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was now demand made that hymns in the Granth hostile to Mohammedanism be destroyed. Arjan was taken prisoner by the emperor and tortured to death ostensibly for refusal to become a Mohammedan, possibly, however, for giving aid to a revolting son of the emperor. Har Gobind, the sixth Guru, was the son of Arjan. Probably because of the increasing pressure of Moslem opposition, he instituted a standing army for the Sikhs, and militarism becomes more pronounced from this time on. Hostilities were frequent, the Guru was himself imprisoned, but the Sikhs were welded together by their trials. The next two Gurus were insignificant. The ninth, Teg Bahadur, youngest son of Har Gobind, took up again the practise of travel, but the military establishment was maintained. He is represented as going to the court at Delhi practically as a sacrifice for his people, where he was beheaded. The tenth Guru, Gobind Rai, afterward Gobind Singh, was the son of Teg Bahadur. He was engaged in conflict with the hill rajahs for almost his whole guruship, and fighting with Mohammedans was also practically constant. His significance for the religion is great. He abolished for the Sikh conformity to the Hindu customs of cutting the hair and shaving the head, instituted fivefold baptism with water stirred with a sword after which each Sikh took the name Singh (" lion "), forbade intermarriage of Sikhs with Mohammedans, confirmed tithes as the substitute for free-will offerings, completed the Granth and made it better suited to the changed conditions, and finally refused to appoint a successor, directing Sikhs to obey the Granth as " the visible body of the Guru." This left religious direction in the hands of the official " reader of the Granth."

After the death of Gobind Singh in 1708, the history of the Sikhs is obscure till 1800. It is known that they were persecuted, and that a price of from

five to twenty-five rupees was for a

But as Mohammedan power declined in the region during the eighteenth century, there was organization of minor Sikh confederacies in the Punjab under elected leaders. Ranjit Singh (b. 1780, governor of Lahore 1800, d. 1839) conceived the plan of utilizing Sikh military fanaticism and religious zeal to create a kingdom with Lahore as the capital, and extended the realm to the Sutlej, then the border of British rule. During his life the relations between the British and the Sikhs was friendly. After his death the Sikhs crossed the frontier into British territory, and the dominion of the latter was gravely threatened. The Sikhs fought with their wonted bravery and were beaten back only after inflicting great losses and winning the respect of their foes. The second Sikh war in 1848 resulted in the same way, and the British then took over the administration of the Punjab. The Sikhs entered in numbers the British army in India, in which they still constitute a large and most loyal element. They proved their worth and loyalty first in the Indian Mutiny of 1857. Their numbers, as given by the census of 1901, are 2,195,339, all but 64,352 in the Punjab, and of these two-thirds are in the United

Provinces and Kashmir. Religiously they fall into two great divisions and many sects. The divisions are the Sahijdharis and the Singhs, the former rejecting the baptism of Gobind Singh. Besides the schismatic Udasis and Minas referred to above, there are the Handalis, named after a convert of Amar Das, but not arising till about 1640. Their descendants, a small community, have their headquarters at Jandiala in the Punjab, where they are known as Niranjanie. As a religious sect the Sikhs are being absorbed by the dominant Hinduism, have lost almost entirely the language of their sacred book, and are in many respects forgetting the distinguishing

practises which under their Gurus marked them as apart from the Hindus.

II. The Religion: The religious tenets of the Sikhs are exhibited in the Adi Granth (or Granth Sahib), consisting of the poetic utterances of the Gurus and of some Indian saints whose sayings the

Gurus approved. According to com-

a. The men conceptions, the Gurus, were inGranth. carnations of deity, and, consequently,

the book is inspired. In its present arrangement the Granth serves the purpose of a bible and a liturgy. It is in six parts: (1) an introduction by Nanak; (2) extracts from two of the " rags " (see below) used in devotions at eventide; (3) a devotional chapter composed of extracts from one of the rags; (4) a chapter of extracts from three of the rags used as a prayer before retiring; (5) the Granth proper, of compositions in meter arranged under thirty-one rags (musical measures to which the hymns were sung or chanted-the result is much like a hymn-book with the hymns arranged under the different meters, short, long, common, etc.); (6) a concluding portion by various authors, including Indian saints and fakirs. The extent is indicated by the fact that Trumpp's translation and notes (see bibliography) make a small quarto of 715 pages. The language of the Granth is obscure both as a dialect and because of the educational limitations of the Gurus. It was intended for the understanding of the common people, and was therefore in the vernacular; on -this account the Brahmans remonstrated with the Gurus for putting in the common speech what the former contended should not be imparted to the populace, such knowledge being too high for them. But the Gurus were aiming at the very evil of retaining the knowledge of religion within the command of a few, and desired therefore not only that their own people should have this knowledge in their own language (not the Sanskrit), but that other nations should learn of it, and so hoped for the translation of their works into many languages. Of its contents varying estimates exist; the literature of the East rarely appeals to the mind of the West, and it is hardly strange that a book which so abounds in figures, which reflects a life and ordinary conceptions so different from those of the western world, and which is more or less repetitious should not appeal to those who have not breathed the inspiration of the East. Sir Lefel Griffin (formerly secretary of the Punjab government) remarks truly that it is scarcely possible to turn a single page without being struck with the beauty and originality of the figures and with the