Prem Sumaragਪ੍ਰੇਮ ਸੁਮਾਰਗ

The Prem Sumarag, meaning the true path of love, is an early Sikh code of conduct written in old Punjabi. It sets out how members of the Khalsa should pray, marry, work, eat and govern, and it pictures an ideal Sikh society built on love, honest work and remembrance of God.

What is the Prem Sumarag?

The name says what the book is for. Prem means love, and sumarag means the true path, so the title reads as the true path of love. The work belongs to the rehat genre of Sikh literature, the family of texts that lay down the rahit, or code of conduct, for the Khalsa. It is an anonymous work, written in the old Punjabi of its time, and it tries to describe a whole Sikh way of life, from private prayer to public rule.

Scholars describe it in two memorable ways. Gurinder Singh Mann called it a proto-rahitnama, an early forerunner of the code-of-conduct texts that followed. J. S. Grewal called it a theory of Sikh social order, because it does more than list rules: it imagines a complete Sikh society and the state that would serve it. The book is divided into ten chapters, called adhiao, and each chapter is divided into smaller sections called bachans, or utterances.

Its scope is wide: daily prayer, the initiation of a new Sikh, birth and marriage, food and dress, work and death, and then taxes, inheritance, courts and kingship. That breadth sets it apart from the shorter rahitnamas, which usually stick to ceremony and conduct. The Prem Sumarag is a code of conduct and a picture of a whole society at once.

When was it written, and who wrote it?

No one can give a firm date or a firm author, and honest writing about the Prem Sumarag says so plainly. The authorship has been attributed in different places to Guru Gobind Singh Ji himself, to the poets of his court, known as the Kavi Darbar, and to later writers. The Sikh Encyclopedia treats it as an anonymous work, probably written in the eighteenth century.

The manuscripts tell a mixed story. Some copies carry colophons dated 1701 and 1707, which would put the text in the Guru's own lifetime or just after it. Yet the earliest manuscript so far discovered bears a date of writing of 1801, according to Parkash Singh Jammu. W. H. McLeod, who translated the whole text into English, dated it to the early nineteenth century, while J. S. Grewal and Gurinder Singh Mann held that it belongs to the period of Guru Gobind Singh Ji or near it.

One firm marker is that the text was already in circulation by the 1840s: Major R. Leech, a British officer, quoted from it at length in his 1844 report on Sikh rites and ceremonies. Whatever its exact date, it is one of the oldest full accounts of the Khalsa way of life that survives.

What does the Prem Sumarag teach?

The first chapter opens as a prologue. It recalls the opening of the Bachittar Natak in the Dasam Granth, where God sends the Guru into the world to end evil and promote goodness, and the author presents his code as the conduct the Khalsa must follow to carry out that mission. The code that follows is given divine weight from the start.

Much of the book is about ordinary life done well: the method of Khalsa initiation, the rites that follow a child's birth, and the rules for choosing a life partner, the age for marriage, and the remarriage of a widow. It sets out what food a Sikh should eat, which intoxicants to avoid, and how much cleanliness matters, and it advises on dress and ornaments, the occupations a Sikh should pursue and those to leave alone, and on the rites of death.

Running through it is a moral code built on love and honest work. A Sikh must shun flirtation and adultery, greed, anger, theft, ego, speaking ill of others and falsehood, even a truth that harms others. Truth telling is prized above all, and false witness is a grave sin. A Sikh should keep arms at hand, earn a living by honest work, welcome guests, address fellow Sikhs as Singh Ji, and accept God's will in every situation.

A Sikh day, from dawn to night

The Prem Sumarag sets out its own daily routine, a nitnem of its own. A Sikh should rise early in the morning, take a bath, and recite Japu and Jap five times in the morning, Japu and Jap at noon, and Sodar, Japu and Jap in the evening. Before going to bed, the text prescribes readings from the Bachittar Natak and Kirtan Sohila.

The stress throughout is on constant remembrance of God, called simaran, joined to honest work and mutual help. The daily round is the shape of a life: prayer at the edges of the day, work in the middle, and love and service binding the two together.

The Prem Sumarag's vision of a Sikh state

The eighth chapter turns from the household to the state, and here the Prem Sumarag is at its most distinctive: its ideal Sikh state is a monarchy. Power rests not with the Panth as a whole but with a single ruler, assisted by a wise minister and by pious, learned advisers. The king holds absolute authority, checked only by his own conscience, yet his first duty is to rule justly and guard his authority.

The administration is drawn on the model of medieval feudal rule, with the mansabdari and jagirdari systems, and the king himself must supervise the courts. He must be open to all his subjects, decide without favour to any belief or religion, and still remember that he owes a special duty to the Khalsa Panth. Gurmukhi, written in Punjabi, is to be the official language of the state, and every Sikh child is to be taught the Khalsa rahit.

Scholars note that this praise of kingship may reveal something about the text's date: Parkash Singh Jammu has pointed out that the bias toward monarchy could mean this part was shaped during the Sikh Empire of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, who took Lahore in 1799. The ninth chapter then deals with the everyday business of such a state: inheritance, debts and interest, taxation, agriculture, animals, gardens and even slavery.

Manuscripts, print and translation

For a long time the Prem Sumarag lived only in handwritten copies. One manuscript was obtained by the German scholar Ernest Trumpp and deposited in 1872 in the Bavarian State Library in Munich, where it is still held. In 1940 Bhai Randhir Singh came across a damaged copy by chance and restored the text with the help of another manuscript kept in the Punjab Public Library in Lahore.

Randhir Singh's edition was the first to reach print, published in 1953 by the Sikh History Society in Amritsar. A second edition followed in 1965 from the New Book Company in Jalandhar. Parts of the text had already reached English readers much earlier, in translations made by the Scots scholar John Leyden in the early nineteenth century. The full English translation came much later, from W. H. McLeod, published by Oxford University Press in 2006 under the title The Prem Sumarag: The Testimony of a Sanatan Sikh.

McLeod's word Sanatan matters for understanding the book. He argued that the Prem Sumarag comes from a Sanatan current of Sikh tradition, quite different from the Tat Khalsa reading of the rahit that came to dominate the twentieth century and produced the Sikh Rehat Maryada. In his telling, the text was buried and forgotten as the Tat Khalsa version took hold, until Randhir Singh's work brought it back into view.

How is it different from the Sikh Rehat Maryada?

A reader who knows the modern Sikh Rehat Maryada may wonder whether the Prem Sumarag is the same thing under an older name. It is not. The Rehat Maryada is the Panth-approved code published by the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee at Amritsar in 1945, drafted from 1927 out of the older rahitnama tradition. It is the standard Sikhs follow today.

The Prem Sumarag is older, longer and written in a leisurely, detailed style, where most rahitnamas are short and crisp. It covers ground the modern code never touches, above all the design of a Sikh state and the civil law of inheritance, taxation and property. And it speaks from a Sanatan outlook that the twentieth-century reformers set aside. Today it is read less as a rulebook and more as a window: it shows how an earlier generation of Sikhs imagined the whole of life, from morning prayer to the king's court, held together by love.

The last chapter gives that vision its name: sahaj jog, a state of contentment, reached through compassion, service, love and devotion, and through submission to God's will. For the author, that acceptance, indifferent to pain and pleasure, is the true path of love.