(RNS) — In the Sikhi tradition, 10 revered leaders established aspects of the faith over two-and-a-half centuries. Guru Gobind Singh, the 10th in the lineage, installed the final, eternal guide in the Guru Granth Sahib, the essential scripture to almost 30 million Sikhs worldwide. 

In time for the 350th anniversary of Guru Gobind Singh’s coronation, Harinder Singh, a senior fellow at the Sikh Research Institute, explores the life of the last Guru in his book “Guru Gobind Singh Sahib: Life, Vision & Wisdom,” released late last year. Working with a calligrapher and graphic designer, Harinder Singh combines poetic text, original art and a contemporary translation of original manuscripts and secondary texts written by the Guru’s court poets — Bhai Nand Lal Goya in Persian, and Chandra Sain Sainapati in Braj and old Punjabi.

Harinder Singh also situates the Tenth Guru as “the first diaspora guru,” he said in a January interview. Born outside of Punjab and shaped by civilizations across South Asia, the Guru’s life modeled how to meet cultural conflict “not with otherness, but with oneness.”

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Why is the inclusion of art and poetry so important to a book of this kind? 

Guru Gobind Singh, as the heir apparent in the 23 years before the Khalsa (the initiated Sikh community) was inaugurated, did trainings on how to write, how to create calligraphy, how to write good poetry, how to develop the next warriors who are not fighters. There is a beauty which is brought out through calligraphy and poetry itself, rather than portraits, because all of them are imaginary.

Within the Sikh tradition, the form of the Guru is the concentration in the mind. We said, let’s take it to the original idea, which was it’s the wisdom which matters the most, and let’s bring out the beauty. The art is to make it relevant to people and communities we live in globally.

What audience were you writing for, and how is it different from other books that might exist on Guru Gobind Singh Sahib?

In particular, I have two audiences in mind. One was Sikhs who want to know the thoughts of the Guru. The secondary audience is non-Sikhs who talk about the Guru, reference him, but really don’t know his thoughts. My assumption and my experience of the last 30, 40 years is that Sikhs and the non-Sikhs who talk about Guru have reduced him to a particular stereotype. In the last 100 years of politics, Guru Gobind Singh is invoked a lot in South Asian context, and not just by the Sikhs or Punjabis. We call it appropriation these days. 

The No. 1 stereotype of the Guru is that he was a great warrior, and that feeds into this larger stereotype about Sikhs in India — that these are the martial races, which is not just a colonial import from the British, but it is also part of the Indian nationalism import. I’m not countering that, but I’m addressing it because Guru Gobind Singh is invoked by particular political nationalistic people in India. One of the things I’m trying to say is the contemporary politics of India does not define who the Guru is. What he did was, actually, he created great poets. He created great warriors. He chiseled them.

But if you go back 100 years, South Asia has been a product of conquest. Whereas Guru Gobind Singh, in his representative democracy model, he gave the next guruship, or the leadership, to the Khalsa. Only one was a Punjabi man, the other four were non-Punjabis from all over South Asia, including one from Gujarat. This is how the wisdom worked in South Asia, and people with utter volunteerism came together. It was demonstrated that we do treat everyone equally. And this was a true nationbuilding project, in today’s vocabulary.

You describe how your personal relationship with him changed from “hero worship” to a more intimate connection. How did that happen over the course of writing and researching this book?

That comment in the book is about my own journey, which is more from my teenage years to now. That hero worship was when I was growing up in the Jhansi (Uttar Pradesh, India), where I lived for the first 13 years, and then eventually in Kansas, onward in America. As pre-teens, you have heroes in popular culture, from Superman and others. Guru Gobind Singh was that kind of a hero for me. But my relationship then went from icon to reading what he has done, (and) what his contributions (were) once he became the uncontested leader of the Sikh nation — because that’s the contextualization of what the Guru is in Sikh religion. It is not a teacher or a prophet.

What lessons from Guru Gobind Singh’s life can apply to current events and afflictions we have as modern people in the West?

The wisdom actually doesn’t see this East-West divide or conceptions of medieval (versus) modernity. It is really about the behaviors, isn’t it? So whether it is the reality of the Modi administration or the Trump administration, essentially, Guru’s work was to fight the religious and political domination because the polarity in the world exists between the religious and the political. And Guru integrated the two: The political in you and the spiritual in you needs to come together to be the agent of love and justice because, otherwise, what we end up doing is this proving of whether there’s God or not.

In the Guru Granth Sahib’s paradigm, which is a Sikh paradigm, this idea of believer and nonbeliever is actually the one identification. The lesson for all of us in what we today call “othernesses” (is) because we are not either understanding or failing to implement oneness. That oneness is not vague, but it is actually very specific and unitary. (It) is not debatable. So that’s what Gurus were after: eliminating the polarities of today, whether it’s sexuality, caste, religion, colorism, political extremes.