The Cambridge History of India, Vol. IV: The Mughul Period v4.c19.77

v4.c19.77

The Sikh sect which Bābā Nānak (1469–1538) had founded at the beginning of the sixteenth century was entirely transformed from a religious body into a military brotherhood in the course of the seventeenth century. Though Aurangzīb’s policy and action completed this change, it had begun earlier than his reign and was in fact latent in the racial character of the main element of the Sikh population, namely the Jāts. Nānak had merely aimed at spiritual liberation by means of humility, prayer, self-restraint, searching of the heart and fixed gaze on the one God—“the True, the Immortal, the Self-existent, the Invisible, the Pure” (*alakh niranjan*). He rejected idols and incarnations as abominations and denounced set prayers and dead ritual. In fact, he made a surprising approach to the basic principles of Islām, though he denounced the Muslims of his age as base perverts and his modern followers are bitterly antagonistic to that sect. Nānak’s successors in the leadership of the sect—or rather the largest branch of it—were called Gurūs, and the line ended with the tenth Gurū, Govind Singh (d. 1708).