On the afternoon of Hola Mohalla, while speaking at the valedictory function of Sri Guru Granth Sahib World University’s “Samvaad-II”, I sought to weave together three strands: the history of Fatehgarh Sahib and Sirhind, the theological arc running from Guru Nanak to Guru Gobind Singh, and the contemporary responsibilities of a Sikh university in the age of artificial intelligence.
Fatehgarh Sahib, Sirhind and the University
Fatehgarh Sahib is not merely a point on the map. It is the sacred ground where the younger Sahibzadas and Mata Gujri Ji embraced martyrdom rather than compromise, and where the moral conscience of the Sikh Panth was indelibly shaped. A few kilometres away lies Sirhind, once an important Mughal administrative centre, remembered both for the atrocity associated with the martyrdom of the Sahibzadas and for the later assertion of Sikh power under Banda Singh Bahadur.
In more recent decades, this landscape acquired yet another layer of meaning: the creation of Fatehgarh Sahib district and, later, the establishment of Sri Guru Granth Sahib World University through a dedicated Act of the state legislature. The university stands here as a deliberate institutional effort to bring Sikh scriptural heritage and modern academic disciplines into a single frame.
The valedictory function, therefore, was not simply a campus ceremony. It unfolded in a space where administrative history, Sikh sacred memory and contemporary higher education meet.
Hola Mohalla and the Birth of the Khalsa
From this local setting, the address moved to Hola Mohalla and the creation of the Khalsa. On 13 April 1699, at Anandpur Sahib, Guru Gobind Singh called for heads, and five Sikhs stepped forward. The Panj Pyare came from Lahore/Delhi region, Hastinapur, Jagannath Puri, Dwarka and Bidar. They represented Khatri, Jat, water-carrier or Kumhar, Chhimba or tailor, and Nai or barber backgrounds.
In choosing them, the Guru struck at both caste hierarchy and regional narrowness. The Khalsa was conceived from the outset as a pan-Indian, anti-caste community bound by prem, discipline and courage, rather than by bloodline or locality. Hola Mohalla, instituted soon thereafter at Anandpur Sahib, became the training ground of this community: a festival of organised martial exercises, shastar-vidya, horsemanship and tactical display, woven together with kirtan, katha and langar.
At the heart of this lies the ideal of the sant-sipahi: the saint-soldier who combines inward humility and devotion with outward courage and readiness to defend the weak. This leads naturally to the twin vocabulary of shastar and shaastar.
Shastar refers to weapons: swords, spears, firearms, and the instruments of physical force.
Shaastar refers to scripture and disciplined knowledge: Sri Guru Granth Sahib, Gurbani, and the serious study of law, history, science and ethics.
The Sikh insight is at once simple and profound: when shastar is not guided by shaastar, it degenerates into oppression; when shaastar lacks the moral courage of shastar, it declines into cowardice and irrelevance.
From Guru Nanak’s “Game of Love” to Guru Gobind Singh’s Prem
The address then stepped back to Guru Nanak, because the ideal of the sant-sipahi does not begin in 1699. In the Babarvani hymns, Guru Nanak responds to Babur’s invasions not as a detached mystic but as a morally engaged witness. He condemns tyranny, the humiliation of women, the failure of local rulers and religious elites, and the suffering of ordinary people.
In that context, his oft-quoted line becomes a radical political and spiritual challenge:
ਜਉ ਤਉ ਪ੍ਰੇਮ ਖੇਲਣ ਕਾ ਚਾਉ,
ਸਿਰੁ ਧਰਿ ਤਲੀ ਗਲੀ ਮੇਰੀ ਆਉ ॥
If you wish to play the game of love, he says, bring your head on your palm and step into my lane. This “game of love” is not sentimentality. It is the readiness to risk everything for truth, justice and the defence of the oppressed.
Guru Nanak’s ahimsa, therefore, is not passivity. It is resistance to injustice without hatred. That is the moral DNA which Guru Gobind Singh would later institutionalise in the Khalsa and give organised expression through Hola Mohalla.
Guru Gobind Singh completes this doctrinal arc with his famous line:
ਜਿਨ ਪ੍ਰੇਮ ਕਿਓ, ਤਿਨ ਹੀ ਪ੍ਰਭੁ ਪਾਇਓ ॥
“Those who loved, they alone realised God.” The First Guru lays down the condition: bring your head if you would enter this path of love. The Tenth Guru delivers the verdict: only those who truly live this love attain the Divine. Between these two utterances stretches the entire history of the Khalsa.
Dharam-Yudh, the Zafarnama and Banda Singh Bahadur
The ethical discipline governing force is crystallised in the Zafarnama, Guru Gobind Singh’s letter to Aurangzeb:
ਚੂੰ ਕਰ ਅਜ਼ ਹਮੇਹ ਹੀਲਤੇ ਦਰ ਗੁਜ਼ਸ਼ਤ,
ਹਲਾਲ ਅਸਤ ਬੁਰਦਨ ਬਾ ਸ਼ਮਸ਼ੀਰ ਦਸਤ ॥
Only when all avenues of redressing a wrong have been exhausted does taking up the sword become legitimate. Force is thus a last resort, never a first instinct.
Historically, Fatehgarh Sahib and Sirhind embody this principle. The younger Sahibzadas and Mata Gujri Ji, imprisoned in the Thanda Burj and bricked alive for refusing to renounce Sikhi, represent the highest form of inner shaastar: unwavering ethical clarity and love, even in childhood.
