ਰਾਜ ਕਰੇਗਾ ਖਾਲਸਾਰਾਜ ਕਰੇਗਾ ਖਾਲਸਾ

Raj Karega Khalsa is the promise with which Sikh worship ends. After the Ardas, the standing prayer that closes every Sikh service, the whole sangat sings two short couplets together, and the second of them is this one: Raj Karega Khalsa, aaki rahe na koye, khuar hoe sab milenge, bache saran jo hoe. It is at once a prophecy, a pledge and a prayer, and it has been on Sikh lips for three hundred years.

What does Raj Karega Khalsa mean?

The words translate plainly. Raj means rule or sovereignty. Khalsa means the pure: Guru Gobind Singh Ji gave the name to the initiated community he founded in 1699, the pure ones who belong to God alone. Aaki means a rebel or opponent, one who stands against. The scholar W. H. McLeod translates the couplet: the Khalsa shall rule, no enemy shall remain; all who endure suffering and privation shall be brought to the safety of the Guru and his protection. The second line is the mercy inside the promise. Those who were scattered and lost, khuar, worn down by wandering, will be gathered back, and whoever comes into the Guru and his refuge will be saved. The rule being promised is not left empty: it ends with shelter for the defeated and the lost.

A second reading runs alongside the first, and many Sikhs hold both at once. In this reading the aaki, the opponents who shall not remain, are the enemies of the soul: anger, lust, attachment, ego and greed, the five inner thieves that the pure soul defeats. Raj then means the rule of purity over the mind, and the couplet promises spiritual conquest and liberation as much as any rule on earth. The entry on the phrase in Wikipedia sets out both views side by side, and the Ardas itself leaves the words open enough to carry them together.

Where is Raj Karega Khalsa sung?

The couplet is not part of the spoken Ardas itself. The Ardas is said by one officiant, or by any Sikh leading the prayer, standing before Guru Granth Sahib Ji, while the sangat listens and answers at set points. What follows the prayer is an anthem, and the anthem is different in kind: it is recited aloud in unison by everyone present. First comes the dohra Guru Maneyo Granth, the command to accept the Granth as Guru, and then Raj Karega Khalsa, and then the jaikara ਬੋਲੇ ਸੋ ਨਿਹਾਲ Sat Sri Akal shakes the hall. The Sikh Encyclopedia, in its account of Ardas, puts it simply: the prayer ends with the famous proclamation, Raj Karega Khalsa, the Khalsa shall rule. Because Ardas is said at the end of every service, morning and evening, at weddings and funerals and before journeys and undertakings, the couplet is among the most frequently repeated sentences in Sikh life.

Where do the words come from?

The couplet is not found in early Sikh scripture. Its written home is the Tankhahnama of Bhai Nand Lal Ji, the Persian poet of Guru Gobind Singh Ji and his court, a rehatnama cast as a dialogue between the Guru and his poet. The Encyclopaedia tradition, as the Sikh Encyclopedia quotes it, prints the dohra at the end of that dialogue and attributes it to the Tankhah Nama of Bhai Nand Lal. Scholars date the writing down of the Tankhahnama to 1718, after the Guru and his passing, while the scholar Harjinder Singh argues it was written earlier, between 1699 and 1708, and that the phrase originates in Bhai Nand Lal Ji and his Persian ghazals. The same couplet also stands as the third dohra of the Guru Maneyo Granth verse, the verses of 1699 in which the congregation was told to accept the Granth as Guru.

An older root is sometimes claimed. A SikhNet study of the phrase by the historian Jasbir Singh Sarna notes a reference in the Karni Nama, linked to Guru Nanak Dev Ji and his dialogue with Qazi Ruknuddin at Mecca, while adding that most historians affirm the words were spoken by Guru Gobind Singh Ji. The honest summary is the one the sources support: the promise belongs to the circle of Guru Gobind Singh Ji, it was Bhai Nand Lal Ji who gave it its lasting written form, and the Panth has treated it as the Guru and his own sanction ever since.

What did the longer Ardas say?

The couplet once had company. The older Ardas, as Wikipedia prints it from the historical record, carried two lines before it: Delhi takht par bahegi aap Guru ki fauj, chattar firega sees par badi karegi mauj. On the throne of Delhi the Guru and his own army shall sit; the imperial canopy shall wave above their heads and they shall rejoice. Only then came Raj Karega Khalsa. Under British rule the colonial authorities banned those first two couplets, fearing their martial and political charge, and directed that the anthem begin directly with Raj Karega Khalsa. That shortened form is the one the world hears today, which is why the surviving couplet carries the weight of the lines that were struck out before it.

How was the promise lived in the eighteenth century?

For the Sikhs of the 1700s the couplet was not a metaphor. Sarna records that Baba Banda Singh Bahadur, the general Guru Gobind Singh Ji sent to Punjab, popularised it, and that it served as an enduring source of inspiration through the persecutions that followed, when Sikhs were hunted in the jungles and the phrase was a vow that tyranny would not have the last word. Its spirit is the spirit the Kosh calls Chardi Kala, ever rising optimism in the face of loss. And once, the promise was acted out almost literally. When the Sikh armies under Sardar Baghel Singh, Sardar Jassa Singh Ahluwalia and Sardar Jassa Singh Ramgarhia took Delhi in 1783, Wikipedia relates, they did the seva of the historic gurdwaras of the city, and then, instead of claiming the crown, asked the ruler of Delhi to rule with conscience and not to levy the jizya tax on non Muslims. Rule, in the Khalsa sense, arrived as service and restraint, and then the army went home.

Is Raj a kingdom, or a way of ruling?

Readers have argued over the couplet for as long as it has been sung, and the argument is itself part of its life. One line of reading, represented by Kapur Singh and cited in the scholarship, hears a plain will to sovereignty: the Khalsa is a sovereign people, and its rule is a real hope in real history, the hope the misls and then Maharaja Ranjit Singh and his Sarkar i Khalsa partly fulfilled. Another line hears the spiritual conquest described above. Sarna joins the two with an older Sikh ideal: Guru Nanak Dev Ji and his own vision of Halemi Raj, the benevolent rule under which, as Guru Granth Sahib Ji says, all abide in peace. On that reading raj was never meant as tyranny. It is the triumph of justice, unity and divine order, the same union of temporal and spiritual duty that the Kosh entry on ਮੀਰੀ ਪੀਰੀ sets out. What the couplet rules out, on every reading, is rule without righteousness: the Khalsa that rules is the Khalsa that stays pure, and the refuge promised to the defeated stands in the same breath as the rule itself.