Sikhs from Assam begin search for roots:
An interesting article you might wish to read if you have time. It is about the small sikh community of Assam and how they landed up in a far off place and sacrificed their lives.
After successfully defeting the Mighty mughals 19 times (for further reading read
Battle of Saraighat - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)
, the Assamese army was subjected to the Burmese invasisons . The then king of Assam Chandrakanta Simha Requested for help from most of the kingdoms. But only response was from Maharaja Ranjit Singh of Punjab. He dispatched fifth generation of Sikh soldiers to Assam to help fight the Burmese invaders. Most of the soldiers died in the battlefield.Most of them who survived stayed back, married locals and gave birth to the community called Assamese Sikhs.
This is the contrast that on one side Kings like Raja Ram Singh was fighting for the Mughals against sikhs, marathas and assamese i.e against our very own people. On the contrary Sikhs were voluntarily helping us save our motherland from invaders.
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In March 2009 , 186-member jatha arrives in Amritsar from Assam
Makhan Singh has been listening to tales of his ancestral village, Sarobar near Adampur in Jalandhar, since childhood. But for the first time in his life, the 25-year-old from Lanka, near Guwahati, assam, is on a visit to the land his forefathers left to settle in faraway Assam.
Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee chief Avtar Singh Makkar had visited Assam two months back and facilitated the visit. The jatha, which was given a warm welcome by the SGPC today. is now faced with the herculean task of finding their relatives.
“We will help them find their relatives in the state. Some of them have their origins in Pakistani Punjab, too. We will try and help them reach them as well,” said Makkar.
Some, meanwhile, have already found their relatives. “I have established contact with my distant uncle Naseeb Singh, who lives in a village nearby. I will soon leave to meet him,” says Makhan.
Rajendra Singh of Borkala, near Guwahati, has a cousin in Baba Bakala. “Her son visited me in Assam recently and now I want to reciprocate,” he said.
A member of the group, Kamaljit Singh, said the community, which has swelled to over 50,000 in number, has its own gurdwaras in assam and follows the religion “as it should be”.
Most of Assamese Sikhs are in the police or the Army, while some have taken to agriculture and trade. Rajbir Singh, a retired ASP, who heads the Sikh Kalyan Parishad, an association of Assamese Sikhs, said the first group of Sikhs settled down in a village near Chaparmukh and the community now inhibits Barkola, Raha, Lanka, Hatipara, Hojai, Lumding and Kampur villages.
They participate in gurpurabs [birth and death anniversaries of Sikh gurus], baisakhi [the harvest festival] as well as Assamese festivals. They speak Assamese and generally follow the local code of conduct regading marriage, food, social discipline, and dress. They, however, are no less aware of their Sikh identity and do wear the five Ks. Their gurdwaras (often called namghars) follow some of the Sikh rituals as well as try to make room for the local style of worship. The comunity has been doing financially well as well.
It is very dishonouring that a segment of Punjab Sikhs call them as kacha [incomplete] Sikhs inspite of the fact that these men had maintained their Sikh identity over the centuries despite the tremendous distance from the Punjab and the prevalent non-Sikh culture around them besides they are very confident of their Sikh identity.
They are considered as true martial race in assam not only because of the fact that they are good at war but also because they are truly loyal to their men and their land. In the battlefield the result for sikhs and assamese is only one. i.e Victory OR death . There is no surrender.
