All aboard the Guru Express!

By the time of the 10th and last guru, Guru Gobind Singhji in the 18th century, the Sikhs were forced to take up arms to defend their faith.

It was Guru Gobind Singh who began the martial tradition of the Sikhs, and ever since his time, Sikh men have worn five emblems of their faith: The five Ks, namely kesh (long hair, which must not be cut); kangha (a comb to keep the hair groomed); karha (a steel bangle worn on the right wrist); Kachcha (underwear) and last but not least Kirpan, a dagger or sword.

As learned men, the gurus wrote extensively but it was not until the fifth, Guru Arjan Devji, that all the writings were put into a volume and the Granth placed in the Golden Temple in Amritsar, whose foundation stone was laid by Mian Mir the Sufi saint of Lahore at the invitation of the guru.

Then followed almost a century of persecution by the Mughal rulers, with the final version of the Guru Granth Sahib completed by Guru Gobind Singh, who declared that the Sikh would hence follow the teachings of the gurus in the Granth Sahib.

The holy book also includes writings of Hindu and Muslim pious men who were contemporaries of the Sikh gurus.

“The gurus left behind a repository of divine wisdom in the Granth Sahib,” states Baba Mohinder Singhji, the eminent Sikh scholar and leader of the Nishkant Sahib religious charity that organised the return of the Guru Granth Sahib to Makindu.

“Many scribes wrote and added their own verses,” he explains. In order to stop the original scriptures from being distorted, the words in the verses were numbered and as an extra precaution, strung together without a gap so that no letter could be inserted. Each verse is attributed to the author and it takes a highly educated Granthi or reader of the Granth Sahib to read the older version. Today, the Granth Sahib comes in a standardised version of 1,430 printed pages.

“Labour, not trade, is the foundation of the Asian African heritage in East Africa,” reads the brochure for the Asian African exhibition at the Nairobi National Museum at the turn of the last century. The work of the railway labourers is the bedrock on which later endeavours came to be based.

The 1963 souvenir edition reads, “As the railway pierced its way into the interior, the Sikhs built a temporary Gurdwara at every major camp and one of these, at Makindu, is now a permanent temple right on the Mombasa road.”

It is a nostalgic journey in the train for many of us, descendants of the original labourers who came more than a century ago, armed with only their simple belongings and the Guru Granth Sahib.

“Today, l am talking to 3rd and 4th generation Kenyans who are the great grandchildren of the builders. You have to be proud of your forefathers,” said Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga, who came to pay homage to the Guru Granth Sahib being recited in the Guru Express.

“You may be Kenyans of Indian origin or Kenyans of Sudanese origins, but we are all Kenyans.

“We need more peacemakers of this kind,” said the prime minister referring to the political upheavals from 1990 to the infamous post-election violence of 2007, which reach breaking point in 2008.
“Kenyans have a shared responsibility and we have to reconcile and unite.”

I’m looking at a sketch of Makindu Station in a series drawn by the late Mohamed Sadiq Cockar a Sufi and a surveyor in the Public Works Department of the Kenya Colony in 1926.

A trained draughtsman and architect, each page is a narrative of the railway stations that hosted them.