I meant that as an equivalent to a "character arc" in storytelling.Oh yes, the "Snape kills Dumbledore" and "Darth Vader is Luke's father" of LttW.
So it begins. The "the frontier of civilisation" is about to be re-established.
What is a "historical arc"?
Look to the West Volume VIII: The Bear and the Basilisk
- Thread starter Thande
- Start date
Oh, yes, thanks. England changed tack remarkably fast, though.
Indeed. However, one can easily argue that even then, England was generally pretty consistent in not wanting a single Great Power in control of the whole Low Countries, especially not France. But that was also about the height of the Dutch Republic's naval power so they might have looked like the most challenging rival. After all, it was the Dutch, not the French, who successfully landed troops in England.
I'm a little confused on the situation. Who's on whose side in the Franco-Russian / Franco-Belgian War? What about the ENA? What about Feng China? What about Persia, I know there was fighting going on there but who are the Persians siding with? More importantly, when are the Combine going to get involved if they haven't already.
"Vitebsk Pact:" Russia, Belgium, Poland, Czechosilesia
The French Side: France, Germany, Persia, ENA, England, Scandinavia
I might be missing some.
Last edited:
France and their allies (including greater powers likes Germany and Norden), the ENA and their allies, and Persia and their allies are all co-belligerents and are fighting Russia and their allies. China was also supposed to gang up on Russia, but signed non-agression with Russia at the last moment.
The Societists are mostly waiting so far.
We know for a fact that the Combine and ENA fight towards the end of the period, obviously over Carolina revolting against American rule and either seeking help from down in South America (just like what happened in the Great American War in the minds of the idealistically turned views of the uninformed) or is aided by the Black Flag wavers from the onset.
So fighting will definitely take place in the Caribbean and I thinks it’s all but confirmed that a good portion of the once proud Kingdom of Carolina is going Societist, which means the ENA much have lost badly
I also just realized that we finally got some new info on the Iberian Crisis mentioned so many updates ago! And was anyone else thinking “we have always been at war with Eurasia/Eastasia”?
After several decades of neglect and other problems. I suspect the Societists are basically invited in, just because they seem to be a better option.
Modern-day Carolina complains of "buyer's remorse", but I wonder how much there actually was.
Even if the societists are invited in by the Carolinians, they still need to *take* it from the ENA.
Maybe it becomes “aligned” in the sense of what the Combine says it does like how a coma implies one still lives but does not move or act, Carolina isn’t technically under either sides control but realistically it’s just another Zone?
Depends upon how long it took them to realize that going from de facto meridian rule, then ENA rule, AND then wanting help from South America to get the ENA out basically doesn’t change the fact that an outside group STILL bosses them around
282.1
Thande
Donor
Part 282: A World at War
“And finally, a correction to yesterday’s broadcast in which we reported on the ongoing Global Games dispute over a young Panchali gymnast. Our thanks to, uh, His Excellency Mr, uh, Bhupendra...Bihari, the Panchali consul in Ultima, for his correction that the young lady’s name is pronounced Sangeeta and not Sangitta...”
*
From: “A Pocket Handbook of World Religions” edited by J. B. Waites (1995)—
With approximately 35 million adherents worldwide, overwhelmingly in the Indian states, Sikhism is one of the world’s smaller religions, comparable in size to Judaism. Like the Jews, however, the Sikhs have punched above their weight in their influence on world history, as well as frequently being defined by steadfast resistance to persecution.
Sikhism was founded by Guru Nanak (1469-1539). According to the Puratan Janamsakhi, in his youth he was fascinated by holy men and religious concepts, and one day went missing from his usual daily bath in the river. His family feared he had drowned, but he returned after three days to declare “God is neither Hindu nor Muslim”. He went on to found his own religious commune which would blossom into the Sikh faith. While secular historians dispute some of the hagiographic details of Nanak’s life (such as accounts of his great journeys to debate with holy men as far away as Tibet and Mecca) Nanak’s historicity is well attested. He became the first of ten human Gurus (an Indian term meaning religious teacher found in multiple faiths) who led the Sikhs. Sikhism has always been associated with Pendzhab, the Land of Five Rivers in which Nanak was born.[1]
Historically Sikhism has frequently been compared to Puritanism, Calvinism and other Protestant movements in the context of Christianity by students of comparative religion. Sikhism emphasises asceticism and equality in the face of conspicuous consumption and caste division. Sikhism emphasises the monotheism of One God; in fact, the first words of the Sikh scripture (q.v.) the prayer called the Mool Mantra, begins with this:
There is One God. Truth is his name. The Creator, without fear, without hate, without beginning or end. Beyond birth, self-existent, made known by the grace of the Guru.[2]
Egalitarian Sikhism holds that the Gurus should be respected but not worshipped, and would later abandon the idea of a priesthood altogether. Sikhism has also historically been a more Cytherean force in the Indian lands (though this is sometimes exaggerated by some accounts), notably opposing the Hindu practice of suttee (a widow being burnt on her husband’s pyre) and the Muslim one of veiling women.
