During his return home after visiting Mecca, Guru Nanak Sahib halted at Saidpur in modern day Pakistan to visit a humble carpenter named Lalo who was devoted to him. What he saw in Saidpur prompted him to address these powerful words to the Almighty in anguish:
Khorasan he laid to waste
To India then he turned his gaze
How can you be blameless my Lord?
Herald of death did you not raise?
Slaughter death and cries of pain
How can you, unmoved remain?
If the lion slays the lamb
Answer for it his master must
Dogs defile this precious land
The dead forgotten in the dust
Guru Nanak was responding to a terrible massacre that the Uzbek warlord Babar had perpetrated as he prepared to take on the Lodhis to seize Delhi. The streets were awash in blood; corpses were piled everywhere; as far as the eye could see, there was death and destruction.
Guru Nanak’s visceral cry of pain became one of the fundamental principles of the Sikh faith that he was in the process of founding: you shall not remain silent in the face of terrible injustice and tyranny.
Nearly a decade ago my daughter, Mehr Kaur, then a young college student, wrote a play titled Kultar’s Mime. Based on a poem of the same name, that I had written many years earlier, it told the story of the 1984 massacre of Sikhs in Delhi. As we prepared to take the play on tour, I stumbled upon another poem that eerily told the same story, albeit from another time and place. It was In the City of Slaughter, by the celebrated Hebrew poet Hayim Nahman Bialik, about the massacre of innocent Jews in Kishinev in 1903.
I was struck by the similarities between my poem and Bialik’s so Mehr and I decided to bookend the text of my poem with excerpts from Bialik’s in the play. As we toured the world with our band of actors, presenting Kultar’s Mime more than 90 times to emotional audiences, the pain of the Jews of Kishinev merged with the pain of the Sikhs of Delhi as all oppressors became the same and all victims became the same.
Like millions of others, I have engaged with the history of the Holocaust through literature, films, the brilliant graphic novel Maus and several other works that capture both the pain and the heroic struggle of the Jewish people. This engagement evokes in me, both a profound sense of empathy for them and admiration for their resilience.
Like the rest of the world I looked at the images that came from Israel after the barbaric October 7 attacks by Hamas, targeting innocent civilians, with shock and grief. The devastating cycle of sectarian violence seemed endless and once again my heart went out to the innocents that were crying out in pain.
It was inevitable that the fury of Israel would descend upon Gaza but I was unprepared for what happened in the months that followed. The terrible vengeance of Israel has inflicted the kind of pain on millions of innocent Palestinians that perhaps only the Jewish people can truly understand. The world has largely watched in silence as the voices of empathy have been muffled by the protective cocoon of powerful allies such as the US as well as the fear of being labeled ‘anti-semitic’ for speaking up.
As a Sikh who tries to live his life according to the ideals of Guru Nanak, I feel deeply ashamed for abandoning the fundamental principle that his cry of anguish espoused, by remaining silent on this subject until now. God bless my daughter, who shares my empathy for the Jewish people, for waking me up from my stupor. For, when she came home a few weeks ago, she asked me: ‘ever since I have been a child, I have heard you speak of this principle; Why are the Sikhs quiet now? Why are you silent? Is the pain of Gaza not our pain?’
I shall not be silent any more. What Israel is perpetrating in Gaza is nothing short of genocide. It has to stop. While it has every right to defend itself, the historical suffering of the Jewish people does not give Israel the license to subject innocent Palestinians to terror, starvation and unimaginable savagery. People of conscience, regardless of who they are or where they live, need to speak up. To all of them, I address these words of Guru Nanak:
Tain kee dard na aya (How can you remain unmoved?)
Sarbpreet Singh, a writer, playwright and podcaster, is the author of Kultar’s Mime, The Camel Merchant of Philadelphia, The Night of the Restless Spirits, The Story of the Sikhs: 1469-1708 and The Sufi’s Nightingale. His Story of the Sikhs Podcast, which has listeners in 90 countries, has an expansive sweep that has drawn comparisons with the work of filmmaker Ken Burns. His work has been featured on BBC and NPR and his commentary has appeared in newspapers and magazines in the US, India and Pakistan.
