All aboard the Guru Express!

The year is 1892.

In the souvenir booklet printed to commemorate the 494th birthday anniversary of the founder of the Sikh faith, Siri Guru Nanak Devji, and the opening of the Siri Guru Singh Sabha temple in Nairobi on November 1, 1963, a chapter is dedicated to the arrival of the first Sikhs in what is today Kenya.

It reads “Men were packed in the ship like sardines in a tin… They were crossing a vast ocean… Amidst this group of men was a small party of Sikhs who had come on board, led by one who reverently carried on his head a small cot in which sat what looked like a big book richly draped. Another man ceremoniously waved over it a large and ornate fan.

“The Sikhs were carrying their Holy Book — the ever-present embodiment of their faith — with them. On the overcrowded decks travellers willingly created an honourable place for it. While there was shouting and pushing all over the ship, there was a quiet deep air of veneration around this Holy Book — the Adi Granth or the Granth Sahib.”

I continue reading the souvenir booklet.

“These particular Sikhs were part of the first indentured labour force that was brought over from India in 1892 to build the Uganda Railway. They were all men of skill — carpenters, blacksmiths and masons. Within a few weeks of landing at Mombasa, they erected a small wood and iron Gurdwara at Kilindini on land and with materials provided by the Railway authorities. This was the first Sikh Gurdwara on the African continent.”

In this first Sikh temple at Kilindini, the Sikhs must have placed the first Granth Sahib brought to the Africa, but there is no mention of that.

From there it is said to have been taken to the Makindu Gurdwara, from where it was taken to Nairobi in 1972 and eventually found its way to Kericho.

Fast forward to 2010.

The date, February 4.

A train, the Guru Express, arrives at Makindu station ornately draped with the Sikh colours of blue and yellow and the Sikh emblem, the Khanda, painted on the wagons.

Inside, the final prayers are recited from the Granth Sahib before it is closed and brought outside to the crowd waiting at the station — which, apart from Sikhs, includes many Africans too.

I am excited like everyone else, for the Guru Granth Sahib being returned to Makindu Gurdwara from Kericho via Kisumu on board the Guru Express is believed to be the original one from 1892.

There is an air of deep reverence as the holy book is carried outside, much, imagine like the scene in 1892.

It is placed on a specially prepared palanquin and carried on the shoulders of the faithful to a newly constructed temple within the grounds of the Makindu Sikh Temple, one of the most revered Sikh temples in the world — like the iconic Golden Temple of Amritsar, where the first ever copy of the Granth Sahib was placed in 1604.

The five-day journey of the Granth Sahib — from Kericho to Kisumu by road, and from Kisumu by special train stopping at Nakuru and Nairobi for prayers for Kenya’s peace, prosperity and unity — has been dubbed the “Sacred Travel for Peace, Prosperity and Unity.”

The new temple is built with materials retrieved from an earlier temple constructed in 1926. The front two windows are from that time.

To understand the reverence given to the Granth Sahib, one has to go back into Sikh history.

It starts with Guru Nanak Devji’s birth in 1469 in the village of Talwandi, now in west Pakistan to Hindu parents.

Pious from childhood, he was an excellent student — by the time he was 10 years old he had mastered all that the teachers had to teach him, including the Persian language.

Soon after, his father arranged for a sacred thread ceremony, in which the sacred thread that would identify him as a Brahmin — Hinduism’s highest, priestly caste — would be put around the young boy’s neck by a holy man.

Nanak asked of the holy man, “Why must l wear the thread? Will it make me good and kind?” To which the holy man replied, “I am not sure.”

Clear vision

Nanak refused to wear the thread and instead asked the priest to give him the sacred thread “of mercy and contentment.”

This, though he was still a child, was the beginning of Nanak’s refusal to follow dogmatic rites and superstitions, emphasising the one, universal nature of God.

Travelling with his faithful companion, Mardana the Mussulman (literally, the “manly Muslim”) as far as Mecca and beyond, Nanak’s followers grew, much to the chagrin of the Mughal rulers of India, who at one point had him imprisoned.

Undeterred, Nanak continued with his teaching and finally settled down to a farmer’s life in Kartarpur, where he established a community kitchen or “langar” where all were welcome to dine.

It is a hallmark of the Sikh faith that any person coming to a Sikh Gurdwara is welcome to share a simple meal.

Nine gurus followed Guru Nanak, and Sikh history runs parallel to Mughal rule in India.

Some Mughal emperors respected the Sikh gurus but others, such as the Aurangzeb, were intolerant and persecuted the Sikhs.

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.

In his Makindu sketch, he shows the Makindu temple and writes, “Big space with many rooms, the Sikh Temple for free food and accommodation.”

It shows a busy railway station complete with the Nairobi-Mombasa road, two baobab trees between the mosque and the temple, and the PWD staff encamped on the periphery of the town with giraffes and other game in the vicinity.

With a busy station to look after, the Sikh community increased in Makindu, the men working in the railway workshop and the trains.

On April 27, 1930, a new Gurdwara was opened at Makindu in the presence of about 150 Sikhs from East Africa.

The new temple is described as “a magnificent stone building with fine arches at the front and back and a beautiful garden.”

The building cost the princely sum of Ksh15,000 — just about $200 at today’s exchange rates.

