In the cosmologies of the Vedics, as Georges Dumézil explains, the gods receive their stratum according to their role. Three such ranks appear among the celestial beings, a triad to which the universe conforms in its essential character. The highest function relates to sovereignty and is the specific province of the dualistic pair of Mitra and Varuna. Their relation to one another is relative; Mitra represents the rationalistic, legalist elements of sovereignty while Varuna undertakes to preserve and expand its magical, religious features. Together, they form an inextricable bond, the ostensible division between them masking only a totalistic unity in sacred purpose.

But what accounts for the existence of the sacred? Durkheim reverses the old adage of “on earth as it is in heaven” by emphasising the primacy of moral order. The gods, thus, are metaphors, representations of either a culture or its constituent parts. And so, in heaven shall it be like earth. It is no great coincidence that the fundamental properties of sovereignty and its overlords, as understood by the Vedics and, as we shall see, others, correspond neatly with the social functions of the Brahminical caste. The maintenance of law, the practice of religion.

Friedrich Max Müller expresses the more controversial belief that in this early age of language, the Indo-Europeans had not yet obtained the gift of abstract thought, and so metaphor instead acted as the lifeblood of communication. That which would later develop into the gods began as ordinary speech. As time progressed it dragged language along with it, the offspring of those early settlers understood the ambiguity of abstraction and thus the practical meanings of metaphors were lost, subsumed instead into theology. In any case, it is clear that in India, as elsewhere, these gods of sovereignty and the higher stratum existed in a state of symbiosis with their priests.

And what of the gods of war? They do not exist in the highest stratum of sovereignty, but in a secondary role. Indra occupies this space of exteriority, on the edge of sovereignty, beneath its ruling, essential to its continuance yet outside its official boundaries. Unlike Mitra or Varuna, Indra exerts his will through physical force. His is the kshatriya dharma, and his idealised disposition is one of subordination to sovereign (Brahminical) concerns. Any doubts about this can be easily dispelled through the associated Iranian concept of xsathra, which runs parallel to Indra and which, when sanskritised, becomes kshatra.

And yet Indra is not merely the tool of sovereignty, to be employed towards its ends on a whim. Warriorship is not simply a military endeavour. Indra himself violates the tenets of Vedic sovereignty, it is his prerogative as warrior to turn against and challenge the law. What we are edging towards here is a recognition of the inherent tension between sovereign and warrior. The higher gods insist that the warrior is in error, that he be punished, while nonetheless integrating the trade of the warrior, war, into the domain of sovereignty. But war has a fundamental substance of its own, independent of the wishes of the sovereign, that can be turned against the latter at any time. War is thus both within and beyond the domain of sovereignty. This is the paradox at the heart of Indo-European mythology. That svadhā was a key attribute of Indra and the Maruts suggests even an autonomy within sovereignty, a contradiction which threatens to collapse the entire framework as a sovereignty incomplete is no sovereignty at all.

The existence of this hierarchy, and its internal oppositions, is accepted. Among the earliest known references to the Vedic deities, in the treaty between the Mitanni and the Hittites in northern Syria, Mitra-Varuna are invoked, followed secondly by Indra. The covenant was sealed by the sovereign and backed by the warrior. Dumézil made it his mission to discover this arrangement in other Indo-European traditions, with varying levels of success. The first three kings of Rome — Romulus, Numa and Tullus Hostilius — thus represent not personages but historicized deities, the critical link demonstrated with the last of the three having the same associations of warriorship (it’s in the name, Hostilius — no prizes for guessing what that means). Similar exegeses for the Norse and Iranic canons notwithstanding, the muddled nature of the Greek adaption posed some issues, and though none of these have so far proven insurmountable they remain controversial. But we reach a startling conclusion: the tension between sovereign and warrior can be claimed as a fundamental characteristic of all Indo-European societies, one that, in the case of India, was resolved in favour of the former.