In fact, as Sikhism drew on both former Hindu and Muslim converts, a major headache for the leaders of the faith was to ensure said converts did not attempt to follow two religions or sets of cultural practices in parallel. This is not helped by some radical scholars who argue that Sikhism is merely a reformed Hinduism, rather than its own faith. Some Sikh practices seem deliberately designed to force its adherents to make a choice. For example, Hindus celebrate Diwali (known in the French-speaking world as La grande fête des lumières des Indoux for political reasons) on a date around October-November according to their luni-solar calendar. This festival of lights has ancient significance to Hindus and Sikhs would be likely to join in for cultural reasons, but Sikhism instead highlights the date as Bandi Chhor Divas, the Day of Liberation, when Guru Hargobind was released from Mughal captivity and found his way home to Amritsar by the Diwali lights. This is similar to how early Christianity located Christmas to the date of the pagan festival Saturnalia in order to force people to make a choice rather than lackadaisically following both faiths.
A related cultural issue is that while Sikhism repeatedly emphasises opposition to the caste system (and unsurprisingly a disproportionate number of Dalits or ‘untouchables’ have embraced the faith) in practice discrimination has repeatedly reared its ugly head. Nonetheless, history has conspired to ensure that Sikhism has never fallen into a mere vague syncretism or variant on existing faiths. Countless Sikhs have been martyred for their faith over the long and bloody history of Pendzhab.
For the tenure of the first five Gurus, the Sikhs were generally regarded as a peaceful if not pacifist movement, something made more possible by the fact that they were tolerated by the inclusive Mughal Emperor Akbar the Great.[3] However, things changed after Akbar’s death and the Muslim Mughals began to persecute the Gurus, whose succession was often disputed at this point as the Sikhs became more political and administrative over their lands. The fifth Guru, Arjan, built the Harimandir (Abode of God) in Amritsar and compiled the Adi Granth or ‘first book’, the first organised written Sikh scriptures. The Harimandir, the most famous example of a Gurdwara (literally ‘Guru’s Door’, the name for a Sikh temple) is emblematic of the values of the religion. While structurally impressive, it is located physically lower than the surrounding city to emphasise humility. It is surrounded by a purifying moat of water with a single bridge to emphasise one goal – though often throughout history this has sadly been used for the more prosaic reason as being a better defence. The Harimandir has always been the symbolic target number one for persecution and suppression of the Sikhs by others, usually Muslims.[4]
In 1563 Guru Arjan was martyred at the hands of the Mughal Emperor Jahangir for refusing to convert to Islam. He was succeeded by Guru Hargobind, who led the Sikhs on a path to militarisation to resist persecution which would later define them as a group in the eyes of others. He led the Sikhs in battle as a general and won a notable victory over the Mughals at Amritsar in 1634, at a time when the Thirty Years’ War was similarly raging in Europe over matters of faith. Conflict between the Sikhs and Mughals continued on and off, with the ninth Guru, the warrior Guru Tegh Bahadur, being martyred by the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb – according to some accounts, not only because of his refusal to convert to Islam, but for defending the persecuted Hindus of Kashmir.
