Guru Nanak's Punjab: The Buried History of Sikh-Muslim Kinship

When British census officers fanned out across Punjab in 1881, they ran into a problem their administrative categories could not solve. James Ibbetson, the officer overseeing the count, complained that he could record a person's caste with confidence but not their religion. A man who looked Hindu might list himself as Sikh; a Sikh might list himself as Hindu; both would go to bow before the shrine of a Muslim saint, and Muslims in the same villages kept up Hindu customs of their own. Between one census and the next, entire villages seemed to change faith, because the same person answered the question differently each time.

That anecdote, offered early in a long conversation on the Nous Podcast, is where the Punjab-based journalist Shiv Inder Singh begins an argument he returns to for nearly two hours: that the Punjab formed by Guru Nanak's teaching and by centuries of Sufi devotion never organized itself along the hard religious lines that colonial administration, and later national politics, tried to impose on it. Singh, who has covered Punjab for more than two decades for Indian and international publications including The Caravan and NewsClick, was speaking with host Bushra Khanum Fahad about a subject that runs through nearly every strand of Punjabi public life: the deep, documented, and now politically inconvenient closeness between Sikhs and Muslims, a closeness that predates Partition, survived it in fragments, and is being actively contested today.

"No Hindu, No Muslim"

Singh's starting point is Guru Nanak's own formulation, sometimes rendered as "there is no Hindu, no Muslim" — an assertion, Singh argues, that the Punjabi society of Guru Nanak's own time largely lived out rather than simply preached. He pairs it with a line from the seventeenth-century Sufi poet Bulleh Shah, who asked "Bulla, I know not who I am," as evidence of a Punjab that treated inherited religious identity as far less fixed than either colonial administrators or today's political parties assume. Even the everyday vocabulary of undivided Punjab avoided partition's binary: Sikhs and Muslims across Punjab, he notes, have long called Guru Nanak by different names without treating the difference as a dispute — Hindus and Sikhs address him as Guru, while Muslims in Pakistani Punjab still refer to him as their Peer, a spiritual guide, and an old saying holds that Baba Nanak is Guru to Hindus and Sikhs and Peer to Muslims.

Singh frames this not as sentimental nostalgia but as an intellectual inheritance with a specific lineage. Punjab, in his account, was shaped above all by two "intellectual revolutions" — Gurbani, the teachings and hymns of the Sikh Gurus, and the Sufi movement that ran alongside and often intertwined with it. Both planted the same values at the root of Punjabi identity: shared existence, brotherhood and a kind of practical secularism that later movements, from the Ghadar revolutionaries to the twentieth-century Naxalite current, drew on without discarding. That legacy, he says, is why Punjab keeps organizing around causes that are not narrowly its own: the earliest protests against the 2019 revocation of Kashmir's Article 370 status spread from Punjab to forty-five locations after an initial Chandigarh demonstration was blocked, and Punjabis were visible in the movement against the Citizenship Amendment Act before the 2020-21 farmers' protest became the movement most identified with the state.

Companions, Not Combatants

The bulk of Singh's argument rests on episodes from Sikh history he lays out in detail, precisely because, he says, they run against a version of history now being promoted that recasts the Sikh Gurus' era as a continuous conflict between Sikhs and Muslims. Guru Nanak's own closest companion on his travels, the Udasis, was Bhai Mardana, a Muslim minstrel Singh describes as a brother to the Guru rather than a follower. The foundation stone of Harmandir Sahib — the Golden Temple, Sikhism's holiest site — was laid, in an episode central to Sikh tradition, by the Sufi saint Sai Mian Mir. The land on which Nankana Sahib, the gurdwara marking Guru Nanak's birthplace, now stands was a gift from a Muslim landowning friend; the property remains registered to this day in the name of "Nanak Shah Fakir."

