one’s fellowship. ਗਿੱਦੜਾਂ ਤੋਂ ਮੈਂ ਸ਼ੇਰ ਬਣਾਉ।— Jackals I shall make into lions.
Recognition is the Guru-mukh’s gift to the suffering world.
The Khalsa’s jus ad bellum
ਰਾਜ ਕਰੇਗਾ ਖਾਲਸਾ ਆਕੀ ਰਹੇ ਨਾ ਕੋਇ॥— The Khalsa shall reign; no rebellion shall subsist.
As per Sikh tradition, the earliest rahit (lit. ‘way of living,’ code of conduct, constitution; Oberoi: ‘the Khalsa’s own dharma’⁵) occurs in the Nasihatnama (popularly known as the Tankhahnama), attributed to Bhai Nand Lal, amanuensis to the Tenth Guru’s dictation. From the document’s twin titles, we gain nasihat (counsel, advice, tending towards chastisement, admonition), and tankhah (lit. ‘salary’), which connotes the punishment meted out to a Khalsa Sikh who transgresses against the Sikh code of conduct, against the Panth’s socio-political life-world. In other words, it is a juridical text, intended to frame the Khalsa’s political conduct.
This document also lends the Sikhs’ liturgical ardaas the blessed couplet: ਰਾਜ ਕਰੇਗਾ ਖਾਲਸਾ ਆਕੀ ਰਹੇ ਨਾ ਕੋਇ॥ ਖੁਆਰ ਹੋਏ ਸਭ ਮਿਲੇਂਗੇ ਬਚੇ ਸ਼ਰਨ ਜੋ ਹੋਏ॥, recited by millions of Sikhs across the world daily. It is this couplet that we will concern ourselves with.
A philological engagement with ‘ਆਕੀ’ reveals a complexity that cannot be neatly translated to a singular word: rebel, enemy, opposer, dissenter, adversary, transgressor, defier, defiler, disruptor, obstructer, impairer. (For the sake of convenience, let us opt for ‘Enemy’) In the Mahan Kosh, Kahn Singh Nabha traces the word to its Farsi root: “ਫ਼ਾ. [آک] ਆਕ. ਕਲੇਸ਼,” discord, strife, chaos. There is also ‘عَاقَ’: “to hinder, to obstruct, to impair, etc.” The ambit of the Sikh life-world is determined by the rahit, as interpreted by the Panth. Concretized and clarified, ਆਕੀ is that which threatens not just the Panth, but dharma itself (Claiming “Sikhism envisages [. . .] a universal State,” Ahluwalia translates ਨਾਨਕਿ ਰਾਜੁ ਚਲਾਇਆ॥ to “Nanak founded a State, a Dominion of God.”⁷)— imperils that which restrains, balances, maintains political order. And so, this figure, as rebel, traitor or adversary, logically assumes the position of the Panth’s enemy. Jus ad bellum.
In the ‘ਆਕੀ,’ as one who defies and defiles the Guru’s will (and in the Guru’s will, the Khalsa’s), we do not decipher the image of a private or personal enemy, a ਦੋਖੀ, a ਸ਼ਰੀਕ, inimicus. Rather, the ਆਕੀ is, broadly speaking, an existential, political enemy, i.e. a ਸ਼ਤਰੂ, hostis. Derrida imagines “[. . .] a hostility without affect or, at least, without an individual or ‘private’ affect, a purified aggressivety, with all passion and all psychology removed: a pure hostility and, ultimately, a purely philosophical one.”
Now, the juridical import of “ਆਕੀ ਰਹੇ ਨਾ ਕੋਇ॥”— regardless of whether the adversary is to be reconciled with, annihilated, or, in reconciliation, annihilated— is entirely a matter of interpretive pleye, contingent upon circumstance, i.e. politically determined. What determines the enemy’s status? Socrates offers: “Giving names does not belong to every man but to a certain ‘name-giver’ [ὀνοματουργοῦ], and it looks like that person is the lawgiver, the rarest of craftsmen [τῶν δημιουργῶν] who come along among humankind.” The Guru says it is Hukam, the highest truth as Law, which manifests through shabad as the guru-mukh’s clarified inner measure. ਅੰਤਰਿ ਸਾਚੁ ਬਾਹਰਿ ਸਾਚੁ ਵਰਤਾਏ ॥— He who is filled with Truth within, administers Truth in the world.
