ਸਰਦਾਰ ਕਪੂਰ ਸਿੰਘਸਰਦਾਰ ਕਪੂਰ ਸਿੰਘ

Sirdar Kapur Singh (1909 to 1986) was a Sikh scholar, writer and politician whose life ran through Punjab's most testing decades. He served as an officer of the Indian Civil Service, lost that career for protesting against a government order he saw as biased against Sikhs, and then spent the rest of his life writing books on Sikh thought and politics that are still quoted today. His best known work is Sachi Sakhi, his Punjabi memoirs, and he is widely credited with drafting the Anandpur Sahib Resolution of 1973.

Who was Sirdar Kapur Singh?

He was a man of two careers, and the first ended because of the second. Kapur Singh was born into a farming family in undivided Punjab, rose through the Indian Civil Service to become a deputy commissioner, and was dismissed in 1949 after he protested against a circular he believed defamed the Sikh community. In his second career he became one of the most learned and most argued about voices in Sikh life: a prolific author in English and Punjabi, a parliamentarian, and in October 1973 the National Professor of Sikhism, a title conferred on him by the Jathedar of the Akal Takht.

Two things must be kept clear about him. First, he is not ਨਵਾਬ ਕਪੂਰ ਸਿੰਘ ਜੀ, the 18th century Sikh leader who organised the Dal Khalsa. The two men share a name and nothing else, and they lived more than 150 years apart. Second, he was a controversial figure even among his admirers. Guru Nanak Dev University, which published his selected works, called him both one of the most controversial figures and the greatest scholar of Sikhism. His admirers praise his learning and his courage; his critics found him blunt and dogmatic. Both sides agree that he could not be ignored.

Early life and education

Kapur Singh was born on 2 March 1909 at Chakk village in Lyallpur district, in the Punjab that is now Pakistan. His father was Didar Singh, and the family were farmers. He was a brilliant student. At Government College, Lahore, he took his Master of Arts in philosophy in 1931, topping the Punjab University list of successful candidates. He then went to Cambridge University in England, where he took his Tripos in Moral Sciences in 1934 and passed the Indian Civil Service examination.

His Cambridge years fell in the time of the Round Table Conferences in London, when the future of India was being argued in public. He kept cordial relations with Muhammad Ali Jinnah and other Muslim League leaders, and before Partition he acted as an interlocutor for the Sikhs in talks with them. He also mastered languages with an ease that became part of his reputation: besides English and Punjabi he knew Hindi, Persian, Arabic and Sanskrit, and he read widely in philosophy, history and the classical literatures of East and West.

The ICS officer who stood up to his own government

Kapur Singh joined the Indian Civil Service in 1933 and served as a district officer under the British Raj and then in independent India. He held the post of deputy commissioner in several districts, including Karnal and, in 1947, Kangra. He was an able administrator, but he was never a quiet one. In 1941 the British Government of India confiscated every copy of his book The Hour of the Sword, a work on Sikh history drawn from Rattan Singh Bhangu's Prachin Panth Prakash. In March 1942 he travelled to Wardha to meet Mahatma Gandhi, and in 1948 he entertained the Akali leader Master Tara Singh at the deputy commissioner's bungalow in Dharamsala, gestures that marked him out in a service that prized discretion.

The break came over a circular dated 10 October 1947, issued by the Punjab governor, Chandu Lal Trivedi, warning district officers about what it described as the criminal tendencies of the Sikh people. Kapur Singh filed a strong protest against the charge. The governor took offence, charges were brought against him, and in April 1949 he was suspended from the service. He was never reinstated. He believed he had been singled out for his protest, and the episode became the turning point of his life: the civil servant became a full time scholar and writer.

What is Sachi Sakhi?

Sachi Sakhi, which means True Testimony, is Kapur Singh's Punjabi memoir, first published in 1972 with a second edition in 1979. It is part autobiography and part contemporary history, and it is the book for which he is most widely read. In it he gives his own account of the years around Partition, the Communal Award, the negotiations that led to independence, and what he saw as the failures of Sikh leadership in those years. His tone is unsparing, toward the British, toward the Congress leadership, and toward Sikh leaders themselves, and the book earned him the displeasure of the Indian government.