Unfortunately, the railway that “opened up” the so-called Dark Continent — few outsiders had ever ventured beyond the Coast till then — took a turn for the worse after the 1980s.

Becoming the East African Railways after the Independence of the three countries in the 1960s — Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania — internal wrangling saw the amalgamation break.

Today, the Rift Valley Railways, having taken over the dysfunctional Kenya Railways Authority, has turned out to be a controversial investment, with thousands of railway workers laid off and passenger services becoming infrequent, a pale shadow of its former heyday when the prestigious passenger service say travellers enjoying fine dining in the restaurant cabins served on fine porcelain and silver cutlery.

However, the prime minister reminded the gathering, plans are now afoot to modernise the rail system and expand the network to Kampala in Uganda and run another line to Juba in Southern Sudan from Lamu, where the second seaport is being built.

“Ek on kar,” recites Babaji from the first verse in the Granth Sahib.

“Ek refers to God, the creator. Everything is because of Him. The message is complete in this verse. All the other verses elaborate on this.”

Babaji continues. “According to the Sikh faith or dharma, we have a responsibility towards the entire creation. The Japji Sahib, which is the morning prayer, is about the environment. It mentions the elements — air, water and Mother Earth — which we must not pollute because we are interdependent. It means that we must tread carefully on Mother Earth. Without religion,” he continues after a pause, “there is no environment.”

Born in Uganda in 1939, Mohinder Singh or Babaji as he is fondly called, was raised and schooled in Kenya.

His father worked with the railways and the family moved from station to station, frequenting Makindu.

Trained as a structural engineer, Babaji emigrated to England in the 1960s.

Deeply devoted to the teachings in the Guru Granth Sahib, he is the leader of the Nishkant Sahib, an organisation devoted to Sikhism.

Between 1995 and 1999, the organisation, under his leadership, redid the external gold gilding of the Golden Temple or Harmandir Sahib in Amritsar.

“It was a complex procedure. The first gold gilding of Harmandir Sahib was done by Maharaja Ranjit Singh, who consolidated the Sikh empire before he was overthrown by the British. It took him 27 years, from 1803 to 1820, to complete the job, finding time between the many battles he fought to consolidate the Sikh empire. We did it in four years.”

He explains the process. “We put 24 layers of gold leaf on copper plates that are 99.9 per cent copper. It’s almost pure. The gold leaf is pasted on the copper plates with mercury. The gold leaf is made from gold bars cut into pieces of one square centimetre and manually pounded to 120 times per minute till the thickness is 0.76 microns or one thousandth of a millimetre.” I gasp at the sheer thinness of the leaf.

The original leaf coating had 12 layers and lasted almost 177 years.

Babaji’s intention in having 24 layers of gold leaf, is that it will last twice as long — almost four centuries.

“This technology in India goes back to about 600 years and the art is passed from generation to generation and jealously guarded. But l was determined to redo the Golden Temple because it had started to corrode because of the copper within. But some things had to be determined, like the thickness of the gold leaf, which until then nobody knew.

“With my engineering background and being in Birmingham where the Industrial Revolution started, l managed to take an original gold plate to a research institute there. The officer had never seen a hand-beaten gold leaf.”

The holy book is in the care of Mohinder Singh or Babaji as he is fondly called.

Born in Uganda in 1939 but raised and schooled in Kenya, Babaji trained as a structural engineer, and migrated to England in the 1960s.

Deeply devoted to the teachings in the Guru Granth Sahib, he is the leader of the Nishkant Sahib, an organisation devoted to Sikhism.

Between 1995 and 1999, the organisation, under his leadership, redid the external gold gilding of the Golden Temple or Harmandir Sahib in Amritsar.

Babaji is nostalgic about his Kenyan roots. Before inheriting the leadership from Baba Puran Singh from Kericho, the founder of Nishkant Sahib, he was told of the leader’s desire to see the original Granth Sahib returned to Makindu Gurdwara.

“The Guru Granth Sahib was taken from Makindu Gurdwara in 1972,” explains Joginder Kaur who was married in Makindu in 1967 to a railway worker. She still resides in Makindu, the only permanent Sikh resident in town. “There was an accidental fire. A cat knocked down the diya (candle holder) and everything burnt to cinders except the Guru Granth Sahib. It was intact,” she recalls.

The Holy Book was brought to Siri Guru Singh Sabha Nairobi for safekeeping and at some point taken to Kericho Sikh Temple, where the organisation has built a new temple including a technical college for the youth regardless of creed or caste.

I am still curious to know if the Guru Granth Sahib returned to Makindu Sikh Temple is the 1892 version.

“This is the only hand-illuminated copy of the Granth Sahib that l have ever seen,” says Babaji as he is fondly called.

“This particular copy may be one of its kind in the world today.” The white-bearded Babaji, simply clad in white cotton kurta and pyjamas with the traditional “kilemba” (turban) of the “kalasinghas,” as Kenyans call them, goes on to describe the history of the Granth Sahib.

“This version has 2,452 pages and the technique used was to cut the letters on marble fonts to stamp on the pages.” But this technology was used in the 1920s. It seems then that perhaps the Guru Granth Sahib is not the original brought to Africa but nevertheless one of the first ones on the continent.

Email: rupi.mangat@yahoo.com