Lepel H. Griffin

“Fakir Azizuddin. He was one of the ablest and certainly the most honest of all Ranjit Singh's courtiers. Azizuddin was of so engaging a disposition, and soperfect a courtier in his manners, that he made fewdeclared enemies, though many were doubtless jealous of his influence. One reason of his popularity, as aMuhammadan minister at a Hindu Court, was the liberality of his belief. He was a Sufi, a sect held,indeed, as infidel by orthodox Muhammadans, but to which the best thinkers and poets of the East havebelonged. He had no love for the barren dogmata of the Kuran, but looked on all religions as equally to be respected and disregarded. On one occasion Ranjit Singh asked him whether he preferredthe Hindu or the Muhammadan religion. ' I am,' he replied, 'I am a man floating in the midst of a mighty river. I turn my eyes towards the land, but candistinguish no difference in either bank.”

“...if we accept contemporary literature as sufficient evidence, the society of Paris today is fully as corrupt as that of the Punjab in 1830; and the bazaars of Lahore, while Ranjit Singh was celebrating the festival of the Holi,were not so shameless as Piccadilly at night in 1892.”

“The children of the mountains are too free and independent to bear with any patience the restraints of civilization. But the Sikh is always the same ; in peace^ in war, in barracks or in the field, ever genial, good-tempered and uncomplaining: a fair horseman, a stubborn infantry soldier, as steady under fire as he is eager for a charge.”

“Even in the palmiest days of the Khalsa it is astonishing how small a proportion of the Punjab population was of the Sikh profession. The fierce fanaticism of the earlier years of the century was succeeded by the unequalled military organisation ofthe Maharaja, and these together enabled a people who were never numerically more than a sect of Hinduism to overrun the whole Punjab and Kashmir, to beat back the Afghans to the mountains, and tofound a powerful kingdom in which they were outnumbered by Hindus and Muhammadans by ten to one.”

“...the strong attractive force of Hinduism, which, in days of peace, when martial instincts have less influence, retains its hold of the people. Its ivy-like vitality, enfolding and strangling everything which it has once grasped, has been fatal to almost all creedswhich, like Sikhism and Buddhism, both heterodox forms of Hinduism, have put themselves in competition with it. As the Church of Rome in the West so is Hinduism in the East.”

“...Of the Hindu, of whatever caste, it may be said, as of the poet, nascitur non fit. His birth status is unalterable. But with the Sikh the exact reverse is the case. Born of a Sikh father, he is not himself counted of the faith until, as a grown boy, he has been initiated and received the baptism of the pahul at the Akal Bungah or some equally sacred place.”