Nanak Parkashਨਾਨਕ ਪ੍ਰਕਾਸ਼

Nanak Parkash is the verse life of Guru Nanak Dev Ji, written by Kavi Santokh Singh Ji and completed about 1823. In about 9,700 verses of Braj poetry it tells Guru Nanak's birth, travels and teaching, and it later became the opening part of the poet's great Sri Gur Pratap Suraj Granth.

What is Nanak Parkash?

The name means the illumination, or shining forth, of Nanak. It is a janamsakhi, a birth story and life story of Guru Nanak Dev Ji, but told in verse rather than prose. Scholars call it the largest of all the janamsakhis, and the most polished: about 9,700 verses that carry the reader from Guru Nanak's birth at Talwandi through his years at Sultanpur, his long travels, and his final years at Kartarpur, where he passed the Guruship to Guru Angad Dev Ji.

The book's main source was the Bhai Bala janamsakhi, the tradition that claims the companion Bhai Bala told Guru Nanak's stories at Guru Angad's request. Santokh Singh Ji believed that tradition had been tampered with, that followers of Baba Hindal had added passages praising their own teacher. He set out to clean the story, keeping what he trusted from Bala and leaving the rest aside. Modern scholars note the irony: the Bala tradition itself is doubted by historians, since its oldest accepted manuscript dates to 1658 and Guru Angad is said not to have known Bala at all. But for Santokh Singh Ji, Bala was the true account, and his poem fixed that version of Guru Nanak's life in the Sikh imagination.

The verse is Braj Bhasha, the literary language of north Indian poetry in that age, written in Gurmukhi script and thick with Sanskrit words. It was written to be heard. Even today, preachers read it out in gurdwaras as katha, explaining each verse as they go, because few readers can follow the old Braj without help.

Sunrise and sunset: the two-part structure

Nanak Parkash is built in two parts, and their names carry the book's central image. The first part is Purab Ardh, the eastern half, the sunrise of Guru Nanak's life. It runs to 73 chapters and covers his birth, childhood, marriage, his work at Sultanpur and the call that sent him out to preach. The second part is Uttar Ardh, the northern half, the sunset: 57 chapters on his travels, his teaching and his closing years at Kartarpur. Together the two halves run to 130 chapters.

The sun image matters because it is the thread that runs through the whole Granth. Santokh Singh Ji explains it himself: as the sun rises, darkness ends and the stars fade, and so it was with the coming of the Gurus, whose light drove away the darkness of ignorance. In Nanak Parkash the sun rises and sets on one life. When the poet later wrote the lives of the other nine Gurus, he kept the same sky: twelve raas named for the signs of the zodiac, six rut for the seasons, two ayan for the solstices. The first part of the Granth is the sunrise and the sunset. The rest is the sun's journey across the day and the year.

The poet behind the book

Kavi Santokh Singh Ji was born on 8 October 1787 at Sarai Nurdin, a village near Tarn Taran, the son of Deva Singh and Mai Rajadi. He studied first with his father and his uncle, then for nearly a decade with Giani Sant Singh of Amritsar, the leading scholar of the day, learning Braj, Sanskrit, scripture and history.

He earned his living as a katha performer and a court poet. His first patron was Bhagwant Singh of Buria, and it was at Buria that he wrote Nanak Parkash, finishing it about 1823 and leaving Buria the same year to gather material for the lives of the other Gurus. In 1829 he moved to the court of Raja Udai Singh of Kaithal, who rewarded him in 1834 with the village of Morthali. There he spent about a decade writing the second part of the Granth, finishing it in the rainy month of Sawan in 1843. He carried it to Amritsar, presented it to the clergy at the Akal Bunga, and died on 19 October 1843, in the same year, aged 56. His admirers call him Kavi Churamani, the crown jewel of poets.

The birth date that fixed Gurpurab

Nanak Parkash did more than tell Guru Nanak's life. It fixed the date on which Sikhs celebrate his birth. Following the Bhai Bala janamsakhi, Santokh Singh Ji gives the birth as Puranmashi, the full moon, of the month of Kartik in Sambat 1526, which falls about November 1469. It was the first time, as far as the record shows, that this date had been put forward as Guru Nanak's birthday.

The effect was practical and lasting. In 1853, thirty years after the book was finished, the birthday was celebrated at Nankana Sahib in the month of Kartik, and the Kartik full moon became the most widely kept date in the Sikh calendar. Guru Nanak Gurpurab is still marked on that full moon today.

Other traditions give a different date, and readers should know that. The Puratan janamsakhi, the oldest of the traditions, places the birth in Vaisakh, in the spring of 1469. Nanak Parkash chose the Bala date, and because the poem became the standard telling of the life, the Bala date became the standard date. The book's authority, not a new discovery, settled the question.

Nanak Parkash and Suraj Parkash: how the two parts fit

Readers often meet the two titles together, and it is worth being clear about how they relate. Nanak Parkash came first, finished about 1823, a single life in about 9,700 verses. Suraj Parkash, full title Sri Gur Pratap Suraj Granth, came twenty years later, finished in 1843, and it tells the lives of the other nine Gurus and Baba Banda Singh Bahadur in about 51,800 verses. Counts vary a little by edition, and some give 51,829.

Together the two works run to more than 60,000 verses, and they are now printed and read as one book. In Bhai Vir Singh's great annotated edition, published in fourteen volumes between 1926 and 1935, Nanak Parkash fills the first two volumes and the rest of the Granth follows. That is why the full work is sometimes called Suraj Parkash and sometimes Sri Gur Pratap Suraj Granth: the second title covers both parts, and Nanak Parkash is its opening.

The two parts also differ in feel. In Nanak Parkash the telling is at its most elaborate, with long passages of praise for the Gurus, the Guru Granth Sahib and the gods of learning. The later part moves faster and spends less time on ornament. A reader who wants Guru Nanak alone can read Nanak Parkash on its own. A reader who wants the whole story of the ten Gurus reads on into Suraj Parkash.

Can Nanak Parkash be trusted as history?

This is the honest question, and scholars have answered it in different ways. The book is a hagiography, a reverent telling of a holy life, not a modern critical history. Its stories include miracles: a cobra shading the sleeping child, a boulder stopped by a hand, the Kaaba turning towards Guru Nanak's feet at Mecca, and after his death a body that vanished and left only flowers for Hindus and Muslims to divide. These are stories of meaning, not records of fact, and no historian treats them as evidence for what happened.

The scholars who used the book most also warned about it. Max Arthur Macauliffe drew on it heavily for his six-volume The Sikh Religion of 1909, which introduced Sikh scripture to the West, yet he called it of doubtful trustworthiness. W. H. McLeod went further, calling the Granth mostly ahistorical mythology. Ganda Singh criticised Santokh Singh Ji for accepting every source he used, including the Mahima Prakash and the Sau Sakhi, as authentic without questioning them, and Karam Singh made the same complaint about his trust in the Bhai Bala tradition.

Its defenders answer that the book was never meant to be that kind of history. Bhai Vir Singh, who gave more than a decade of his life to publishing it, argued that its Puranic stories and miracles are metaphors, meant to open the listener's heart in a way plain history cannot. The fair way to read Nanak Parkash is as the Sikh tradition's own telling of its founder's life: beloved, influential and beautifully made, but to be checked against other sources wherever dates and facts are concerned. Scholars still study it closely: Guru Nanak Dev University published a full historical analysis of the text in 1993, and its katha is still heard in gurdwaras every day.