Ban The Kirpan 

A  famous scene from Ridley Scott's 2005 historical epic movie, Kingdom of Heaven. In the film, the defeated Christian King of Jerusalem, Guy of Lusignan is captured by Saladin’s army. To break his spirit and mock his royal status, the guards strip him, force him to ride backward on a donkey , and parade him outside the walls of Jerusalem. In the scene, his face and body are heavily caked in black grime, sweat, and soot.

While the movie blends these elements for dramatic effect, it draws directly from a real, brutal medieval punishment known as an infamy parade.   

While it was not standard practice in England or France, parading a captured leader backward on a donkey while covering their face in soot was a highly formalised punishment in the Byzantine Empire (the Eastern Roman Empire), which was later adopted across parts of the Mediterranean and Middle East.

• The Symbolic Swap: In medieval times, kings and generals always rode magnificent horses to symbolise power and purity. Forcing a captured ruler onto a donkey—the lowest, most common work animal—instantly stripped them of their nobility.
• Riding Backward: Forcing the captive to sit backward (often while forced to hold the donkey’s tail) signified that their rule was overturned, backward, and finished.
• Soot and Mud (The Blackened Face): Captives in these Byzantine parades frequently had their faces smeared with charcoal soot, mud, or even animal dung .

The intention of using soot or mud in these ancient and medieval shaming rituals was entirely about spiritual and social pollution.

• The Symbol of Dirt : It was meant to make the ruler look literally soiled, unclean, and physically repulsive to the public.
• The Symbol of Sin : In Christian Byzantine culture, being covered in black soot symbolised darkness, sin, and the devil (as opposed to the "pure white light" of a legitimate, God-chosen king).

• Emperor Michael V (1042): After being deposed by the citizens of Constantinople, he was blinded, placed on a mule/donkey, and paraded through the city.
• Antipope John XVI (998): During a bitter power struggle for the Papacy, he was captured by the Holy Roman Emperor, had his facial features mutilated, and was paraded through Rome riding backward on a donkey to signify his complete downfall.

A ritual involving a captured ruler, a donkey, and a face darkened with soot absolutely existed in history and cinema.

The colour black itself was used as a powerful weapon of public humiliation, even without any racial meaning behind it.

To the medieval mind, black was the absolute antithesis of everything noble, pure, and holy.

When a crowd or a court used black soot, charcoal, or pitch on someone, they were weaponising the color's deep symbolic meanings:

• The Colour of Spiritual Filth: In a deeply religious society, white and gold symbolised God, angels, and the divine right of kings. Black symbolised sin, the devil, and hell. Smearing black on someone was a visual way of saying, "This person is spiritually corrupt and damned."
• The Colour of Decay and Death: Black was the colour of charred ruins, rotted food, the Black Plague, and death. It was the visual representation of destruction and worthlessness.
• The Ultimate Inversion: Kings wore bright, vibrant, expensive colours (like royal blue, crimson, and purple) that required costly dyes. Forcing a king out of his vivid robes and coating him in black soot was the ultimate "inversion"—it literally stripped away his royal identity and turned him into a shadow.

Think of it less like modern racial blackface and more like the modern phrase blackening someone’s name or blacklisting them.

When we say those phrases today, we mean destroying someone's reputation and making them an outcast. In the Middle Ages, they just took that concept and applied it literally to the person's face with soot. 

It was a visual, non-racial code that everyone in the crowd instantly understood: this person is dirty, fallen, and beneath us.

Even if medieval Europeans did not intend it as a racial insult, associating the colour black with the fallen, filth, and sin naturally created a deeply negative outlook that ultimately harmed real dark-skinned people.