The pattern continues across generations of Sikh Gurus, in stories Singh treats as documented history rather than folklore. Humayun, after losing a battle, is said to have sought the blessings of Guru Angad Dev. Akbar reportedly visited Guru Amar Das, ate langar, and, in an account tied to the founding of Amritsar, donated the land on which the city was built. The pluralist Mughal prince Dara Shikoh maintained close ties with Guru Hargobind. Two episodes stand out from the life of Guru Gobind Singh: when Mughal forces encircled him at Machhiwara, the Muslims Ghani Khan and Nabi Khan disguised him as a Peer and carried him past the soldiers, telling them only that they were escorting their spiritual guide. Separately, an ally named Nihang Khan sheltered a wounded Sikh fighter by hiding him in his daughter's room, telling soldiers he was concealing his son-in-law. In Raikot, near Ludhiana, the Guru gifted a perforated vessel to his friend Rai Kalla, an object Singh says the friend's descendants in Pakistan still keep and display each year to visiting Sikh pilgrims.

Singh also points to the Guru Granth Sahib itself, which incorporates the verses of the Muslim Sufi poet Baba Farid alongside those of Kabir, granting Farid's writing the same devotional status as a Guru's own composition. And he traces the pattern into the Sikh empire: Maharaja Ranjit Singh, though a Sikh ruler, kept a Muslim foreign minister, took Muslim wives, and is remembered in Punjabi lore partly through Moran, a Muslim courtesan associated with his court — evidence, in Singh's telling, of a ruling culture that never treated religious difference as a barrier to trust.

1947 and the Betrayal of That Inheritance

Against this backdrop, Singh describes Partition as the deepest wound in Punjab's history — deeper, he argues, than any political violence that followed it. He cites newer estimates, drawn from research by Pakistani Punjabi historians, putting the death toll at roughly fifteen lakh Punjabis on both sides of the new border, revising older figures of ten lakh; a crore of Punjabis, of every faith, were uprooted from their homes, and the sexual violence against women during the migrations ran into the lakhs. What makes the memory unbearable, in his account, is less the scale than the intimacy of the betrayal: neighbours who had addressed each other as uncle or brother turned on one another overnight, invoking the sacred formulas of their own religions while committing atrocities against people they had called their own daughters and sisters.

Singh is emphatic that ordinary Punjabis, as distinct from the political leadership of the Muslim League, did not want the province divided; he points to the Unionist Party governments of Sikandar Hayat Khan and Khizr Hayat Tiwana, and to a late, failed proposal — recorded in Rajmohan Gandhi's history of Punjab — to carve out a single unified Punjab rather than split it between the two new nations. The demand came too late, and the province lost Lahore, which Singh calls the loss from which Punjabi culture never fully recovered. He notes a demographic consequence still visible today: Pakistani Punjab's population of roughly fourteen crore dwarfs the Indian Punjab's three crore, a gap he connects to a wider argument, that a smaller, minority-scale Muslim population in India, a direct consequence of Partition, has made Muslims easier to target politically than they would otherwise be.

Even the vocabulary Punjabis use for the two halves of their former province, Singh says, resists the language of nations. Punjabi newspapers and speech on the Indian side still avoid "Indian Punjab" and "Pakistani Punjab" altogether, using instead Charda Punjab — the Punjab where the sun rises, the east — and Launda Punjab, where it sets, the west. Referring to the two Punjabs by nationality, in this framing, is itself experienced as a further partition.

Those Who Refused

Amid the killing, Singh singles out a handful of figures who tried to save people across the religious line that had suddenly turned lethal, and who paid for it. Gahal Singh Chhajjalwaddi sheltered Muslims from mob violence around Amritsar in 1947; Sikh extremists, who judged this a betrayal, burned him alive. Two other rescuers, Megh Singh and Suba Singh, were killed for the same reason. Across the new border, Sai Umruddin of Lyallpur worked to protect Sikhs and Hindus during the same months and was killed by Muslims for it. Singh offers these as evidence that the violence of 1947 was not simply Muslims against Sikhs and Hindus, or the reverse, but a breakdown severe enough that protecting a neighbour of a different faith could become a capital offence within one's own community.