The tenth and final human Guru was originally known as Guru Gobind Rai, but in 1699 became known as Guru Gobind Singh following major reforms he made to the faith. The story goes that at the spring harvest festival of Vaisakhi, with the Sikhs once again facing persecution, the Guru asked for volunteers who would die for their faith. He disappeared with each man (of a wide variety of castes) into a tent and emerged each time with a bloody sword, yet volunteers kept coming until five had disappeared. He then emerged at the end with all five still alive and well. They were the Panj Piare, the Five Beloved, who became the first of the Khalsa, the Community of the Pure that the Guru had founded within Sikhism.[5] Frequently confused with all Sikhs by outsiders, the Khalsa are Sikhs who are baptised with sugar water (amrit) stirred by a sword to emphasise that they are those who will fight and die for their faith and to defend others (Dharam Yudh, a just war of last resort against oppression). They hold to certain behavioural rules, notably wearing the ‘five Ks’ – uncut hair (kesh), a wooden comb (kangha), a steel bracelet that evolved from a bracer or knuckle-duster for combat (kara), a sword (kirpan) and short trousers suitable for combat (kachera). Contrary to popular belief, wearing a turban is not technically required for Khalsa members or other Sikhs, it is simply a convenient way to keep the uncut hair under control, a way to identify other Sikhs at a distance, and evokes the egalitarianism of the faith as it was historically associated with the upper castes in the Indian lands. Despite this, the turban has become perhaps the most recognisable symbol of Sikhism outside of those lands.
In another attempted caste-busting measure, Khalsa members all take the surname Singh (‘lion’) for men and Kaur (‘princess’) for women. These are names associated with the upper castes, and by overwriting the followers’ original surnames, remove traces of their origins from which they might be judged. However, this has remarkably complicated modern attempts to keep track of individuals (such as the quist book!) and in practice Sikhs have had to adopt additional identifiers to prevent the need to sort through several thousand Singhs in a census record!
Guru Gobind Rai (now Guru Gobind Singh) rather than making a human successor, said that the respect of the office of the Guru should after his death pass to the Sikh scriptures, afterwards known as the Guru Granth Sahib. Guru Gobind Singh, the last human Guru, died due to complications of wounds inflicted by a Muslim assassin sent by the Nawab of Sarhandh. Ever after the authority has been held by the book rather than by a human being.
In addition to having a spiritual element, the Khalsa reforms also had the more pragmatic temporal reason that Guru Gobind Singh sought to replace the masand-based system of regional administration, which he felt had become corrupt. The Sarbat Khalsa was created as a legislative assembly. The Mughals launched a genocidal campaign against the Sikhs[6] and defeated Gobind’s disciple Banda Singh Bahadur at the Battle of Gurdas Nangal (1715) in which, according to some accounts, they outnumbered the Sikhs twenty to one. Despite torturing Banda Singh to death, the Mughals nonetheless were unable to permanently subdue the Sikhs, and the weakened Mughals granted the Sikhs a ‘jagir’ of land grant in 1733. Weakened by the Sikh wars among many other causes, the once-mighty Mughals were then defeated by the Persian conqueror Nader Shah. In the aftermath of this, in 1748 the Sarbat Khalsa reformed the Sikh domains into a series of ‘misls’, sometimes collectively described as the Dal Khalsa or Sikh Empire.
But if the Sikhs had hoped for a retreat from persecution, they would not be so lucky. When Nader Shah’s Afghan protégé Ahmad Shah Durrani returned and founded the Neo-Mughal Empire, the Sikhs were in the firing line. Durrani destroyed or desecrated the Harimandir twice, only for the Sikhs to patiently rebuild it both times.[7] The Sikhs stubbornly fought their way back to independence in 1781 and an independent Sikh polity – sometimes described as a Confederacy and sometimes as an Empire, depending on whose star was in the ascendant – was reborn, dividing the two halves of the Durrani inheritance in two.[8]
History repeated itself as the two Durrani empires clashed in civil war and weakened themselves, just as the Mughals they had conquered had. In 1811 the Battle of Ajmir between the two sides provided an opportunity for the Sikhs to gain further power and control over more of Pendzhab, naming the general Kanwaljit Singh as their Maharajah.[9] This office did not (consistently) long survive Kanwaljit’s death, being little compatible with the egalitarianism (and factional infighting) of the Sikh people. The Sikhs enjoyed a generation of relative peace and prosperity, barring the aforementioned occasional infighting, until the rise of the Mahdi and the Great Jihad once again plunged northern India into a storm of religious violence and persecution. Nadir Shah II, the son of the last effective Neo-Mughal Emperor Mohammed Shah II, attempted to direct the path of the Jihad southwards towards Hindus and Christians and away from his own lands.[10] This met with some success at first, but as the Jihad dragged on for years and new volunteer mujahideen arrived from distant climes, eventually northern India came to suffer as well.