Sachi Sakhi was only one part of an enormous output. The 1950s and 1960s were his most prolific decades. His books in English include Parasaraprasna, a classic treatise on Sikh philosophy published by Guru Nanak Dev University; The Sacred Writings of the Sikhs, a UNESCO publication to which he contributed with scholars such as Khushwant Singh and Dr Trilochan Singh; Me Judice, a miscellany of essays; Contributions of Guru Nanak; Sikhism for Modern Man; The Hour of the Sword; Guru Arjan and Sukhmani; Some Insights into Sikhism; and Sikhism an Oecumenical Religion. In Punjabi he wrote Hashish, a book of poems; Saptsaring, a set of biographies; Bahu Vistaar and Pundrik, collections of essays on culture and religion; Bikh meh Amrit, political essays and lectures; and Mansur-al-Hallaj, a monograph on the Sufi saint. His essays also appeared regularly in The Sikh Review, where he remained on the editorial advisory board until his death.

The Anandpur Sahib Resolution

Kapur Singh's most lasting mark on Sikh politics came in 1973. After the Shiromani Akali Dal won only one of Punjab's thirteen Lok Sabha seats in 1971 and 24 of 117 assembly seats in 1972, the party appointed a twelve member sub-committee on 11 December 1972 to restate its programme and policies. Kapur Singh served as counsel to the sub-committee, and the draft that emerged from its ten meetings carried his impress. The working committee of the Akali Dal adopted it unanimously at ਅਨੰਦਪੁਰ ਸਾਹਿਬ on 16 and 17 October 1973, and it became known as the Anandpur Sahib Resolution.

The resolution set out the Akali Dal's religious postulates, drawn from Guru Nanak's teaching of Nam Japo, Kirat Karo and Vand Chhako, and its political goal: an autonomous region in the north of India, with the Centre keeping only defence, foreign relations, currency and communications. It also put forward the ideas Kapur Singh had developed in his writings, including the double sovereignty of the Sikhs and the theo-political status of the Golden Temple, ideas rooted in the Sikh doctrine of ਮੀਰੀ ਪੀਰੀ. The resolution was endorsed again at the All India Akali Conference at Ludhiana in October 1978, and it has remained a reference point in every debate about Punjab and the Sikh community since.

Kapur Singh had already set out much of this thinking in public. His presidential address to the Hari Singh Nalwa Conference at Ludhiana on 14 July 1965, which the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism describes as clearly his handiwork, declared that the Sikhs had agreed to merge into a common Indian nationality on the understanding that they would be co-sharers in the community, and that there was no alternative left but to demand a self-determined political status within the Republic of India. His speech in the Lok Sabha on 6 September 1966 is still described as a magna carta of Sikh demands, and the resolution he helped to draft grew from the same vision of the ਖਾਲਸਾ ਪੰਥ as a distinct political community.

ਬਾਅਦ ਦਾ ਜੀਵਨ ਅਤੇ ਵਿਰਾਸਤ

Kapur Singh entered active politics at the urging of Akali leaders. In 1962 he was elected to the Lok Sabha from Ludhiana as a candidate of the Swatantra Party, and he served in Parliament until 1967. In 1969 he was elected to the Punjab Legislative Assembly. In the same year as the Anandpur Sahib Resolution, October 1973, the Jathedar of the Akal Takht conferred on him the status of National Professor of Sikhism. In April 1979 he travelled to Los Angeles, where he addressed the Khalsa Council of Sikh Dharma of the Western Hemisphere and assured its members that their distinct titles and practices fitted within the broad stream of Sikh history, a history that begins with ਗੁਰੂ ਗੋਬਿੰਦ ਸਿੰਘ ਜੀ ਨੇ and the Khalsa he founded.

He died after a protracted illness at his home in Jagraon, in Ludhiana district, on 13 August 1986. He was 77. Guru Nanak Dev University later published a selection of his writings, beginning with Guru Nanak's Life and Thought. His legacy is still argued over, as it was in his lifetime, but his place in Sikh letters is secure: no history of modern Sikh thought is complete without Sachi Sakhi, and no account of Sikh politics can avoid the resolution he helped to write.