Nihang Singhsਨਿਹੰਗ ਸਿੰਘ

The Nihang Singhs are the most recognisable Sikhs in any crowd. The dress is deep blue, the turban, a dastar bunga, rises tall and carries steel quoits and crescents, the wrists carry iron bracelets, and swords, spears and shields are worn as everyday dress, not costume. Nihangs, also spelt Nihungs, are a martial order of the Khalsa, and they understand themselves as Guru Gobind Singh Ji and his own army, the Guru ki laadli fauj, the beloved army of the Guru. Early Sikh military history is dominated by this order, which won famous victories while heavily outnumbered.

What is a Nihang?

A Nihang is a Sikh who has taken the warrior discipline of the Khalsa as a whole way of life. SikhiWiki, drawing on the Mahan Kosh of Bhai Kahn Singh Nabha, gives the heart of the word as fearlessness: Guru Arjan Dev Ji and his line in Raag Aasa, preserved at Ang 392, says that being fearless, a person becomes a nihang. The old Panth Prakash puts it in martial dress: a nihang is one who has forsaken the fear of death and is always ready to embrace martyrdom, counting joy and sorrow the same. So the blue dress alone does not make a Nihang. The order expects strict Khalsa rehat, daily Nitnem, generosity, and a life held ready for the defence of the Panth. Their closest kin on this site are the ideal of the Sant Sipahi, the saint soldier, and the speech they created, Khalsa Bole.

Where does the word Nihang come from?

Two derivations circulate, and scholars disagree. Mughal historians are said to have taken Nihang from the Persian word for a crocodile, comparing the ferocity of the Akalis in battle to that animal coming out of the water. Harjinder Singh Dilgeer calls that a misreading and traces the word instead to its use in Gurbani, where it describes a person who is carefree and without fear. The other name, Akali, is clearer. Akal means the Timeless One, God beyond time, so an Akali is one who belongs to Akal alone and is subject to none but God. The word became common in the last decades of the eighteenth century, standing for commitment, fearlessness, boldness, struggle and justice. One warning: since 1920 Akali has also named members of the Shiromani Akali Dal political party, who cannot be traced back to the historical Nihangs.

How did the Nihangs begin?

The origin of the Nihangs is obscure, and this page reports the theories as theories. Summarising Kahn Singh Nabha, the scholars Pashaura Singh and Louis Fenech list three. The order began with Sahibzada Fateh Singh Ji, the youngest son of Guru Gobind Singh Ji, whose blue clothing and tall turban the Guru prescribed as the uniform of his warriors. Or it began with the blue disguise in which Guru Gobind Singh Ji escaped from Chamkaur in 1704 or 1705, a scrap of which a follower, Bhai Man Singh, saved and tied on his own turban. Or it can be traced to the dress of Akali Naina Singh, leader of the Shaheedan Misl. Dilgeer tells a fourth story, set at Anandpur Sahib on 2 December 1703, in which the Guru tore a strip from his blue under turban and tied it on the standard bearer and his turban when the flag pole broke, creating the farla, the loose blue strip that still flies from a Nihang jathedar and his turban, so that the Sikh flag can never be lowered. J. S. Grewal takes a cooler view: the Nihangs descend from remnants of the late eighteenth century Khalsa who refused to settle and hold territory. What is not in dispute is the setting: a hunted, armed Khalsa that kept moving, and made a virtue of needing nothing.

Under the Sikh Empire the Nihangs reached the height of their influence in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Their great figure is Akali Phula Singh, overseer of the Akal Takht in Amritsar, who took part in the conquests of the Empire and feared no one, not even Maharaja Ranjit Singh, whom the Akalis would rebuke in public when they thought him wrong. Nihang deras stayed independent, and the order helped maintain many Sikh places of worship. After Phula Singh and his death the order declined, and British rule pressed it down further: the census counted 1,376 Nihangs in 1892 and only 431 in 1901. After the independence of India the deras began to thrive again.

What do Nihangs wear, and why so much steel?