The campaign of Banda Singh Bahadur, commissioned by Guru Gobind Singh in the Deccan, was the effort to translate that moral capital into political and social transformation. The fall of Sirhind and the execution of Wazir Khan in 1710 were directed at the tyrannical Mughal apparatus responsible for these atrocities and for widespread agrarian injustice. Alongside military victory, Banda’s early measures regarding land redistribution and relief to peasants marked the first major assertion of Sikh political power and the beginnings of a more just rural order.
The address underscored that this was not a war against Islam as such. It was a focused dharam-yudh against a particular structure of oppression and the officials who upheld it.
Sadhna Kasai, Rauza Sharif and Coexistence in the Landscape
To make this point more concrete, the speech turned to two Muslim sites in the same historical geography.
The first is the mosque or mausoleum associated with Bhagat Sadhna “Kasai”, a Muslim butcher from Sindh whose solitary shabad in Raag Bilaval is enshrined in Sri Guru Granth Sahib. His spiritual posture of radical humility and dependence on divine grace — “I am nothing, I have nothing; now You alone must preserve my honour” — resonates deeply with Sikh theology.
The second is the Rauza Sharif at Sirhind, the dargah of the Naqshbandi Sufi Ahmad Sirhindi of the sixteenth and seventeenth century. Although Sirhind was captured and its oppressive officials punished in 1710, the Rauza Sharif was not razed. The city itself was not erased, and important religious structures remained standing.
The coexistence, within the same landscape, of Sikh martyrdom sites, a Sufi dargah and a bhagat-associated mosque points to an important historical truth: Sikh armed resistance was directed against a tyrannical state apparatus, not against the existence of Muslim shrines or Muslim communities. This soil carries memories not only of conflict, but also of coexistence.
The Guru as Servant, Not Deity
Given the Khalsa’s armed and organised character, Guru Gobind Singh is careful to prevent any cult of personality. In the Bachittar Natak, he writes:
ਅਬ ਮੈ ਆਪਣੀ ਕਥਾ ਬਖਾਨੋ ॥
ਤਪ ਸਾਧਤ ਜਿਹ ਬਿਧਿ ਮੋਹਿ ਆਨੋ ॥
ਮੈ ਹੋ ਪਰਮ ਪੁਰਖ ਕੋ ਦਾਸਾ ॥
ਦੇਖਨਿ ਆਯੋ ਜਗਤ ਤਮਾਸਾ ॥
He presents himself as the servant of the Supreme Being, sent into this world for a divinely ordained task. He then warns:
ਜੋ ਹਮ ਕੋ ਪਰਮੇਸਰ ਉਚਰਿਹੈ ॥
ਤੇ ਸਭ ਨਰਕ ਕੁੰਡ ਮਹਿ ਪਰਿਹੈ ॥
Those who call him Parmeshwar, he says, fall into hell. All shastar and all leadership — including religious leadership — remain subordinate to Akaal Purakh, never to human ego.
Shastar and Shaastar in an Age of AI — and Article 25
The final part of the address brought these historical and theological insights back to the university and to our own times.
For students and scholars at Sri Guru Granth Sahib World University, the primary shastar of today are no longer merely swords and spears, but also pens, degrees, disciplines and digital tools — including the increasingly powerful instruments of artificial intelligence. These tools can be turned into instruments of manipulation, surveillance and extraction; or they can be used in the service of justice, empowerment and critical inquiry.
Within the Indian constitutional framework, the relationship between shastar and shaastar is not merely symbolic. Article 25 of the Constitution, while guaranteeing freedom of conscience and the free profession, practice and propagation of religion, also carries Explanation I, which recognises the Sikh right “to wear and carry kirpans” as part of the profession of the Sikh religion. The kirpan is not a casual ornament. It is acknowledged in the supreme law of the land as an essential element of Sikh identity and practice.
Any serious reflection on Sikh identity today — whether in the physical sphere or in the emerging digital and AI domains — must begin from this point: the Sikh is understood, both constitutionally and theologically, as someone for whom shastar, guided by shaastar and animated by prem, is not optional but constitutive.
Three forms of preparation follow for the modern sant-sipahi:
Intellectual preparation: rigorous study of Gurbani and Sikh history, alongside law, public policy, economics, environmental science and technology, so that ignorance and propaganda may be countered by disciplined and reasoned analysis.
Ethical preparation: integrity in examinations, research, publication and professional life; refusal to participate in plagiarism, cheating, corruption, misogyny, casteism or communal polarisation.
Civic preparation: engagement with the real crises of Punjab and the wider world — drugs, agrarian distress, water scarcity, climate change and inequality — through seva, legal literacy, environmental action and honest public debate.
The central question remains unchanged: are our shastar and our shaastar governed by prem? Are we prepared to risk comfort and convenience for truth, justice and the dignity of the vulnerable?
The address closed by returning to Hola Mohalla and Fatehgarh Sahib as a living classroom. On this soil — marked by the unparalled sacrifice of the Sahibzadas, the campaign of Banda Singh Bahadur, the presence of Muslim shrines, and the work of a modern university — the call of Guru Nanak and Guru Gobind Singh remains the same:
to become sant-sipahis of prem, whose knowledge and power are disciplined by shaastar, whose courage is bounded by dharam-yudh, and whose ultimate allegiance is to the One before whom even the Guru declares, “ਮੈ ਹੋ ਪਰਮ ਪੁਰਖ ਕੋ ਦਾਸਾ।”