The Sikh Times - Biographies - W. Hew McLeod: Historian of a Living Faith

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W. Hew McLeod: Historian of a Living Faith

By RUKUN ADVANI

The Telegraph, Calcutta, Jul. 17, 2002

W. Hew McLeod, 2002

"Just over 300 years ago, on the day of Baisakhi in the year 1699, the tenth Sikh guru, Gobind Singh, is believed by tradition to have summoned a vast concourse of his followers in Anandpur, a small town in Punjab. When the multitude had gathered, the guru stunned them into silence by demanding that five among them must instantly volunteer to be decapitated: they must agree to be beheaded there and then, on the spot. Guru Gobind Singh's predecessor, Guru Tegh Bahadur, had sacrificed himself a short while earlier in like manner, by allowing himself to be arrested and executed by Aurangzeb. He had hoped by this means to reveal Mughal tyranny and incite the "lions" of Punjab to resist it. Now, Guru Gobind Singh was extending the example set by his predecessor."
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"This was partly in response to Sikh difficulties with the Mughals. The idea was to make the faithful militant, martial and ready for martyrdom. In this respect, the effort was also to make Sikhs quite fundamentally different from the sort of devotional, peace-loving followers that Guru Nanak and his 16th century successors had expected them to be. A process of emulation was at work: the techniques of jihadic Islam were implicitly being valorized and duplicated to forge a new identity. Sikhism was at a crossroads, and it was Guru Gobind Singh who, by starting the khalsa, would initiate its distinctive character of aggression and manliness, far-removed from the pious docility of Nanak."
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"It took a while for the crowd to digest Guru Gobind Singh's demand, but his insistence finally yielded a man who was led into a nearby tent, from whence issued the loud thud of a sword decapitating the sacrificial victim. A Sikh with bloodstained sword emerged from the tent, and the guru then asked for a second volunteer, who appeared and was similarly dispatched. Three more followed; finally all five volunteers had been accounted for, and the guru had proved the existence of Sikh valour even as he had established his authority to lead them. At this point, the tradition goes, Guru Gobind Singh drew aside the flap of the death-chamber tent to reveal the five living Sikh volunteers alongside five decapitated goats."
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"We may presume the crowd was as awestruck as it was relieved, and that since the goats had been dispatched by the favoured jhatka method, they constituted the lunch that followed. This palatably gory story is told within what may be the best short account of Sikh tenets and history that has ever been published. The book is called Who is a Sikh? (Clarendon, 1989) and its narrator, who has done more to sift Sikh history from Sikh tradition and legend than anyone else, is neither Khushwant Singh nor J.S. Grewal (the two best-known living Indians of Sikh history)."
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"He is, curiously, a 70-year-old historian from New Zealand who has, over the past 40 years of sustained scholarship and research supervision, strong claims to being the father of modern Sikh studies. His name is W.H. McLeod. Within the historiography of Punjab, Hew McLeod (as he likes to be called) has far more significance than his contemporary and fellow countryman, Edmund Hillary, has within the history of Indian mountaineering."
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"In another way, however, Hew McLeod's career bears some resemblance to that of the anthropologist-writer, Verrier Elwin, who came to India on a proselytizing stint as a Christian missionary, found himself converted instead, and devoted his life to studying tribal India. Transpose the same scenario to Punjab about two generations later, and Hew McLeod is what you get. He was born to a New Zealand sheep farmer (apparently most of New Zealand is born to sheep farmers), decided against farming, and went off to the University of Otago in Dunedin, followed by three years at a theological college. In the late Fifties, he applied to his church for an overseas appointment and was given a job teaching English in Punjab."
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"In Punjab, McLeod quickly realized he was less equipped than local teachers to teach English, and he therefore turned to his real interest, history. Sikh history was the obvious subject. Within a few years he had published his first book, Guru Nanak and the Sikh Religion (1968), a classic work which remains in print to this day. Like Romila Thapar, whose first monograph, titled Asoka and the Decline of the Mauryas, also appeared at this time, McLeod had worked with and was indebted to the influential historian of India of this period, Professor A.L. Basham."
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"At the time that McLeod started his career, Sikh history was written in a fairly traditional manner - straightforward chronological "developments" and "progress" were traced; theological issues were not clearly or strictly separated from historical facts; leaders, gurus and elites were more written about than dissenting movements, religious mobilizations and cultural issues. Two influences thus became crucial to McLeod's efforts. The first was an awareness that Sikh history could not possibly be studied without an intimate knowledge of Sikh religion, even if only in order that the two might be more authentically separated from each other. The second influence was his awareness that he was no longer a believing Christian, which made him, like Elwin, more dispassionately sympathetic towards the people he was living among."
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" 'My perspective,' he says, 'is from an essentially detached position as well as that of a former believer. I believe that it is one which enables me to view others with understanding and to pose questions which should be regarded as sympathetic.' "
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"Foreign historians of a living religion in the Orient are sometimes given a torrid time, both by xenophobic and insular religious adherents and officials who are resentful of what they see as an intrusion into their space, as well as by local secular historians who, possessing scarcer resources and facilities (and sometimes abilities), ridicule even the ablest non-Indian scholars. Ramachandra Guha's biography of Verrier Elwin, Savaging the Civilized, certainly makes a strong case against the attitude of local sociologists such as G.S. Ghurye and M.N. Srinivas to the activist, interventionist and (in that sense) unacademic anthropological work of Elwin."
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"Of course this is not always true: the work of Barbara Metcalf, Richard Eaton, Christian W. Troll, Douglas Henderson, Stephen Dale, Francis Robinson and Gail Minault, all foreign historians of Indian Islam, has been quite uniformly well-received within the country. Contrarily, one of the finest scholarly works on Sikh history, titled The Construction of Religious Boundaries: Culture, Identity and Diversity in the Sikh Tradition (1994), which is by a cent per cent sardar, Harjot Singh Oberoi, has met with sustained hostility from the authorities who control the dominant Akali tradition of khalsa Sikhism."
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"Hew McLeod, as well as the growing tribe of fine students he has supervised or overseen - Harjot Oberoi, Pashaura Singh, Louis Fenech, Jeevan Deol and Gurinder Singh Mann among them - are viewed with suspicion in many Punjabi circles, though McLeod himself feels he has, overall, been fortunate in this respect: 'In the preface to my first book I anticipated this sort of reaction, which is bound to be hostile when one is working on a living religion. That reaction has certainly come, but it has not affected my personal relations with even the most conservative members of the Panth. They stay far away from my books and they criticise them vigorously, but whenever I meet them I have had no problem of personal relations. . . . I have had no difficulty securing access to material, nor have I any objection to the manner in which my work has been received and strongly criticised.' "
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"Almost all of Hew McLeod's many books are well known and continuously available in India. The bulk are addressed to scholars, and his contribution to Sikh studies has been profound. For anyone who wishes to understand the essence of Sikh scriptural writing - the janam sakhis, the rahit nama, the gur bani and the Adi Granth - as well as how the Indian sardar has evolved into the distinctive shape he possesses today, the historian to read is Hew McLeod."
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