As before, the Sikhs fought bravely against impossible odds and survived, in part thanks to the leadership of Hari Sarandeep Singh, who rose from generalship to command. In his time the office of Maharajah was treated somewhat like that of a Roman Dictator, being a temporary appointment in time of war – which appeared to be all the time. Though different groups of mujahideen sacked Amritsar and damaged the Harimandir twice more in the 1850s and 1860s, the Dal Khalsa lived on. However, Sikh losses did tell, and Kashmir – which the Sikhs had controlled as part of their domains in the 1820s – was lost.
Nonetheless, the weakened Sikh Empire was still intact in 1884 when a Russian exploratory mission reached Pendzhab. With most people outside India assuming the whole of the area was the devastated and lawless ‘Aryan Void’ following the depredations of the mujahideen, it was a surprise to the Russian commander, Gennady Grigoriev, to find an organised state governing a substantial territory. The canny Grigoriev argued, in his report to the Imperial Soviet on his return, that it was in Russia’s interests to ensure news of the discovery did not leak out. The Soviet agreed; surviving papers indicate Grigoriev’s argument was so persuasive that he himself was nearly liquidated to keep the secret, but those council members were argued down. The Russians were remarkably successful in keeping the secrecy Grigoriev had suggested; later scholars consider it probable that the Persian government did know the Sikhs had survived, but for their own reasons they did not share this information with their Western allies. In 1886 a Russian trade mission was sent to Amritsar, which did not go well; Grigoriev found himself lost in the court intrigue of the Sikh factions and ultimately alienated those who should have been his natural allies.
Having decided that control over the Sikh lands would give Russia a vital foothold in northern India before the old European traders could venture north again, the Soviet agreed to launch an invasion by force. The Russo-Sikh Wars took place from 1888-1892; though the Russians were disadvantaged by operating on the end of a long supply line, they also had considerable technological superiority over the Sikhs, who were still fighting with what (in Europe) would be considered Jacobin Wars-era weapons and tactics. The Sikhs’ famed cavalry, in particular, was of little effect in the face of cingular gunfire. Despite this, the Sikhs’ courage and determination repeatedly impressed the Russian commanders on the ground, in particular General Evgeny Kurganov, who wrote on the subject to the Soviet and even directly to the Tsar. Kurganov’s account is notably distinct from how the Russians considered the Yapontsi. While the nindzhya were effective elite troops, they were looked down on as inhuman mad dogs, whereas the Sikhs met with genuine respect (though not from Grigoriev, who refused to concede it had been his own failure that had resulted in a lack of peaceful trade). According to Sikh accounts, it was also through a nindzhya assassin that Kurganov finally defeated their armies, with their commander Gurshuran Ujjal Singh being slain in such a manner before a battle – not unlike the fate of Guru Gobind Singh two centuries earlier.
The Sikhs were effectively offered a peace in which they would be largely left to their own devices, but would function as sepoy troops and administrators for the Russians’ attempt to carve out an empire in northern India. In practice, this was largely restricted to the existing Sikh lands, Kafiristan and Kashmir, which today comprise the modern Republic of Pendzhab.[11] It was certainly a contrast to how the Russians treated subject peoples in other parts of their empire, and perhaps a measure of how much Kurganov had been impressed – or, perhaps, how much he feared it would be impossible to rule the Sikh lands if the Russians pressed too hard.
It would be a couple of decades – admittedly with the great distraction of the Pandoric War and the rise of Societism! – before the rest of the world finally realised that the Russians were operating in northern India with the help of the Sikhs. And it would be another decade before the Russians learned that the Sikhs had not been idle, but were quietly and patiently planning for the day when they could, once again, break free...
[1] The Russian-influenced transliteration here is obviously an ex post facto decision, and largely reflects that knowledge of the region came into the West through Russian sources in TTL. Compare to how the capital of Burkina Faso will today always be called Ouagadougou in Anglophone histories today (reflecting its later French colonial history), even when talking about a pre-colonial era, though the few English-speakers who knew of it at the time used spellings like ‘Wogodogo’.
