Why do so many Sikh men share the name Singh? The reel follows the shared name back to Vaisakhi 1699 at Anandpur, the five men initiated into the Khalsa, and the Guru who asked them to initiate him in turn.
Why do so many Sikh men share the name Singh? It goes back to one day: Vaisakhi, sixteen ninety-nine.
Back then, your surname often told everyone your caste. Who you could eat with. Who you could marry.
At Anandpur, five men stepped forward, from across India. Among them, a farmer, a water carrier, a cloth printer, and a barber. Guru Gobind Rai initiated all five into the Khalsa, and gave them the same name. Singh. Lion.
Then he asked those five to initiate him too. Gobind Rai became Gobind Singh.
Kaur, for women, became standard later.
So the name Singh can't tell you anyone's caste. That was the point.
Notes and caveats
A naming rule, not a count. The question says “so many”, not “every” Sikh man. The Rehat Maryada prescribes Singh for a boy and Kaur for a girl. It does not tell us what proportion of Sikhs use those names.
Singh was not invented in 1699. Rajputs had used the name for centuries. The founding idea was to open it to everyone who joined the Khalsa, rather than let a surname announce caste.
The Guru and the five. The film follows the standard Sikh account: Guru Gobind Rai initiated the five, then asked them to initiate him too, and became Gobind Singh. Britannica is more cautious about the timing of his name change. The film does not say that he knelt.
The five and their trades. The sources give the five in different orders. The film places them west to east and names four trades among them: a farmer, a water carrier, a cloth printer and a barber.
Kaur became standard later. It is not dated to the founding in this reel. Singh Sabha reformers around 1900 promoted Kaur for women, and the Rehat Maryada, accepted in 1945 and published in 1950, fixed the rule.
A shared name does not mean caste disappeared. Caste persists in Sikh communities, and many Sikhs add a family name after Singh or Kaur. The last line describes the shared name’s purpose, not a claim that caste has vanished.
The poem on screen. “Wah wah Gobind Singh, aape gur chela” means “hail, hail Gobind Singh: himself the Guru, and the disciple too”. It is from Bhai Gurdas II, Var 41, an eighteenth-century Sikh poem, not an eyewitness quotation from Vaisakhi 1699.
What the film draws
The film’s governing object is a ledger of names. Its ruled lines become the rungs of a caste ladder, then places on a map, then one shared line, before returning to the ledger. The sticker keeps the ruled ledger and one shared surname column, with no lettering. It is a drawing of the film’s visual idea, not a surviving register from 1699. No people are drawn.
Sources
Harbans Singh (ed.), The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism, Punjabi University, Patiala, entries 'Singh' and 'Panj Piare' (https://eos.learnpunjabi.org/)
Jacob Copeman, 'Super Singhs and Kaurageous Kaurs: Sikh Names, Caste and Disidentity Politics', An Anthropology of Intellectual Exchange (2023), chapter 5 (https://doi.org/10.1515/9781805390763-009)