The traditional dress is called bana, or Khalsa Swarupa. Its colour is the dark blue the Nihangs say Guru Gobind Singh Ji wore when he escaped from Chamkaur through the Machhiwara jungle. On the wrists are iron bracelets, and tiered in the tall conical turban, the dastar bunga, are steel quoits, the chakram, together with a chand tor, a crescent and trident emblem. Those steel reinforced turbans were once real protection. Today a Nihang turban carries miniature versions of five weapons: the chakram, the khanda, a dagger, the kirpan and an arrow. Fully dressed, a Nihang of the old pattern bore a talwar or khanda at the right hip, a katar dagger at the left, a buffalo hide buckler on the back and a large chakram at the neck, with a bow or spear in hand. The love of steel has a name, sarbloh, pure iron, and it runs through the order, its cooking vessels, weapons and scripture alike. The dress belongs with the Five Ks, which every initiated Sikh wears, carried here to its fullest martial form.

How are the Nihangs organised?

The Nihangs claim descent from the day Nawab Kapur Singh divided the Dal Khalsa in the eighteenth century into the Budha Dal, the army of the elders, and the Taruna Dal, the army of the young. Those two remain the great dals today, the Budha Dal with its headquarters at Raqba, alongside two smaller orders, the Bidhi Chand Dal, descended from Bhai Bidhi Chand, a warrior companion of the Gurus, and centred on Sur Singh, and the Ranghreta Dal, prominent among Mazhabi Sikhs. There is no central command: each dal is led by jathedars, who usually hold office for life. The camps are called deras or chhaunis, cantonments, and they keep horses, hold weapons as a normal part of life, run their own gurdwaras, and train in the martial arts, above all Gatka. A Nihang flag tells you whose camp you are in: dals fly a deep blue Nishan Sahib, sometimes with bright yellow, where gurdwaras managed by the SGPC fly the familiar orange.

What do Nihangs do today?

In peacetime the order and its work is mostly ceremonial, but the circuit is a full one. The dals travel to Amritsar for Vaisakhi, to Muktsar for Maghi, to Baba Bakala for Rakharh Punnian, and above all to Anandpur Sahib for Hola Mohalla, the festival Guru Gobind Singh Ji founded for martial display, where thousands of Nihangs ride, fence and perform Gatka before vast crowds. The order is also a walking library. Nihangs revere three scriptures together, the Guru Granth Sahib, the Dasam Granth and the Sarbloh Granth, read from all three in their daily Nitnem, and have kept compositions alive that other Sikh bodies treat more cautiously. Their dialect, Khalsa Bole, renames chickpeas as almonds and one Sikh as sava lakh, one hundred and twenty five thousand. One practice divides opinion and is reported here plainly: some Nihang groups prepare shaheedi degh, also called sukha, an infusion of cannabis taken as a liquid and never smoked, which they defend as an old tradition; in 2001 the Budha Dal jathedar Santa Singh and twenty Nihang chiefs refused an SGPC ban on it, and the disagreement stands unresolved. Tobacco and alcohol, by contrast, the order strictly forbids.

Are there Nihang women?

Yes, though always a small number. A nineteenth century account by Giani Gian Singh records Nihang women who also chose to wear turbans, and an 1838 watercolour by Emily Eden shows a Nihang woman in a turban the same size as her husband and his. A woman of the order is a Singhani, and Nihang families are part of dera life, though the public face of the dals at festivals is mostly male.

Why do the Nihangs matter?

Because they are the Panth and its memory of itself as an army. Other Sikhs regard the order with a mixture of affection, respect for its sacrifices, and distance from some of its customs, and scholars describe the Nihangs as an orthodox but often neglected part of the community. Their living gifts are concrete: the custodianship of Gatka and of Shastar Vidya, the keeping of the Dasam and Sarbloh traditions, the blue bana that became, in the Singh Sabha period, a marker of Sikh identity itself, and a standing reminder, renewed every Hola Mohalla at Anandpur Sahib, that the Khalsa was founded to be, in the Guru and his own pairing, both saint and soldier.