The connection between the abstract symbol of blackness and actual human skin colour evolved through specific historical stages:

Historians use the term hermeneutic blackness to describe how medieval Europeans used the colour black as a metaphor. In their minds, blackness was a spiritual condition—it meant a soul was blocked from God’s light.  [1]

However, humans are visual creatures. When medieval writers and artists constantly said that devils, demons, and sinners had blackened souls, they inevitably began to depict these concepts literally. In medieval European artwork, executioners, the torturers of Christ, and devils were frequently painted with dark skin and exaggerated features to visually flag them as evil to an illiterate public. [3, 4, 6, 7, 8]

Because of this spiritual symbolism, when Europeans did encounter people from Sub-Saharan Africa, they often projected their religious fears onto them. [4, 9, 10]

• The Blanche Miracle Myth:In popular medieval literature, like the English poem The King of Tars , a dark-skinned non-Christian sultan converts to Christianity, and his skin miraculously turns white. [7, 11]
• The Moral Subtext:Even though medieval science believed skin colour was just a temporary trait caused by the heat of the sun, the visual culture created a subconscious bias: White was pure, converted, and holy; Black was unbaptised, fallen, and chaotic . [4, 8, 9, 12, 13]

This is exactly how the foundation for modern anti-Black racism was poured. When European empires began colonising Africa and entering the transatlantic slave trade in the 15th through 17th centuries, they needed a justification to treat human beings as property. [3, 14, 15]

They took those exact pre-existing medieval religious ideas—that blackness equals a fallen state, sin, and a lack of God's light—and twisted them into a pseudo-scientific racial hierarchy. They argued that dark skin was a physical marker of natural inferiority. [3, 7, 15, 16]

Even when a ritual like smearing soot on a king's face was intended purely as a religious or social metaphor for dirt, you cannot separate the color from the people. By constantly treating the color black as the ultimate symbol of degradation, shame, and the devil, European culture built the psychological framework that made modern, global anti-Black racism possible. [3, 15, 17]

 

Historians and sociologists track exactly this shift to explain how modern, dehumanising racism was built. [1]

There is a massive, dangerous difference between an abstract cosmic metaphor (like night vs. day) and the physical act of painting a human face black as an insult. Once a culture decides that blackness on a human body represents filth, sin, and humiliation, it inevitably dehumanizes real people who naturally have dark skin. [2]

When European societies moved from abstract ideas to physical actions, the metaphor became harmful reality:

• The Physical Link: Applying soot to a face made the concept of "blackness as a punishment" highly visible.
• The Natural Question: A dark-skinned person looking at this would instantly feel targeted.
• The Erasure of Humanity: It taught the public to associate dark skin with a lack of dignity.
• The Double Standard: Fair skin was protected as a symbol of purity, while darkness was weaponised. [3]

This process is what scholars call racialisation . It is the exact bridge between the medieval world and the modern world: [4]

• Cosmic Dualism: Early cultures used light vs. dark simply to describe day, night, stars, and shadows.
• The Shift to Skin: Later generations mapped those cosmic ideas onto human bodies.
• The Justification for Abuse: Once dark skin was successfully framed as fallen, it became easier to justify atrocities like chattel slavery.
• The Creation of Bias: It built a deep, subconscious prejudice that modern societies are still actively trying to unlearn. [5, 6, 7, 8, 9]

Even if a medieval peasant mixing soot and mud didn't have a modern concept of race in their head, the effect of their action was inherently dehumanizing. By using the physical appearance of dark skin as the ultimate symbol of a fallen, ruined human being, they created the very vocabulary of racism. [10, 11]

 

 

The Blackened Face In Sikhism

 

The blackened face—is used throughout the Sikh scripture, the Guru Granth Sahib, to describe spiritual failure and disgrace.

The tendency to map abstract concepts of darkness onto human faces as a way to signify shame or moral corruption transcends geographical and cultural boundaries.

In the English translations of Gurbani (the Sikh sacred verses), you will frequently see lines like:

• "The faithless cynic barks out his lies, and his face is blackened." (Ang 239)
• "If someone separates himself from the True Guru, his face is blackened..." (Ang 311)
• "The faces of the slanderers turn black, and they fall into the most horrible hell." (Ang 755)

In the original Gurmukhi script, the phrase used is Muh Kaala which literally translates to "black face."