[2] As mentioned in the text, the exact translation of this is disputed (in OTL as well as TTL).
[3] This simplifies things a tad – for example the third Guru, Amar Das, did call on the Kshatriya warrior caste to fight to defend justice.
[4] Note that the text does not call the Harimandir the Golden Temple; this name only dates from 1830 in OTL, when Ranjit Singh had it rebuilt and coated in gold foil. The actual building has been rebuilt many times in both OTL and TTL due to the aforementioned persecution.
[5] In-universe the transliterations of these terms will also be Russian-influenced, but I have kept the OTL originals from English to avoid it becoming too impenetrable.
[6] This passes over the fact that often these campaigns were launched by nawabs who were becoming increasingly independent from Mughal control, not always by the Mughal central government.
[7] This happened in OTL as well, though the details are different.
[8] See Part #43 in Volume 1.
[9] See Part #87 in Volume 2.
[10] See Part #200 in Volume 4.
[11] See Part #262 in Volume 7.
“And finally, a correction to yesterday’s broadcast in which we reported on the ongoing Global Games dispute over a young Panchali gymnast. Our thanks to, uh, His Excellency Mr, uh, Bhupendra...Bihari, the Panchali consul in Ultima, for his correction that the young lady’s name is pronounced Sangeeta and not Sangitta...”
– Transcription of a C-WNB News Motoscope broadcast,
recorded in Waccamaw Strand, Kingdom of Carolina, 20/03/2020
recorded in Waccamaw Strand, Kingdom of Carolina, 20/03/2020
*
From: “A Pocket Handbook of World Religions” edited by J. B. Waites (1995)—
With approximately 35 million adherents worldwide, overwhelmingly in the Indian states, Sikhism is one of the world’s smaller religions, comparable in size to Judaism. Like the Jews, however, the Sikhs have punched above their weight in their influence on world history, as well as frequently being defined by steadfast resistance to persecution.
Sikhism was founded by Guru Nanak (1469-1539). According to the Puratan Janamsakhi, in his youth he was fascinated by holy men and religious concepts, and one day went missing from his usual daily bath in the river. His family feared he had drowned, but he returned after three days to declare “God is neither Hindu nor Muslim”. He went on to found his own religious commune which would blossom into the Sikh faith. While secular historians dispute some of the hagiographic details of Nanak’s life (such as accounts of his great journeys to debate with holy men as far away as Tibet and Mecca) Nanak’s historicity is well attested. He became the first of ten human Gurus (an Indian term meaning religious teacher found in multiple faiths) who led the Sikhs. Sikhism has always been associated with Pendzhab, the Land of Five Rivers in which Nanak was born.[1]
Historically Sikhism has frequently been compared to Puritanism, Calvinism and other Protestant movements in the context of Christianity by students of comparative religion. Sikhism emphasises asceticism and equality in the face of conspicuous consumption and caste division. Sikhism emphasises the monotheism of One God; in fact, the first words of the Sikh scripture (q.v.) the prayer called the Mool Mantra, begins with this:
There is One God. Truth is his name. The Creator, without fear, without hate, without beginning or end. Beyond birth, self-existent, made known by the grace of the Guru.[2]
Egalitarian Sikhism holds that the Gurus should be respected but not worshipped, and would later abandon the idea of a priesthood altogether. Sikhism has also historically been a more Cytherean force in the Indian lands (though this is sometimes exaggerated by some accounts), notably opposing the Hindu practice of suttee (a widow being burnt on her husband’s pyre) and the Muslim one of veiling women.
In fact, as Sikhism drew on both former Hindu and Muslim converts, a major headache for the leaders of the faith was to ensure said converts did not attempt to follow two religions or sets of cultural practices in parallel. This is not helped by some radical scholars who argue that Sikhism is merely a reformed Hinduism, rather than its own faith. Some Sikh practices seem deliberately designed to force its adherents to make a choice. For example, Hindus celebrate Diwali (known in the French-speaking world as La grande fête des lumières des Indoux for political reasons) on a date around October-November according to their luni-solar calendar. This festival of lights has ancient significance to Hindus and Sikhs would be likely to join in for cultural reasons, but Sikhism instead highlights the date as Bandi Chhor Divas, the Day of Liberation, when Guru Hargobind was released from Mughal captivity and found his way home to Amritsar by the Diwali lights. This is similar to how early Christianity located Christmas to the date of the pagan festival Saturnalia in order to force people to make a choice rather than lackadaisically following both faiths.