Depending on contingencies so determined, “ਆਕੀ ਰਹੇ ਨ ਕੋਇ॥” yields a wealth of interpretations: May no enemy endure. May no discord subsist. May no dissent brew. None shall remain defiant. May no enmities flower. Let no opposition withstand. Let no traitor survive. Of course, this image of the ਆਕੀ is polemically charged, conditioned by the concrete historical situation that the Panth is confronted with. It is decided not by abstract, predetermined norms, but the very real prospect offered by this enemy of the Sikh life-world being existentially negated. This is the structure of possibility within which the Panth must assess the enemy.
Again, these determinations are premised on the experiential vantage of the Guru-mukh, the Guru-faced, who, in a sweeping, aristocratic gesture of overcoming difference, determines ਮਾਨਸ ਕੀ ਜਾਤ ਸਬੈ ਏਕੈ: the lowest of the low and the highest of the high to be one. ਨਾ ਕੋ ਬੈਰੀ ਨਹੀ ਬਿਗਾਨਾ ਸਗਲ ਸੰਗਿ ਹਮ ਕਉ ਬਨਿ ਆਈ ॥—None is my enemy, none a stranger; I get along with everyone. All worldly enmities are thus contingently measured against this absolutization of sameness.
“Every thing is One — and this is firstly a performative gesture before it becomes an ontological thesis.”
The Panth of Guru-mukhs (as a higher equality of equals, consolidated into the Guru’s juridical body) arrives at this universalizing conceit via (the experience of) coincidence with the Guru, thereon operating in the historical world in a paradoxical state of detached engagement: ਗੁਰਮੁਖਿ ਮਾਇਆ ਵਿਚਿ ਉਦਾਸੀ॥ In assuming the disposition of the ਮਰਜੀਵੜੇ, dead in life, life-death, man’s particular difference from man (haumai) is flattened into a monistic plane of multiplicities. (This selfsameness does not, however, preclude action. One might even say it relativizes it altogether in the fullnesse of pleye: ਖੇਲ ਖੇਲ ਅਖੇਲ ਖੇਲਨ ਅੰਤ ਕੋ ਫਿਰਿ ਏਕ ॥—The pleye pleyes out and is ultimately one again.)
Here, it is not the enemy’s identity that qualifies the enemy’s enmity (identity being but another churn in the world-ocean), but rather his concrete location, within Hukam’s grand unfolding pleye, as that which confronts the Panth with an existential threat.
Let no such thing endure. Folded into the ardaas, statecraft.
The Panthic Ladder of Escalation
Having determined the conceptual grounds for determining and qualifying the nature of the Panth’s enemy, we proceed to the second verse.
ਖੁਆਰ ਹੋਏ ਸਭ ਮਿਲੇਂਗੇ ਬਚੇ ਸ਼ਰਨ ਜੋ ਹੋਏ॥— Thus abjected, all shall be reunited; they who seek refuge shall survive. This proviso keeps the intensification of enmity from becoming absolute: the ground for reconciliation is instituted (should the vanquished enemy seek it). Jus post bellum.
Indeed, one can construct a veritable escalation ladder through the Guru’s bāṇī: commencing with a letter (ਪ੍ਰਥਮੇ ਮਤਾ ਜਿ ਪਤ੍ਰੀ ਚਲਾਵਉ ॥ ਦੁਤੀਏ ਮਤਾ ਦੁਇ ਮਾਨੁਖ ਪਹੁਚਾਵਉ ॥ ਤ੍ਰਿਤੀਏ ਮਤਾ ਕਿਛੁ ਕਰਉ ਉਪਾਇਆ ॥— First, I was counseled to send a letter. Second, I was advised to send two men. Third, I was instructed to take an appropriate measure.), culminating only ultimately in war. The diplomatic letter was itself imagined as a form of rhetorical combat, a battle of wits and literary acumen that put the adversaries’ noble pedigree to the test.
