In a discreet corner of the northwest Indian town of Amritsar, Harkirat Waraich is about to do what would have been sacrilege to his father and every other male ancestor for the past 300 years.

He is sitting in front of a cracked mirror in the inappropriately named Modern barber’s shop. And he is about to have a haircut.

As a 34-year-old baptised Sikh man, Mr Waraich is supposed to grow his beard and his hair long and to wear the turban in public at all times — one of the five core tenets of Sikhism.

According to the rules laid down by the 10th Sikh Guru, Gobind Singh, in 1699, he is also obliged to carry a sword and a wooden comb, and to wear loose cotton underwear and an iron band on his wrist. But half a millennium after the founding of Sikhism, attitudes are changing among its 23 million followers, some 90 per cent of whom live in India.

A growing number of young Sikh men are now unfurling their turbans, shaving their beards and trimming their locks into crew cuts, mullets, spikes and other more exotic coiffures.

Nor is the trend confined to the prosperous Sikh community overseas; it is happening here in the heartland of Punjab, and even in Amritsar, home to the Golden Temple, the holiest Sikh site. “The thing is, everyone wants to look good these days,” said Mr Waraich, who is “in the gas station business” in Amritsar. “It’s a person-toperson thing now. I just find the turban heavy and uncomfortable. I put one on for weddings, but otherwise I choose not to.”

There are no official statistics to show how many Sikh men are cutting their hair but Mr Waraich and a dozen other young Sikhs estimated that 20 to 30 per cent of their friends had done so. Most barbers in Amritsar were reluctant to talk about it, although one said that up to 15 per cent of his customers were Sikhs.

Whatever the exact numbers, the issue is serious enough to have prompted the Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee (SGPC), the community’s top decision-making body, to speak out. “This is a challenge to the traditional Sikh identity,” Avtar Singh Makkar, president of the SGPC, said. “Young boys are doing this because they want to look smart. They think this because of the influence of modern culture through the Western media,” he said. “It is our task to educate them about the sacrifices that have been made for their religion and to bring them back to their faith.”

The crisis at the heart of the Sikh community is one indicator of the social changes that are challenging traditions across India some 15 years after it began market-orientated economic reforms.

It also reflects the growing intolerance in the West towards overtly religious clothing — especially veils and turbans — five years after the attacks on America of September 11, 2001. Many young Sikh men who have cut their hair say that they did so to escape the humiliation of turban searches at Western airports or to avoid being mistaken for Muslims.

They cite Balbri Singh Sodi, a petrol station owner shot dead in Arizona on September 15, 2001. His American killer, bent on revenge for 9/11, thought that Mr Sodi’s turban indicated that he was an Arab.

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