A related cultural issue is that while Sikhism repeatedly emphasises opposition to the caste system (and unsurprisingly a disproportionate number of Dalits or ‘untouchables’ have embraced the faith) in practice discrimination has repeatedly reared its ugly head. Nonetheless, history has conspired to ensure that Sikhism has never fallen into a mere vague syncretism or variant on existing faiths. Countless Sikhs have been martyred for their faith over the long and bloody history of Pendzhab.
For the tenure of the first five Gurus, the Sikhs were generally regarded as a peaceful if not pacifist movement, something made more possible by the fact that they were tolerated by the inclusive Mughal Emperor Akbar the Great.[3] However, things changed after Akbar’s death and the Muslim Mughals began to persecute the Gurus, whose succession was often disputed at this point as the Sikhs became more political and administrative over their lands. The fifth Guru, Arjan, built the Harimandir (Abode of God) in Amritsar and compiled the Adi Granth or ‘first book’, the first organised written Sikh scriptures. The Harimandir, the most famous example of a Gurdwara (literally ‘Guru’s Door’, the name for a Sikh temple) is emblematic of the values of the religion. While structurally impressive, it is located physically lower than the surrounding city to emphasise humility. It is surrounded by a purifying moat of water with a single bridge to emphasise one goal – though often throughout history this has sadly been used for the more prosaic reason as being a better defence. The Harimandir has always been the symbolic target number one for persecution and suppression of the Sikhs by others, usually Muslims.[4]
In 1563 Guru Arjan was martyred at the hands of the Mughal Emperor Jahangir for refusing to convert to Islam. He was succeeded by Guru Hargobind, who led the Sikhs on a path to militarisation to resist persecution which would later define them as a group in the eyes of others. He led the Sikhs in battle as a general and won a notable victory over the Mughals at Amritsar in 1634, at a time when the Thirty Years’ War was similarly raging in Europe over matters of faith. Conflict between the Sikhs and Mughals continued on and off, with the ninth Guru, the warrior Guru Tegh Bahadur, being martyred by the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb – according to some accounts, not only because of his refusal to convert to Islam, but for defending the persecuted Hindus of Kashmir.
The tenth and final human Guru was originally known as Guru Gobind Rai, but in 1699 became known as Guru Gobind Singh following major reforms he made to the faith. The story goes that at the spring harvest festival of Vaisakhi, with the Sikhs once again facing persecution, the Guru asked for volunteers who would die for their faith. He disappeared with each man (of a wide variety of castes) into a tent and emerged each time with a bloody sword, yet volunteers kept coming until five had disappeared. He then emerged at the end with all five still alive and well. They were the Panj Piare, the Five Beloved, who became the first of the Khalsa, the Community of the Pure that the Guru had founded within Sikhism.[5] Frequently confused with all Sikhs by outsiders, the Khalsa are Sikhs who are baptised with sugar water (amrit) stirred by a sword to emphasise that they are those who will fight and die for their faith and to defend others (Dharam Yudh, a just war of last resort against oppression). They hold to certain behavioural rules, notably wearing the ‘five Ks’ – uncut hair (kesh), a wooden comb (kangha), a steel bracelet that evolved from a bracer or knuckle-duster for combat (kara), a sword (kirpan) and short trousers suitable for combat (kachera). Contrary to popular belief, wearing a turban is not technically required for Khalsa members or other Sikhs, it is simply a convenient way to keep the uncut hair under control, a way to identify other Sikhs at a distance, and evokes the egalitarianism of the faith as it was historically associated with the upper castes in the Indian lands. Despite this, the turban has become perhaps the most recognisable symbol of Sikhism outside of those lands.
In another attempted caste-busting measure, Khalsa members all take the surname Singh (‘lion’) for men and Kaur (‘princess’) for women. These are names associated with the upper castes, and by overwriting the followers’ original surnames, remove traces of their origins from which they might be judged. However, this has remarkably complicated modern attempts to keep track of individuals (such as the quist book!) and in practice Sikhs have had to adopt additional identifiers to prevent the need to sort through several thousand Singhs in a census record!
