Jangnama Singhan te Firangianਜੰਗਨਾਮਾ ਸਿੰਘਾਂ ਤੇ ਫਿਰੰਗੀਆਂ

About the poem

Jangnama Singhan te Firangian (The War Chronicle of the Sikhs and the British) is a long Punjabi poem by Shah Mohammad, the Muslim poet of Vadala Viram near Amritsar, and the most famous Punjabi telling of the first Anglo-Sikh war of 1845 to 1846. The Encyclopaedia of the Sikhs calls its author the national poet of the Punjab in the nineteenth century, and calls this composition his celebrated work: a poem whose subject is the decline of the Sikh polity after the death of Maharaja Ranjit Singh in 1839, and whose meaning, for later readers, lies in its treatment of the uncertainty that gripped the sovereign identity of the Punjab.

The poem is built in the traditional baint metre. SikhiWiki counts 105 baints, each baint having four verses, and in the sung text the poet signs stanza after stanza with his own name, Shah Mohammada. Its structure is in two parts. The first part, running into fifty octaves, narrates the war of succession that consumed the Lahore court after 1839. The second part, of fifty five octaves, describes the battles fought between the Sikh and British armies. It is also known as Var Shah Muhammad and as Hind Panjab da Jang, and its full text is still published and read, among other places on Folk Punjab.

What does the Jangnama describe?

The Jangnama describes a kingdom that first destroys itself and then fights bravely to survive. Its opening movement follows the murderous intrigues after Ranjit Singh's death: the prime minister Dhian Singh Dogra set aside Maharaja Kharak Singh and had his favourite Chet Singh murdered before his eyes; Kharak Singh, his son Kanvar Nau Nihal Singh, Maharaja Sher Singh and Sher Singh's young son Kanvar Partap Singh were all killed in turn, and Dhian Singh himself was killed by the Sandhanwalias, who had murdered the reigning Maharaja. SikhiWiki notes that Shah Mohammad relates this tale of political nightmare with a historical precision and brevity of expression unusual in a popular poet. The second movement then turns to the war: the engagements between the English and the Sikhs, in which the poet lyrically recalls the days when Sikh warriors had subdued Khyber, Kangra and Jammu, and praises the heroism and sacrifice of sardars such as Sham Singh Atarivala and Ranjodh Singh.

Pride, treachery and grief

Three feelings run through the poem at once, and they are the reason it has lasted. The first is pride: Shah Mohammad, though a Muslim, identifies himself with the Sikh elan and ascendancy, and remembers Ranjit Singh's empire as Punjab's own greatness. The second is anger at betrayal from within: the Encyclopaedia of the Sikhs stresses how the poem names the internal collapse that delivered the Khalsa army to defeat, so that the war reads as a loss Punjab inflicted on itself before the British could. The third is grief. The defeat elicits the poet's full empathy: he declares it a war between the rest of India and the Punjab, and he draws a poignant picture of the lamenting mothers, sisters, wives and relatives of the dead. The Jangnama is a war poem that ends, again and again, at the doors of the bereaved.

The author

Shah Mohammad (c. 1780 to 1862) lived at Vadala Viram, near Amritsar, and the poem itself opens there, with the poet sitting in his village as news and talk of the English reach him. He is said to have composed a kissa, a narrative poem of love, as well, but the Jangnama is the work his name lives by. Writing from inside the countryside that supplied the Khalsa army its soldiers, he saw the empire's fall not as distant court history but as a calamity arriving in villages like his own. He has a full entry of his own in this Kosh.

Reception and legacy

The Jangnama's reputation rests on a rare double claim. As literature, it is the great Punjabi poem of the Anglo-Sikh wars, the work that fixed the fall of the Sikh Empire in the language and metre of the people who lived it. As record, it commands a historian's respect: SikhiWiki concludes that the historical framework the poet laid out for those events has not so far been superseded. The Encyclopaedia of the Sikhs adds that the composition keeps acquiring meaning, because the uncertainty it captured, about Punjab's sovereign identity, has extended with the passage of time. Read today, it remains what it was for its first hearers: Punjab accounting for itself, in verse, at the moment it ceased to be a kingdom.