Guru Bilas Patshahi Chhevinਗੁਰੂ ਬਿਲਾਸ ਪਾਤਸ਼ਾਹੀ ਛੇਵੀਂ

Guru Bilas Patshahi Chhevin, meaning the life play of the Sixth Guru, is the oldest full verse biography of Guru Hargobind Ji, the sixth Sikh Guru. Written in Braj verse in the Gurmukhi script, it tells his whole life, from birth to battles to his passing, and remains the main early source for his guruship.

What is Guru Bilas Patshahi Chhevin?

The title says what the book is. Bilas means a play, a story that shows a life in action, and Patshahi Chhevin means the Sixth Guru, so the whole title reads as the life play of Guru Hargobind Ji. It is a long poem, not a prose history: twenty-one cantos of unequal length, mostly in Chaupai and Dohira metres, with 8,131 stanzas in Gill's 1968 edition and 7,793 in the Languages Department's 1970 edition. The language is Braj, written in the Gurmukhi script, and the poem opens by invoking Bhagauti and bowing to all Ten Gurus.

The book belongs to the Gurbilas literature, a small group of verse chronicles that tell the lives of the sixth and tenth Gurus, Guru Hargobind Ji and Guru Gobind Singh Ji. They stand close to the Janamsakhi tradition, the life stories of Guru Nanak Dev Ji, but work differently. A janamsakhi gathers short episodes, while a gurbilas tells one connected life from beginning to end. Like the janamsakhis, the Gurbilases praise the Guru rather than weigh evidence. Scholars class them as semi-historical, mixing remembered fact with devotion and legend.

Who wrote it, and when?

Nobody knows who wrote it. The author never names himself, and the book is usually attributed to a poet called Sohan, on tradition rather than proof. Its authorship is linked to the Gianian Bunga at Amritsar, the school of Bhai Mani Singh Ji, the scholar and martyr, whom the book places at the heart of its story. The colophon gives 1775 in the Bikrami calendar, which is AD 1718, and the poet says the work took him fifteen months.

That date of 1718 is the one most often quoted, but scholars have questioned it. The text mentions things from after 1718, which suggests parts were added later, or that the whole book is later than its colophon claims. Bhai Khan Singh Nabha argued for 1843, pointing to references to Maharaja Ranjit Singh and to the Ragmala. Others have suggested 1780. Macauliffe recorded that Bhai Gurumukh Singh and Bhai Darbara Singh of Amritsar compiled it in the reigns of Ranjit Singh and Sher Singh. Scholars today tend to place it in the nineteenth century or earlier, accepting that it was edited more than once, and Jvala Singh adds that it was narrated by Bhai Mani Singh Ji and written down by Bhagat Singh. The honest answer is that the book grew over time.

How the story reached the poet

The poet tells his readers where his material came from. He says he versified the Guru's life as narrated to him by his literary mentor, Dharam Singh. Dharam Singh had been present at Nanaksar, known today as Nankana Sahib, where Bhai Mani Singh Ji, at Bhagat Singh's request, recounted the events of the Guru's life in sitting after sitting. Mani Singh Ji's own knowledge, the poet adds, came from Bhai Daya Singh Ji, one of the Panj Piare of Guru Gobind Singh Ji, who had heard the details from the Guru himself.

Take this chain as the book presents it, a claim about how the story was handed down, not a fact that can be checked. What it shows is how the book wanted to be read: not as one man's invention, but as a story carried from the Guru's own time through the men closest to him, set down in verse to be recited and remembered.

What the twenty-one cantos cover

The poem follows Guru Hargobind Ji from birth to death. The first three cantos tell of his birth, childhood and education. Canto four describes his father Guru Arjan's compilation of the Guru Granth Sahib, and canto five his marriage. Canto seven tells of Guru Arjan's martyrdom, canto eight of the building of the Akal Takht, and canto nine of the digging of Bibeksar. The battle of Amritsar comes in canto ten, the marriage of Bibi Viro in canto eleven, and the freeing of Kaulan in canto twelve. Later cantos record Bhai Buddha's passing in sixteen, Suraj Mal's marriage in seventeen, the passing of Bhai Gurdas in eighteen and of Mata Damodari in nineteen, and Painda Khan's defeat and death in twenty.