Guru Gobind Rai (now Guru Gobind Singh) rather than making a human successor, said that the respect of the office of the Guru should after his death pass to the Sikh scriptures, afterwards known as the Guru Granth Sahib. Guru Gobind Singh, the last human Guru, died due to complications of wounds inflicted by a Muslim assassin sent by the Nawab of Sarhandh. Ever after the authority has been held by the book rather than by a human being.
In addition to having a spiritual element, the Khalsa reforms also had the more pragmatic temporal reason that Guru Gobind Singh sought to replace the masand-based system of regional administration, which he felt had become corrupt. The Sarbat Khalsa was created as a legislative assembly. The Mughals launched a genocidal campaign against the Sikhs[6] and defeated Gobind’s disciple Banda Singh Bahadur at the Battle of Gurdas Nangal (1715) in which, according to some accounts, they outnumbered the Sikhs twenty to one. Despite torturing Banda Singh to death, the Mughals nonetheless were unable to permanently subdue the Sikhs, and the weakened Mughals granted the Sikhs a ‘jagir’ of land grant in 1733. Weakened by the Sikh wars among many other causes, the once-mighty Mughals were then defeated by the Persian conqueror Nader Shah. In the aftermath of this, in 1748 the Sarbat Khalsa reformed the Sikh domains into a series of ‘misls’, sometimes collectively described as the Dal Khalsa or Sikh Empire.
But if the Sikhs had hoped for a retreat from persecution, they would not be so lucky. When Nader Shah’s Afghan protégé Ahmad Shah Durrani returned and founded the Neo-Mughal Empire, the Sikhs were in the firing line. Durrani destroyed or desecrated the Harimandir twice, only for the Sikhs to patiently rebuild it both times.[7] The Sikhs stubbornly fought their way back to independence in 1781 and an independent Sikh polity – sometimes described as a Confederacy and sometimes as an Empire, depending on whose star was in the ascendant – was reborn, dividing the two halves of the Durrani inheritance in two.[8]
History repeated itself as the two Durrani empires clashed in civil war and weakened themselves, just as the Mughals they had conquered had. In 1811 the Battle of Ajmir between the two sides provided an opportunity for the Sikhs to gain further power and control over more of Pendzhab, naming the general Kanwaljit Singh as their Maharajah.[9] This office did not (consistently) long survive Kanwaljit’s death, being little compatible with the egalitarianism (and factional infighting) of the Sikh people. The Sikhs enjoyed a generation of relative peace and prosperity, barring the aforementioned occasional infighting, until the rise of the Mahdi and the Great Jihad once again plunged northern India into a storm of religious violence and persecution. Nadir Shah II, the son of the last effective Neo-Mughal Emperor Mohammed Shah II, attempted to direct the path of the Jihad southwards towards Hindus and Christians and away from his own lands.[10] This met with some success at first, but as the Jihad dragged on for years and new volunteer mujahideen arrived from distant climes, eventually northern India came to suffer as well.
As before, the Sikhs fought bravely against impossible odds and survived, in part thanks to the leadership of Hari Sarandeep Singh, who rose from generalship to command. In his time the office of Maharajah was treated somewhat like that of a Roman Dictator, being a temporary appointment in time of war – which appeared to be all the time. Though different groups of mujahideen sacked Amritsar and damaged the Harimandir twice more in the 1850s and 1860s, the Dal Khalsa lived on. However, Sikh losses did tell, and Kashmir – which the Sikhs had controlled as part of their domains in the 1820s – was lost.
Nonetheless, the weakened Sikh Empire was still intact in 1884 when a Russian exploratory mission reached Pendzhab. With most people outside India assuming the whole of the area was the devastated and lawless ‘Aryan Void’ following the depredations of the mujahideen, it was a surprise to the Russian commander, Gennady Grigoriev, to find an organised state governing a substantial territory. The canny Grigoriev argued, in his report to the Imperial Soviet on his return, that it was in Russia’s interests to ensure news of the discovery did not leak out. The Soviet agreed; surviving papers indicate Grigoriev’s argument was so persuasive that he himself was nearly liquidated to keep the secret, but those council members were argued down. The Russians were remarkably successful in keeping the secrecy Grigoriev had suggested; later scholars consider it probable that the Persian government did know the Sikhs had survived, but for their own reasons they did not share this information with their Western allies. In 1886 a Russian trade mission was sent to Amritsar, which did not go well; Grigoriev found himself lost in the court intrigue of the Sikh factions and ultimately alienated those who should have been his natural allies.
