Khalsa Boleਖਾਲਸਈ ਬੋਲੇ

Khalsa Bole is a language built to laugh at hardship. It is the special speech of the Nihang Singhs, the armed Akali order of the Khalsa, in which ordinary Punjabi words are given grand, defiant new meanings: roasted chickpeas become almonds, a tumbledown hut becomes a palace of mirrors, salt becomes the essence of all taste, and a single Sikh becomes sava lakh, one hundred and twenty five thousand. Sant Singh Sekhon, quoted in the scholarship, calls it a grandiloquent patois of euphemisms and jargon symbolic of high spirited confidence and courage.

What are Khalsa Bole?

Khalsa Bole, in Gurmukhi Khalsai Bole or Khalsa Boli, means the words of the Khalsa. The same speech carries other names that describe it well: Gargajj Bole, words that thunder; Nihang Singhan de Bole, the words of the Nihang Singhs; and simply Khalsa de Bole. Scholars describe it as a language variety, a lect, developed and spoken by the Akali Nihang sect, drawing its words from Punjabi and its dialects, with Old Hindi and Persian mixed in, exactly the mixed speech of the Punjab the Nihangs marched through. It has also been described as a coded language, and both descriptions are true: it hid meaning from outsiders, and it lifted the spirits of insiders. Its closest relatives on this site are the jaikara Bole So Nihal and the ideal of the Sant Sipahi, the saint soldier whose speech this is.

Why did the Khalsa invent a language of bravado?

The purpose is stated in one phrase: Chardi Kala, the Sikh discipline of remaining ever optimistic, in high spirits whatever comes. Wikipedia, summarising the scholarship, says the dialect serves martial and mental objectives: it helps speaker and listeners stay in high spirits in the face of adversity, and it works as a verbal act of dissent in troubling circumstances. The Oxford Handbook of Sikh Studies, quoting Pashaura Singh and Louis Fenech on Sekhon, explains the mechanism: the different meanings are metaphors of optimism and belief in the inevitable achievement of the goal. A Nihang eating parched gram of necessity describes himself as eating almonds. Onions are silver pieces, while rupees, the money of the world that hunted him, are mere pebbles, and a wooden club is the repository of wisdom. Poverty is renamed wealth, wealth is renamed dirt, and the renaming itself is the victory.

When did Khalsa Bole begin?

The speech belongs to the hardest century in Sikh history. It developed in the 1700s, in the decades of intense persecution by the Mughal and then the Durrani empires, after a Mughal edict of 10 December 1710 ordered action against the Sikhs, when the Khalsa left the towns for the mountains, jungles and deserts to survive what Wikipedia plainly calls genocidal policies. Who coined it first is not settled. Some claim it was invented by Baba Banda Singh Bahadur, the Guru and his general. The historian Jasbir Singh Sarna places its evolution in the time of Nawab Kapur Singh, and Piara Singh Padam assigns its origin to the eighteenth century generally. What is certain is the setting: a hunted army that refused to speak like victims, and built its refusal into its vocabulary.

Why do Nihangs call chickpeas almonds?

Because in the days of Abdali the almonds were on the other side. SikhTranslations, retelling the tradition, sets the scene: the invading Pathans carried almonds, raisins and dried fruit in their pockets, while the pockets of the jungle dwelling Nihangs held chickpeas. Seeing the enemy and his luxury, the Singhs did not flinch. They named their chickpeas badaam, almonds, and stayed in Chardi Kala. The joke has a hard history inside it: parched gram was the food of necessity, the meal of men with prices on their heads, and calling it the richest of nuts turned a confession of poverty into a boast. Sekhon makes the same point in the Oxford Handbook account: taking a meal of parched gram of necessity, a Nihang would describe himself as eating almonds. The word survives today, and Nihangs still call chickpeas badaam.

What do Khalsa Bole words sound like?

The examples recorded by SikhiWiki from the Nihang tradition show the pattern at work in every direction. Death is never death: to die is charhai karna, to ascend, to rise. Sickness is Dharam Raj di dhee, the daughter of the angel of death, come in service. A calamity is swarag, heaven. A broken hut, a tutti hoi chhann, is a sheesh mahal, a palace of mirrors. Having nothing left at all is mast, carefree bliss. Salt is sarab ras, the essence of all flavours, because it carries every taste food needs. Grass is hara palla, the green spread. Coarse grain is Gurmukhi parshad. Rupees are chhillar, tree bark. And one person is never one: ek is sava lakh, one and a quarter lakh, 125,000, because Guru Gobind Singh Ji promised to make one Sikh a match for a lakh and a quarter. Oneself is simply fauj, the army.

Outsiders noticed early. An account from 1903, printed in a guide to Darbar Sahib at Amritsar and quoted on Wikipedia, describes it with amused respect: if an Akali wishes to say that five of his order are present, he will say five lakhs are before you; asked how he is, he replies that the army is well; asked where he has come from, he says the troops marched from Lahore. Every answer refuses smallness. The numbers, the ranks and the titles all run one way, upward.

Are Khalsa Bole still spoken today?

Yes, wherever the Nihangs gather. The dialect is still used by modern Akali Nihangs in their encampments, their chhaunis, and in conversation with the public, where it now serves comedy as well as secrecy. Many old terms have been forgotten and lost, the scholarship notes, but new ones continue to be coined for modern things, which is the sign of a living speech rather than a museum piece. The writer Teja Singh, in Humour in Sikhism in 1929, gave the speech its finest English name: a Vocabulary of Heroes, in which the things connected with the difficulties of life were expressed in terms of such cheerfulness and bravado, as if, for the Sikhs, pain and suffering had lost all meaning. Three centuries on, that remains the best one line account of what Khalsa Bole are for.