Indra’s multitude of sins represent war that has shaken off the habituation of sovereign philosophy, war that has freed itself from the assimilation of its violence by the discipline of reason. But sovereign power is grounded on its relation to the warrior, specifically its appropriation of war into the subordinate institution of the military. But war seeks escape, it seeks to be for its own sake; it threatens always to return to nomadism, outside the grasp of centralising potencies. Understanding war and the warrior only through the formalistic arrangements of state and sovereign delineates in itself the line between acceptability and autonomy. In its limitations, it ignores the latency of war’s emancipatory potential. In India, Indra was chastised for his transgressions — his infringement of the pact with Namuci, his slaying of the Brahmin. In the Mahabharata, he appears in the form of a jackal to show remorse for his previous misbehaviour. The sovereign, in India, triumphed over the nomad. The tensions within the steppe mythos were overcome by the victory of the Brahmin over war. In time, the steppe would have its revenge.

Sikhi is as much a rediscovery of the Vedic steppe as it is a reconceptualization of the Vedic sovereign. Aurangzeb’s violation of his pact with the Guru thus marks not only an extraordinary treachery, but a direct challenge to the righteous authority of the true sovereign. But the Guru’s recognition of Islamicate governance as hollow in legitimacy, and the belief that it had to be undone, consists of a challenge in itself though not just to Islam. The implication, of an absorption of the standards of sovereignty into the Khalsa, necessarily entails an anti-Brahminical component as well. Gone are the dualistic authorities of Mitra and Varuna and their worldly servants, all having folded into the monistic supremacy of Akāl.

The figure of Chandi thus represents something beyond the simple integration of war and sovereignty. The goddess is not worshipped; as an empty vehicle with no will of her own, worship of her is impossible to a Sikh. There is simply nothing there to worship, she has no presence beyond her telos. But nor is she mere image. She is, following Durkheim, the embodiment of the Khalsa and its constituent parts. There is no attempt here to balance the tension that we have explored, that which has been inherent in Indo-European mythology till now, there is only a profound sense of overcoming. Chandi is war in its most sublime form, war that is true to war, its emancipatory potential endless like the heavens themselves. Nor is there a subjugation of war, nor consequent remorse. Indra has, in a sense, been exonerated — Namuci was a demon after all, and the sovereignty of the Brahmin is trivial. While Chandi nonetheless incorporates a sovereign aspect in her being — particularly in the Bengali renditions of her mythos, in which she grants a low-caste hunter sovereignty over her forest domain — this is a secondary function. In any case, in a Sikh context, mythology is generally not needed in support of sovereignty, a testament to how it is perceived as a given. But it is summoned in support of war. Specifically, an absolute war.

Dumézil would go further still, arguing that the inexplicable fury of the Indo-European gods of war, a theme which shines through in all of the major traditions, is itself representative of those steppe pastoralists, who, with horse and club, settled the known world. The warband here is conceptualised as the Indo-European institution par excellence, and ultimately the hinge of the social system, but the division this renders itself generates a deep-rooted underlying antagonism. The triumph of the Brahmin is undone only by the almost dysfunctional violence of the Khalsa’s mythology, a far more comprehensive attack on Brahmin norms than any envisaged by other Kshatriya reformers precisely because it recalls a total inversion of the sovereign-warrior relationship. Sikhi, after all, is a kind of dharmic avant-garde. Dumezíl believed this particularistic fury of the warband to be a uniquely Indo-European characteristic, a claim which has (naturally) brought much criticism. But the essential point in the Sikh case remains unchanged: the ferocity attributed to Chandi is a direct evocation of the ferocity of the Khalsa war machine. It is an anarchic warriorship, simultaneously controlled yet manic, individual yet collective. The Nihang tradition of chakravarti is relevant here.

Chandi, then, represents for Sikhs a conception of war that is beyond militarism, beyond states, beyond even sovereignty itself. Hence the particularity of her appearance in scripture; she is not to be invoked haphazardly. Her purpose is specific, her means chaotic, but the outcome must be universal. What this entails, in practical terms, is a war without end, an indeterminate struggle beyond comprehension. Chandi is detached, exterior, pure and unreasonable, beyond institutionalisation (it is Indra who is crowned again). Yet she also remains immanent; she represents a sense of movement through war that cannot be captured but remains grounded nonetheless in an ethos of becoming. Her invocation is a fundamental ode to this higher essence, present not in her image but in the Khalsa which adopts it. All other lines of conflict pale in comparison.

ਚਾਰੇ ਜੁਗ ਕਹਾਣੀ ਚਲਗਿ ਤੇਗ ਦੀ ॥