This presumes, of course, a conventional, ‘contained’ enmity that plays out between equals under rules of proper conduct. When Harminder Singh Sandhu addressed a letter to the Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1988, he opened with: ਪ੍ਰਥਮੇ ਮਤਾ ਜਿ ਪਤ੍ਰੀ ਚਲਾਵਉ
If dharma (from dhṛ: “to uphold, to sustain”) connotes that which founds, sustains and orients the Panthic life-world, then maryada (lit. ‘limit, border, shore, frontier’) connotes the space and the limits that define the Panth’s conduct, that bracket its action. Between the pen and the sword, there exists a wealth of strategies to escalate against or neutralize the existential threat presented by the enemy. When the young Guru Gobind Singh sounded the ranjit nagara (‘the drum of victory’) in Anandpur, signaling his claim to sovereignty, he deliberately invited Raja Bhim Chand to conflict. When Avtar Singh Brahma taunted and challenged the CRPF over the loudspeaker of Brahmpura’s gurdwara, he deliberately tested the adversary’s taste for escalation. The element of performance, of grand gestures, brinksmanship. A poetics of escalation. ਖੇਲ ਖੇਲ ਅਖੇਲ ਖੇਲਨ
Regardless of whether the escalatory ladder is scaled to its cataclysmic apotheosis, or a diplomatic détente is devised, what remains is the unambiguous, clear-eyed clarity of recognition. ਨਿਸਚੈ ਕਰਹਿ ਸੁ ਘਾਤੀ ।— With determination, destroy him.
ਮਿਤ੍ਰ ਪਿਆਰੇ ਨੂੰ— to the beloved friend. What is evoked is not only a devotional mode of addressal rooted in bhakti poetics, but also the notion of oaths, covenants, treaties. The god Mitra as the contract personified; *mitrám: that which ‘causes to bind.’ Friendship as diplomatic fact. The Sikhs’ diplomatic history of alliances, treaties, détentes proves the political expediency of this clause: Sri Chand’s humiliation and reconciliation, effected by Guru Ram Das’s act of humility; Guru Gobind Singh’s fluctuating dealings with the Hill Rajahs, his amity with Bahadur Shah; Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s extension of hospitality as well as hostility to Shah Shujah; the rehabilitation of ‘heretic’ lineages into the Panth over the course of the 19th century.
Within the Panth, the vying spirit of agonism has propelled the body politic as much as consensus has (consider the Sukerchakia, Kanhaiya and Bhangi misls; the Amritsar and Lahore Singh Sabhas; Master Tara Singh, Sant Fateh Singh; Darbara Singh, Zail Singh, Buta Singh; Sant Bhindranwale, the Babbar Khalsa, the Akhand Kirtani Jatha; Badal, Tohra, Longowal). In accepting and sanctifying the winning party’s triumph as the Guru’s will, the vanquished rivals are integrated into the Panth’s renewed command structure. ਆਕ— as chaos, strife, discord, Agamben’s stasis, ‘a war within the family’¹⁷ is fended off (personal enmities notwithstanding), restoring the body politic of the Panth to wholeness (as regards the external enemy, on the other hand, the end is upholding dharma— as order, as law— at all costs, be it through amity or hostility).
Further, the tradition of tankha ensures a mechanism that allows the erring Singh (as well as his virtues and resources), the ਆਕੀ as transgressor, as rebel, as the ‘enemy within,’ having expressed and performed his penitence, to be reconciled with the Panth (excepting the most grievous offenses, whereby he may acquire the status of a political, perhaps even absolute, enemy). Again, enmity is not immutable, but contingent on the enemy’s location. Schmitt: “The heart of the political is not enmity per se but the distinction of friend and enemy; it presupposes both friend and enemy.”
