Way back in 1820,when Maharaja Ranjit Singh dispatched a contingent of about 1,000 Sikh soldiers led by Chaitanya Singh in response to a request made by the then Assam king Chandrakanta Simha to help fight Myanmarese invaders from the east,little did he know that some of his soldiers would stay back to give birth to a new community called Assamese Sikhs. Nearly two centuries later,as many as 166 Assamese Sikhs are on their way back,on another historic journey,not just to offer prayers at the Golden Temple,but also to trace if they still have their cousins and relatives in the land of the five rivers. It is a historic journey because never before have Assamese Sikhs made such a pilgrimage in an organised manner, said Rajbir Singh,a retired additional SP,who heads the Sikh Kalyan Parishad,an association of Assamese Sikhs. None of us,however,knows from which villages our ancestors came. Punjab too has undergone a lot of changes since. Singh said the idea came up when a delegation of the Parishad met Prime Minister Manmohan Singh here in November last year. We told him about our history,how our ancestors came here and embraced the Assamese way of life and how we have become inseparable from the Assamese society. A month or so later,when the SGPC chief was here,he almost readily agreed to sponsor a group of Assamese Sikhs every year to visit the Golden Temple, said the Parishad chief. With the SGPC providing for railway tickets and hospitality,the delegation is being joined in New Delhi by US-based Sukhwinder Singh,whose father Phula Singh incidentally was the only Assamese Sikh who had migrated back to Punjab several decades ago,according to Nanda Singh,another police officer hailing from the same community. We know we are on a very interesting journey,especially because none of us can actually speak or understand the language Sikhs speak elsewhere in the country, said Trailokya Singh,a member of the Amritsar-bound team who hails from Lanka,one of the several places in Assam where the Assamese Sikhs are spread. A microscopic minority,the Assamese Sikhs,however,have been able to make it to important positions in government service,with several of them well-placed in the state civil and police services. Several of them are also poets and writers in Assamese.