Having decided that control over the Sikh lands would give Russia a vital foothold in northern India before the old European traders could venture north again, the Soviet agreed to launch an invasion by force. The Russo-Sikh Wars took place from 1888-1892; though the Russians were disadvantaged by operating on the end of a long supply line, they also had considerable technological superiority over the Sikhs, who were still fighting with what (in Europe) would be considered Jacobin Wars-era weapons and tactics. The Sikhs’ famed cavalry, in particular, was of little effect in the face of cingular gunfire. Despite this, the Sikhs’ courage and determination repeatedly impressed the Russian commanders on the ground, in particular General Evgeny Kurganov, who wrote on the subject to the Soviet and even directly to the Tsar. Kurganov’s account is notably distinct from how the Russians considered the Yapontsi. While the nindzhya were effective elite troops, they were looked down on as inhuman mad dogs, whereas the Sikhs met with genuine respect (though not from Grigoriev, who refused to concede it had been his own failure that had resulted in a lack of peaceful trade). According to Sikh accounts, it was also through a nindzhya assassin that Kurganov finally defeated their armies, with their commander Gurshuran Ujjal Singh being slain in such a manner before a battle – not unlike the fate of Guru Gobind Singh two centuries earlier.
The Sikhs were effectively offered a peace in which they would be largely left to their own devices, but would function as sepoy troops and administrators for the Russians’ attempt to carve out an empire in northern India. In practice, this was largely restricted to the existing Sikh lands, Kafiristan and Kashmir, which today comprise the modern Republic of Pendzhab.[11] It was certainly a contrast to how the Russians treated subject peoples in other parts of their empire, and perhaps a measure of how much Kurganov had been impressed – or, perhaps, how much he feared it would be impossible to rule the Sikh lands if the Russians pressed too hard.
It would be a couple of decades – admittedly with the great distraction of the Pandoric War and the rise of Societism! – before the rest of the world finally realised that the Russians were operating in northern India with the help of the Sikhs. And it would be another decade before the Russians learned that the Sikhs had not been idle, but were quietly and patiently planning for the day when they could, once again, break free...
[1] The Russian-influenced transliteration here is obviously an ex post facto decision, and largely reflects that knowledge of the region came into the West through Russian sources in TTL. Compare to how the capital of Burkina Faso will today always be called Ouagadougou in Anglophone histories today (reflecting its later French colonial history), even when talking about a pre-colonial era, though the few English-speakers who knew of it at the time used spellings like ‘Wogodogo’.
[2] As mentioned in the text, the exact translation of this is disputed (in OTL as well as TTL).
[3] This simplifies things a tad – for example the third Guru, Amar Das, did call on the Kshatriya warrior caste to fight to defend justice.
[4] Note that the text does not call the Harimandir the Golden Temple; this name only dates from 1830 in OTL, when Ranjit Singh had it rebuilt and coated in gold foil. The actual building has been rebuilt many times in both OTL and TTL due to the aforementioned persecution.
[5] In-universe the transliterations of these terms will also be Russian-influenced, but I have kept the OTL originals from English to avoid it becoming too impenetrable.
[6] This passes over the fact that often these campaigns were launched by nawabs who were becoming increasingly independent from Mughal control, not always by the Mughal central government.
[7] This happened in OTL as well, though the details are different.
[8] See Part #43 in Volume 1.
[9] See Part #87 in Volume 2.
[10] See Part #200 in Volume 4.
[11] See Part #262 in Volume 7.
Thande
Donor
I reserve the right to change this as it's only a rough sketch and may not take into account things that are due to happen before 'mid-1923' but I haven't written about yet (deep breath) but here's a rough map of the situation. The stripes in central Asia indicate the ongoing "Tartar" (used here as a generic term for all Central Asian peoples) revolt against the Russians, which is partly but not entirely subdued.
Last edited: