BAPTISM OF THE SWORD

The Khalsa was literally baptized in the shadow of the sword. He lived poised on its sharp edge, and he died kissing its cold steel. Indeed iron had gone into his soul at his nativity. But it would be a great mistake to associate the Khalsa with wanton wars and bloodshed. He took to the sword because of a crisis of conscience.
I find such a crisis even in Walt Whitman. It is my faith, he is the Guru’s Sikh born in America to plant his Khalsa ideal in the modern mind. John Bailey in sketching the spiritual change that the declaration of war in America wrought upon Walt Whitman tells us how his poetry thereafter acquired a deeper majesty and an unspeakable serenity. The poet of peace rose one morning and found himself the poet of war. “No soldier,” writes Mr. Bailey, “who fought in the ranks showed more than Whitman of these greatest gifts of war, and the war, taught him not only how to do his chosen work in the hospitals but how to give shape to his thoughts and experiences in some of the noblest war poems which have been written. Certainly there are none in the world which are closer to the actual facts. Only a few of those written in the Great War can compare with them in beauty which is afraid of no truth and the truth which in all its nakedness is yet seen to be beauty.” Again, “all genius has inconsistencies which to the measures of mere logic make it appear untrue to itself. Literature partakes of the rarity and fluidity of life, whereas logic and science have a rigid fixity, which, however necessary, seems like death to the freed eyes of art.” So here in these Drum-Taps, we have Whitman returning boldly upon himself. He who had ridiculed war as the forgotten and superceded theme of the poets of the old world, sounds is trumpet call with a note of the most uncompromising insistence:
Beat! beat! drums! –blow! bugles!
Through the windows-through the doors-burst like a ruthless force,
Into the solemn church, and scatter the congregation,
Into the school where the scholar is studying;
Leave not the bridegroom quiet-no happiness must he have now with his bride,
Nor the peaceful farmer any peace, ploughing his field or gathering his grain,
So fierce you whirr and pound you drums-so shrill you bugles blow.

I see in the poems of war by Whitman a poetic history of the Great Revolution of the spirit in the Punjab caused by Guru Gobind Singh’s spiritual genius.
On the banks of the Five Rivers in the Punjab were planted comrades thick as forests, making the poetic ambition of Whitman an ocularly visible fact centuries earlier. A great poetic experiment of socializing the great truth of soul was performed with success by the Gurus, and Whitman is calling the Khalsa out of the prairies and churches and cities of America. The songs of peace adorning the Guru Granth were being sung as usual at Anandpur, the seat of the Master, but he had a large drum especially made to sound forth his Song of the Sword. He called it the Ranjit, the Victory Drum. It was of an enormous size.
So did the Master declare the armed age even as Whitman did in “Eighteen Sixty-one” :
Arm’d year-year of the struggle,
No dainty rhymes or sentimental love verses for you terrible year,
Not you as some pale poetling seated at a desk lisping cadenzas piano,
But as a strong man erect, clothed in blue clothes, advancing, carrying a rifle on your shoulder,
With well-gristled body and sunburnt face and hands, with a knife in the belt at your side,
As I heard you shouting loud, your sonorous voice ringing across the continent,
Your masculine voice, O year, as rising amid the great cities.
At Anandpur stood Guru Gobind Singh by the side of his drum, contemplating the liberty of his people. There is a complete change of colour and shape in the gathering of the disciples around Him. A new nation had arrived. The Sikh history shows how the Khalsa fought, but it was all a poetic action. It was waged in the songs of the Great Guru to inspirit his people. The war had commenced in the Guru’s poems. His impassioned lyrics of war, “the Battle of Bhangani,” in Chandi-Charitra sound in our ears still. Life rooted in the Truth was allowed by Guru Gobind Singh to take the new course of the flood and the storm. The war-like tones and that clash of the steel and that spiritual impatience to die which we find in the pages of our history have a true correspondence in Whitman’s poems. Surely, no historical accounts show us the poetic genius of Guru Gobind Singhmanifested and enlarged in those wars which were waged insensately on him by the enemies of his thought and ideals. The pint-sized Hindu princess and the mighty Mughals could not endure Guru Gobind Singh being hailed as the “True King” of the people. Their attitude towards him reminds us of the causeless jealousy of the Jews towards the Son of God. Crucifixion of the Christ is seen here in our history as the crucifixion of the multitudes. In those poetic wars of Guru Gobind Singh, even the saints enlisted themselves as ordinary soldiers in love of Him. And our saints who chanted songs were the first in the world to organize a society similar in purposes to the present-day Red Cross Society. They visited the camps of friend and foe alike serving the wounded with water and victuals.
Guru Gobind Singh saw that there was no other way to breathe life into the dead masses of the Punjab, but by arming them and beating drums, and by flashing sabers in the glare of the sun. Dead ye are, rise to die, perchance to catch the spark of life in the battle-field! Earlier, Guru Har Gobind had roamed as the sun did set on the battle-field of Amritsar, wiping blood from the faces of his wounded disciples, nursing them and pouring into their soul his comfort and blessing. And now Guru Gobind Singh flashed upon the Muktsar battle-field like the divine father of his children, giving them his soul.