Running through the story is the hostility of Prithi Chand, the Guru's uncle, who claimed the spiritual throne after Guru Ram Das, resented Guru Arjan's succession, and plotted against his own brother and nephew. Against that stands the blessing of Bhai Buddha, the aged Sikh of Guru Nanak Dev Ji's own time, who told the Guru's mother Mata Ganga that a warrior son would be born to her who would crush tyrants. It also describes the founding of the Akal Takht: Guru Hargobind Ji laid its foundation on Har 5, 1663 Bikrami, or 3 June 1606, with only Bhai Buddha and Bhai Gurdas lending their labour, and Bhai Gurdas was named its custodian, as Bhai Buddha had been of the Harmandir. It credits the Guru with assigning tunes, or dhuns, to nine of the vars in the Guru Granth Sahib, later written in by Bhai Gurdas, against the accepted belief that Guru Arjan fixed the tunes at compilation.

The poem ends with the Guru's death, dated in the text to 1695 Bikrami, or AD 1638. That date is wrong, as are several others in the book: the commonly accepted date of his passing is 28 February 1644, at Kiratpur Sahib.

Why historians read it with care

For all its faults, the book matters because there is nothing else like it: the only comprehensive account of the sixth Guru's guruship, on which later writers leaned heavily. Pashaura Singh has shown that the 1595 birth year most books still give comes from this text, and that later works such as Suraj Parkash and Naveen Panth Prakash simply copied it. Other early records, including the Bhatt Vahis, give 1590 instead. A reader who trusts the Gurbilas on dates alone will go wrong.

Read it as a record of how the early Khalsa remembered its sixth Guru. Its picture of Guru Hargobind Ji, the saint who took up two swords for miri and piri and built the Akal Takht before the Harmandir, shaped Sikh memory for the next two centuries. The battles, the court, the horses and the hunt, and the release of the fifty-two rajas from Gwalior remembered each year at Bandi Chhor Divas, reached later generations this way. Historians therefore read it beside other sources, checking its dates and keeping what it alone preserves.

The same caution applies to details. The claim about the dhuns contradicts what is generally accepted about the compilation of the Guru Granth Sahib, and is best treated as the poet's own tradition rather than settled fact. So are the numbers the book gives for armies and ages, which follow the habits of court poetry more than those of a record office. None of that takes away from the book. It only fixes what kind of book it is: a devotional history in verse, useful to history precisely because it shows what his people believed about him.

How can I read Guru Bilas Patshahi Chhevin today?

Two modern editions carry the full text: Gill's, published by Jivan Mandar Pustakalia in Amritsar in 1968, and the Languages Department of Punjab's of 1970. Manuscripts also survive, some handwritten and decorated, including a folio kept in the village of Bhai Rupa, and digitised copies have begun to circulate, so a reader with access to a Punjabi university library or a Sikh research collection can consult it. There is no standard English translation, so most readers meet the book through Punjabi.

Do not confuse it with the other books that share its name: Gurbilas Patshahi Dasvin by Koer Singh (1751) and Gurbilas Dasvin Patshahi by Sukha Singh (1797) both tell of Guru Gobind Singh Ji, and Sri Gur Sobha by Sainapati (1711) is the earliest text of the genre, also about the tenth Guru. Suraj Parkash (1844) and Panth Parkash cover the same ground later and fuller, and both drew on the Chhevin Patshahi. This book is the first of the line, and the only one about the sixth Guru.

The Janamsakhis gave Sikhs the life of Guru Nanak Dev Ji in stories, and the Gurbilases did the same for the two warrior Gurus who followed. This book fixed the story of Guru Hargobind Ji, builder of the Akal Takht and wearer of two swords, into verse to be read aloud, remembered and passed on. Read with care about its dates, it remains the nearest thing we have to a life of the sixth Guru from the generation that still heard his name from those who knew him.