He connects this history to smaller, present-day gestures he has documented as a reporter. In a village near Ludhiana, an elderly man built a modern house but deliberately preserved a decrepit old sitting area in front of it, explaining that he keeps it in case descendants of the Muslim family that once lived there return and want something familiar. The same man tends both the village gurdwara and an old mosque inside its grounds, dividing money sent by relatives evenly between the two, because, he told Singh, they are houses of the same God. Singh also cites Muslim communities reciprocating during the 2023 Punjab floods, when an imam opened his mosque to displaced residents regardless of faith.

A History Being Rewritten

Singh's central political claim is that this inheritance — the Guru-era friendships, the shared scripture, the rescuers of 1947 — is inconvenient to a Hindu nationalist project that wants Punjab's Sikhs enlisted against Muslims rather than aligned with them, and he says this is visible in a new school curriculum he has seen that frames Sikh history purely as martial heroism against Mughal "villains." History, he objects, consists of facts, not the hero-and-villain structure of legend — facts that include a Guru's letter of reproach, the Zafarnama, to Aurangzeb, after which Aurangzeb reportedly wished to meet Guru Gobind Singh; and the Nawab of Malerkotla publicly objecting, on Islamic grounds, when the governor of Sirhind ordered the execution of the Guru's young sons — an intervention that has made Malerkotla, a majority-Muslim town, a place of particular respect in Sikh memory.

Singh argues the same erasure serves an electoral purpose today. He describes the BJP's strategy in Punjab as an attempt to fracture Sikh political unity from within — elevating figures who present as authentically Sikh while advancing the party's own agenda, naming Amritpal Singh, the Khalistan-sympathizing preacher who arrived from Dubai and won a Lok Sabha seat, as an example. Alongside this, the party cultivates a Hindu-versus-Sikh undercurrent without pushing it too far, since it still needs some Sikh votes, while separately courting Punjab's Dalit population, which Singh puts at roughly a third of the state and fragmented across thirty-nine sub-castes with real internal frictions — a complexity that has repeatedly defeated outside parties trying to consolidate that vote as a bloc.

He draws a sharp distinction between how Hindu nationalist politics has historically treated Sikhs and how it treats Muslims. Sikhs, in his account, have periodically been vilified as terrorists or Pakistan sympathizers, but the strategy toward them has been to "embrace to destroy" — symbolic gestures like a leader donning a turban for Sikh audiences — rather than the open violence directed at Muslims, a distinction he traces through the 1980s repression under Indira and Rajiv Gandhi's governments.

The Ghost of 1984 and the RSS

Discussing the anti-Sikh violence of 1984 that followed Indira Gandhi's assassination, Singh lays out documented associations between the killings and figures linked to the RSS and the BJP's precursor organizations, drawing on reporting he has published in The Caravan. He points to fourteen FIRs filed at Delhi police stations that together name forty-nine people affiliated with the Sangh Parivar, with the largest concentration of cases at the Srinivas Puri station in South Delhi; one of the accused named in those records had served as Atal Bihari Vajpayee's election agent in 1980. He also cites L.K. Advani's own memoir, in which Advani describes pressuring Indira Gandhi's government to send the army into the Golden Temple in 1984 as an achievement of his political career, and an essay by Nanaji Deshmukh, later awarded the Bharat Ratna, defending that military assault. Kapil Sibal, Singh recalls, raised some of this record on the floor of Parliament during the debate over Manmohan Singh's 1984 apology, without receiving an answer from BJP members present.

