The Sikhs

About the book

The Sikhs is Khushwant Singh's concise history of the Sikhs, first published in London in 1953 by George Allen and Unwin. It was his first book of history, written before Train to Pakistan made him famous as a novelist, and it is still in print more than seventy years later. In a single compact volume, Singh tells the story of the Sikhs from Guru Nanak to the Partition of 1947: the ten Gurus, the rise and fall of the Sikh kingdom, and the community's passage through reform, rebellion and exile. He dedicated the book to his father, Sir Sobha Singh. Later editions carry a new afterword by his son, the journalist Rahul Singh, which brings the story up to date.

What does The Sikhs cover?

The book is arranged in four parts. Part One tells the founding story: the life of Guru Nanak (1469 to 1539), the Sikh religion as shaped by the nine Gurus who followed him, the rise of the Sikh confederacy, the kingdom of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, and the end of that kingdom with the British annexation of the Punjab in 1849. Part Two follows the community after 1849, when its history merges with the history of the rest of India: the movements of religious reform, the Singh Sabha and its work of social reform, the Akali agitation for control of Sikh shrines, the Ghadr rebellion and its links with Marxism, the political groups of the twentieth century, and finally the Partition of 1947, which Singh calls the Partition holocaust and the exodus. Part Three describes the cultural heritage of the Sikhs, and Part Four looks to the future. Through it all, Singh keeps his eye on the Guru Granth Sahib, the Sikh holy book, and its central place in Sikh life.

Why Khushwant Singh wrote it

Singh explains his reasons in the preface, and they are personal. He feared that the story of the Sikhs was being written by outsiders, and that the last chapters of it were being written by his own contemporaries. He wanted an account by someone identified with the community by faith and association, even if that meant it would lack the objectivity of the outsider. He was frank about the gap he was filling: no complete history of the Sikhs had been written by a Sikh, and no history at all had dealt with the community after 1849. Before him, the English reader had only a handful of older books: John Malcolm's Sketch of the Sikhs (1812), Captain J. D. Cunningham's History of the Sikhs (1849), and Max Arthur Macauliffe's six-volume The Sikh Religion (1909). Singh drew on sources those writers had not used. He had met leading figures of the movements he describes, he was entrusted with their original documents, and he worked in the India Office Library in London and with Ghadr party newspapers in Canada, where he served as a diplomat.

The author

Khushwant Singh was born in 1915 at Hadali, a village in the Khushab district of Punjab that now lies in Pakistan. He was educated at Modern School in New Delhi, St Stephen's College in Delhi, Government College in Lahore, and King's College London, where he studied law. He practised as a lawyer in Lahore for eight years, then joined the Indian Foreign Service in 1947, serving in Toronto, London and Ottawa, before turning to journalism. He edited the Illustrated Weekly of India from 1969 to 1978, taking its circulation from 65,000 to 400,000, and he served in the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of India's parliament, from 1980 to 1986. He wrote Train to Pakistan (1956), Delhi: A Novel, and the two-volume A History of the Sikhs (1963 to 1966), which grew out of this book and became the standard work on the subject. He died in New Delhi on 20 March 2014, aged ninety-nine.

Reception and legacy

The Sikhs was the book that made Khushwant Singh a historian. His publisher calls it one of the most concise and readable accounts of the Sikhs and their faith, and it has stayed in print through reprints and new editions ever since, most recently with his son's afterword. Its greater legacy is the book it led to. Ten years after The Sikhs, Singh published the first volume of A History of the Sikhs (1963), followed by the second volume in 1966, a work based on Persian, Gurmukhi and English documents that is still described as the most comprehensive and authoritative history of the Sikhs. The Sikhs remains the shorter road into that history: the book to read first, whether the reader wants the story of the Gurus, the kingdom of Ranjit Singh, or the community's passage through the twentieth century.