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As the Sikhs cleaved to Gobind's martial principles, the tales of their valor and ferocity became legion. They routed the Afghans at the Battle of Attock in 1813, and in 1849 they delivered a stinging defeat to the British at the Battle of Chillianwala. After they were forced to succumb to superior British firepower six weeks later, the Sikhs became among the sturdiest and trustiest men of the British army: during the great Indian Mutiny of 1857, the raj was kept alive by their support. After the British slaughtered nearly 400 civilians, many of them Sikhs, at Amritsar in 1919, the warriors changed allegiances and joined the crusade to bring down the raj. Sikh soldiers and policemen have, to this day, loyally protected their Hindu compatriots all over India.
With partition and independence in 1947, India went to the Hindus and Pakistan to the Muslims; the Sikhs were left in the middle. The Sikhs' home state of Punjab was cut to a third of its former size, and many Sikhs, finding themselves landless, became urban teachers, doctors and engineers. By now the vast majority of Sikhs are the very picture of middle-class respectability. Yet a small band of extremists has continued agitating, with ever more fervor, for a separate Sikh state that would be called Khalistan.
Their cause has enjoyed increasingly vigorous support in recent months from Sikhs abroad. "We may not be in India," said Amarjit Singh Dhillon, general secretary of the Supreme Council of Sikhs, in London last week. "But we are to the fighters in the homeland what the provisional Sinn Fein is to the Irish Republican Army here." In all, there are about 250,000 Sikhs in the U.S., 80,000 of them in New York and as many as 60,000 more in Northern California. Some 400,000 live in Britain.
When they first emigrated, many Sikhs tried to blend into their new homes by shedding their turbans and shaving their beards. But as they have grown more rooted and confident, they have proved characteristically resolute in defense of their customs. In 1969 Sikh bus crews in Britain defied, and defeated, a local transport committee that prohibited the wearing of turbans by employees. Then, mounting their own mobile version of civil disobedience, Sikh motorcyclists flouted British law by wearing their turbans in place of the required helmets. Just last year, after a private school refused admission to a 13-year-old Sikh boy whose father insisted he wear a turban, the three judicial peers who constitute Britain's highest court of appeal unanimously found the school guilty of racial discrimination. The Sikhs, they declared, were not just a religious community but an ethnic group. A group, moreover, that has never been shy about stressing its differences from the world around it. As one Sikh historian writes, "Where there is one Sikh, there is one Sikh. Where there are two Sikhs, there is an assembly of saints. Where there are five Sikhs, there is God."
—By Pico Iyer. Reported by Dean Brelis/New Delhi and James Shepherd/London