Singh extends the pattern forward: ten Sikh pilgrims killed in Pilibhit, Uttar Pradesh in 1991 under a BJP state government, later found to have been ordinary travellers wrongly branded as terrorists; land disputes between Sikh farmers and Gujarat's government under Narendra Modi's chief ministership; and remarks by Modi himself that Singh calls demeaning toward Sikhs, including a widely recalled description of Manmohan Singh as a "Shikhandi," using a term for a eunuch. He also cites journalist Nikita Saxena's 2019 report in The Caravan, which found "Sikh terrorism" remains official terminology in government documents even as the same government resists the phrase "Hindu terrorism."

The Politics of "Punjab '95"

Much of the conversation's second half turns to the recent, heavily censored film about Jaswant Singh Khalra — the Amritsar-based investigator who documented extrajudicial killings and disappearances by Punjab police during the insurgency years, and who was himself abducted and killed by police in 1995. Singh, who watched the film before its withdrawal, is skeptical of the censorship drama around it: after four years and 127 cuts by the Censor Board, he found nothing in the finished film that questioned the state itself. Its narrative, he argues, isolates blame on five or six rogue police officers while presenting the CBI and judiciary favourably — propaganda, in his reading, that authorities nonetheless blocked, first delaying its theatrical release and then pulling it from a streaming platform within two days, letting it circulate uncontrolled on WhatsApp and in village screenings rather than run its course in cinemas. Politically, he sees rival factions using the film for different ends: the Akali Dal's Sukhbir Badal offering to screen it in gurdwaras despite what Khalra's own family describes as years of indifference from the party, while BJP leaders split between officially backing its release and, in Ravneet Bittu's case — the grandson of assassinated former chief minister Beant Singh — using it to stir Hindu resentment.

On Khalra himself, Singh offers a qualified assessment rather than simple celebration. He credits Khalra's documentation of police killings as serious and largely accurate, while disputing Khalra's own estimate of 25,000 extrajudicial deaths against other researchers' figures of roughly 6,000 to 12,000, with 297 bodies specifically traced. But Singh withholds the label "human rights activist" without qualification, on the grounds that Khalra, in writings from the early 1990s, described Indira Gandhi's assassins as greater martyrs than the independence-era revolutionaries Bhagat Singh and Kartar Singh Sarabha. A genuine human rights position, Singh argues, cannot justify individual killings regardless of cause; he suggests "Sikh activist" as the more accurate term for someone who documented state violence with real courage while excusing violence from the other direction.

Crossing Charda and Launda Punjab

The conversation closes on Singh's own experience of the border his subject keeps circling back to. He describes two recent visits to Pakistani Punjab — in 2024 for the World Punjabi Conference and in 2025 for the Faiz Festival, where he spoke alongside journalists including Munizae Jahangir and Beena Sarwar — and recalls a childhood spent secretly tuning into Radio Lahore, memorizing its schedule, and writing letters to a program host whose decades-later reunion with him in Lahore he treats as a small emblem of a connection surviving beneath the politics. He describes shopkeepers in Lahore refusing his money once they learned he had come from "Charda Punjab," and a Pakistani friend's grandmother's Partition displacement surfacing, unprompted, over a shared meal.

Singh is careful, though, not to romanticize the present moment. He notes that during recent India-Pakistan tensions, including the aftermath of the Pahalgam attack and the military exchanges that followed, Punjab was the one Indian state where farmers, students and ordinary residents organized visible peace protests against escalation — protests that found an echo in parallel demonstrations in Lahore, Karachi and Islamabad, including participation by Singh's own Pakistani contacts, among them Faiz Ahmed Faiz's daughter Salima. He is critical of both governments' response to the crisis, arguing that while Pakistan restricted access to independent domestic critics such as the physicist Pervez Hoodbhoy, India allowed its own television ecosystem to fuel nationalist fervour largely unchecked. For Singh, that asymmetry — jingoism amplified, dissent narrowed, on both sides of a border his own family's language still refuses to name by nationality — is the clearest evidence that the shared Punjab Guru Nanak's teaching once made possible now survives mostly in memory, gesture and stubborn habit, waiting, as he puts it by way of a couplet from Amrita Pritam, for all that remains to be said.