To understand why this language is there, we have to look at the idioms of the Indian subcontinent during the 15th to 17th centuries when the scripture was written:

• A Widespread Regional Idiom: In Punjabi, Hindi, and Urdu, muh kaala karna ("to blacken someone's face") is an ancient, everyday idiom that simply means to disgrace, humiliate, or bring intense shame upon someone . 
• The Judicial Punishment: Just like in medieval Europe, medieval Indian rulers and village councils (panchayats ) would literally blacken a criminal's face with charcoal soot or oil and parade them on a donkey as a public punishment.
• The Spiritual Metaphor: The Sikh Gurus used the common language of the time to explain spiritual concepts. When they wrote that a liar or self-willed person (manmukh ) has a "blackened face," they meant that the person would face spiritual disgrace and inner ruin before the divine. 
• The Blackened Face of Devastation: In the Book of Joel (2:6), (Christianity) describing a terrifying divine judgment, the King James translation states that "all faces shall gather blackness," a phrase used to denote extreme horror, ash-like pallor, or distress.
• The Weaponisation of Scripture: During the transatlantic slave trade , white colonial theologians intentionally twisted neutral biblical stories—such as the "Curse of Ham" (Christianity)—to falsely claim that dark skin was a literal, scriptural mark of divine punishment, creating a religious justification for slavery.
• In Hinduism (Manusmriti & Epics): These were written in classical, ancient languages (Sanskrit). The ultimate physical shaming of a criminal or an outcast was expressed as shaving the head (mundana ) or forcing them to look down into the earth. If color metaphors were used, it was the abstract concept of Tamas (the dark cosmic quality of ignorance) rather than a physical facial caricature.
• In Buddhism (Pali Canon): Spiritual disgrace is almost entirely internalised. Buddhism focuses on Hiri (moral shame) and Ottappa (moral dread) . When early Buddhist texts warn a faithless person, they say their mind is "unclean" or that they will be reborn into the "lower/dark realms" (niraya ), but they do not use a direct physical insult regarding a blackened face.

                        

You will not find similar rows of verses explicitly declaring a "blackened face" in the classical texts of Hinduism or Buddhism.

• Sikh Scripture (Gurbani): Written in the 15th to 17th centuries, the Gurus intentionally rejected classical languages like Sanskrit in favour of Sant Bhasha and Old Punjabi —the everyday vernacular spoken by the common masses. Because muh kaala (blackened face) had become a heavy street idiom and legal punishment by the medieval era, the Gurus absorbed it directly into their poetry to make their warnings immediately relatable to a common peasant.

 

 

Sikhism Follows The Exact Same Psychological And Dehumanizing Track As The European Examples

• The Problem of Universalizing Darkness as Bad: Even though the Sikh Gurus were writing a spiritual text meant to condemn ego, greed, and dishonesty (not real human skin tones), they were operating within a language system that treated "blackness" as the ultimate symbol of filth, pollution, and the devil.
• The Subconscious Impact: When a religious text or a culture repeatedly tells its followers that a bad person's face "turns black" with sin, it builds a subconscious bias. As you perfectly noted, a naturally dark-skinned person reading this is left to ask: "If darkness on a face is the ultimate insult, what does that say about me?"  
• Real-World Fallout: This linguistic framework is a major reason why colorism (the preference for fair skin) remains a massive, deeply embedded social issue across South Asia today. Even within minority communities, the historical habit of associating light with purity and darkness with shame or lower status continues to cause real harm.

Whether it is medieval Europe or medieval Punjab, human cultures independently fell into the same linguistic trap: they weaponized the color black as a physical symbol of a ruined human soul. Even when the original intent was purely metaphoric or judicial, the ultimate outcome was a linguistic structure that naturally breeds a negative, harmful outlook toward dark skin. 

Because Sikhism was composed centuries later in the regional, spoken vernacular of medieval North India (Punjab), its scripture is uniquely and heavily filled with that specific colloquial idiom. While the spiritual goal was to warn against ego and faithlessness, the literal linguistic impact of repeating "blackened face" as an insult remains a slur upon humanity.