ਖੁਆਰ ਹੋਏ ਸਭ ਮਿਲੇਂਗੇ ॥— Thus abjected, all shall be reunited. The enemy, the rebel, subjugated through the aristocratic gift of mercy and reconciliation. ਧੌਲੁ ਧਰਮੁ ਦਇਆ ਕਾ ਪੂਤੁ॥— The white bull of dharam (upholding the Earth) is the son of compassion. Nietzsche deems “the self-sublimation of justice: [. . .] mercy; it remains, of course, the prerogative of the most powerful man, better still, his way of being beyond the law.” ਖਾਲਸਾ ਹੋਵੈ ਖੁਦ ਖੁਦਾ ॥
Khalsapolitik.
Absolute Enmity
Returning to the verse’s second half: ਬਚੇ ਸ਼ਰਨ ਜੋ ਹੋਏ॥— [only] they who seek refuge shall survive. There is a limit beyond which the Panth’s clemency, readily extended to any enemy or rebel who, in abjection, seeks reconciliation, cannot be offered. Within the horizon of Panthic rahit, the ground exists, in the most extreme case, having exhausted all measures, for the enemy’s annihilation to be judicially sanctioned. ਗੁਰ ਕੀ ਨਿੰਦਾ ਸੁਨੈ ਨ ਕਾਨ ॥ ਭੇਟਿ ਸੰਗਿ ਕਰੈ ਕ੍ਰਿਪਾਨ ॥— Do not brook insults against the Guru; make an offering of such a person with your sword. Somewhere between 1699 and 1708, but certainly no later than 1718, Bhai Nand Lal is said to have noted down this nasihat from the Guru, formalizing it into doctrine.
This is where enmity becomes absolute. The enemy, dehumanized into an abstraction, is assessed instead in moral, theological terms, taking the shape of evil: ਪੰਥ ਦਾ ਦੋਖੀ, the inimical enemy of the Panth, of dharma, despised not just politically or personally, but cosmically. It is in this concretely assessed moment that the ਆਕੀ, by virtue of his hostile position in relation to the Panth within Hukam’s unfolding pleye, is absolutized into “’the natural enemy, the providential enemy.” In being so abstracted, he is denied his status as ਮਾਨਸ, as a man capable of judgment, sense, reciprocation. The promise of Recognition— and with it, the grounds for reconciliation— is effectively rescinded. The Khalsa assumes the millenarian state-form of kalki-dharamu, the tyrannical face of authority. Banda and his Sikh forces defeated and killed Wazir Khan, plundering and destroying the city of Sirhind, thus avenging the younger Sahibzadas’ martyrdom; the misls united in slaughtering the Ranghars of Morinda, who had dared mock the Sahibzadas. ਗੁਰ ਸੁਤ ਬੈਰੀ ਛਡਯੋ ਨ ਕਾ ॥— [The Khalsa Panth] will not spare any enemies of the Guru’s sons.
Schmitt: “The war of absolute enmity knows no containment. The consistent realization of absolute enmity provides its meaning and its justice.” ਕਰਹੁ ਹੁਕਮ ਅਪਨਾ ਸਭੈ ਦੁਸਟ ਘਾ ॥— Sanction me to annihilate all evil-doers.
Ultimately, the course of conflict, the quantum of punishment are politically determined and exercised by the Panth within a regulatory framework, guided by ਬਿਬੇਕ, mánas, discernment and discrimination. The clarity of recognition. ਗੁਰ ਪਉੜੀ ਨਿਜ ਥਾਨੁ ॥— The Guru is the ladder to reach one’s own most place. The Khalsa’s promise, enactment and withdrawal of Recognition is legitimated by the inner measure of Hukam and the office of Guruship, the unbroken flow of sovereignty from the first Nanak, through the Gurus, to the Guru-Panth.
To forgo this privilege, and instead devolve into the atavistic, indiscriminating vulgarity of beasts, is to lose one’s right to the status of ਮਾਨਸ altogether: ਪਸੂਆ ਕਰਮ ਕਰੈ ਨਹੀ ਬੂਝੈ ਕੂੜੁ ਕਮਾਵੈ ਕੂੜੋ ਹੋਇ ॥— Acting like beasts, lacking understanding, practicing falsehood, one is rendered false. It is from the elevated station of the Guru-mukh, that one can offer the Recognition of equals and of enemies. This is the aristocratic crux of Panthic Humanism.
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