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About the book

Mahan Kosh, full title Gurshabad Ratnakar Mahan Kosh and known in English as the Encyclopaedia of the Sikh Literature, is a Punjabi encyclopedia and dictionary compiled by Bhai Kahn Singh Nabha and published on 13 April 1930. It was the first encyclopedia ever produced in Punjabi, and nearly a century later it remains the most comprehensive single reference on Sikh scripture, history and language.

The work holds 64,263 entries, arranged in the alphabetical order of the Gurmukhi script. Its subject is the whole world of Sikh learning: the words of the Guru Granth Sahib and the Dasam Granth, the people, places, doctrines and institutions of Sikh history, and the wider fields that touch them, philosophy, history, geography, science and linguistics.

The full title promises a treasury: Gurshabad Ratnakar, an ocean of jewels drawn from the Guru's word. The book keeps the promise at a scale no Punjabi work had attempted before it, and it still serves as one of the most reliable reference materials for research on the Sikh faith and on Punjabi culture.

What the entries do

Each entry records the etymology of a term and its different meanings, according to its usage at different places in different works, supported by quotations from the texts themselves. A reader can follow a word from its root through each shade of meaning it carries in the Guru Granth Sahib, the Dasam Granth, the Gur Pratap Suraj Granth and other Sikh books.

Where a word comes from Persian, Arabic or Sanskrit, it is also printed in its original script, so the reader sees its correct pronunciation and connotation rather than a guess. References to works outside the Sikh tradition are included wherever they help. The result is part dictionary, part encyclopedia: brief definitions of difficult words sit alongside longer accounts of doctrines, individuals, institutions and the Gurus themselves.

The Mahan Kosh also gives careful treatment to terminology that has dropped out of usage or changed its meaning over the centuries. That makes it a record of the Punjabi language itself, and not only of Sikh belief, one reason linguists as well as theologians keep returning to it.

How it was made

Kahn Singh came to the project through two earlier lexicons, Pandit Tara Singh Narotam's Granth Guru Girarth Kos (1895) and Hazara Singh's Sri Guru Granth Kos (1899). Studying them convinced him that a full lexicography of the words occurring in Sikh historical texts and in the Guru Granth Sahib would promote literacy and critical studies in Punjabi, and on 12 May 1912 he resigned his position in Nabha State and began work.

The work took fourteen years, and it nearly failed twice. His original patron, Maharaja Brijindar Singh of Faridkot, who had earlier sponsored scholarly work on the Guru Granth Sahib, died in 1918. His other patron, Maharaja Ripudaman Singh of Nabha, was forced to abdicate his throne in 1923. Maharaja Bhupinder Singh of Patiala then offered to underwrite the entire expense of printing, and the Patiala State spent Rs 51,000 on the publication. Kahn Singh finished the work on 6 February 1926, printing began on 26 October 1927 at the Sudarshan Press in Amritsar, owned by the poet Dhani Ram Chatrik, and the first printing, in four volumes and 3,338 pages priced at Rs 110, was finished on 13 April 1930.

ਲੇਖਕ

Bhai Kahn Singh Nabha (1861–1938) was a scholar of Nabha State who never attended a school or college, yet taught himself Sanskrit, Persian and several other branches of learning. He served Nabha State in posts rising to judge of its high court, played a role in the Singh Sabha movement, and assisted Max Arthur Macauliffe in researching The Sikh Religion, a debt Macauliffe acknowledged by assigning him the copyright of that work. His own shelf of books includes Ham Hindu Nahin (1898), on the distinct identity of the Sikhs, and the standard guides Gurmat Prabhakar and Gurmat Sudhakar. The Mahan Kosh, the labour of his later years, is his magnum opus and the work that inspired generations of scholars after him.

Why does the Mahan Kosh still matter?

Because nothing has replaced it. SikhiWiki calls it indispensable for any serious student of Sikh studies, its qualities undimmed by the decades since it first appeared, and scholars still treat it as the first place to test the meaning of a term from the Sikh canon. It is also a monument of Punjabi scholarship: one man, working before modern research libraries reached Punjab, set the standard for how the language's religious and historical vocabulary should be documented.

The book has stayed in print ever since. The Languages Department of Punjab at Patiala republished the Mahan Kosh in one volume, and it has gone through several editions, the fourth released in 1981; the 1974 edition runs to 1,248 pages. Punjabi University, Patiala has translated it into English, and searchable digital copies are now free online, carrying Kahn Singh's entries to students far beyond the libraries that once held the four heavy volumes.