The Sikhs of the Punjab

About the book

The Sikhs of the Punjab is the book J. S. Grewal was invited to write for The New Cambridge History of India, and it is the work that made his reputation beyond the seminar room. Cambridge University Press asked him in 1980 to write the volume on the Sikhs, and it was published in 1990 as volume II.3 of the series. A revised edition followed in 1998, with its epilogue brought up to 1997, and the book has been reprinted many times since. Sahapedia calls it a study of change and continuities, and readers have treated it as a classic ever since.

The book does what its title promises. It tells the history of the Sikhs as a people of Punjab, from the mission of Guru Nanak in the late fifteenth century to the present day, and it never lets that story drift away from the land that produced it. The changing pattern of settlement in the region, the rise of Punjabi as a language of the region, and the politics of Delhi, Lahore and the Punjab countryside all run through the narrative. Religion, society, politics, economy, culture and demography are treated together, not as separate stories.

What does the book cover?

Ten chapters carry the story. It opens with Turko-Afghan rule in the Punjab, then turns to the foundation of the Sikh Panth under Guru Nanak and its evolution under his successors to 1606. The transformation of the Panth under Guru Gobind Singh, the rise to political power in the eighteenth century and the Sikh empire of Maharaja Ranjit Singh follow, then the recession and resurgence under British rule, the struggle for freedom, the movement for a Punjabi-speaking province and the new Punjab state after 1966. An epilogue, five appendices and a bibliographical essay close the volume.

Grewal divides the whole span into four periods. The first runs from Guru Nanak to the death of Guru Gobind Singh in 1708. The second runs from the rise of Banda Bahadur to the annexation of Punjab by the British in 1849. The third covers the near century of colonial rule to 1947, and the fourth the decades of Independence. He is frank that historians had long concentrated on the first two periods, and that interest in the colonial period only began in the 1960s. His own treatment grows more detailed, and more factual, as it moves towards the present.

How Grewal writes Sikh history

The preface states the method plainly. General statements give way to factual and analytical narrative as the book moves from one period to another, because the aim is to identify change: what altered, when, and why. The book draws on two decades of research on Sikh history, including the Persian sources Grewal had worked on for years, and it takes account of the research published in the two decades before 1990, which Grewal calls its major claim on the reader.

The tone is measured throughout. Grewal writes as a historian of the region, not as a partisan of any community, and he places Sikh history inside the wider history of India rather than apart from it. That is why the book opens with the land itself, its settlements and its language, before any Guru appears, and why its later chapters give as much weight to the movement for a Punjabi province and the crisis of the 1980s as to the battles of the eighteenth century.

ਲੇਖਕ

J. S. Grewal (Jagtar Singh Grewal, 1927 to 2022) was a Punjabi historian who helped make Sikh studies a field of its own. He took his PhD in history from the University of London in 1963, joined the faculty of Panjab University, Chandigarh, in 1964, and taught there until his retirement in 1987. In 1984 he was elected general president of the Indian History Congress, and in 2005 the President of India awarded him the Padma Shri for his contribution to learning. His full story is in his Kosh entry.

The Sikhs of the Punjab stands in the middle of a long shelf of his work. It followed Guru Nanak in History (1969), the study that earned him his D.Lit., and it was followed by Sikh Ideology, Polity and Social Order (1996), Historical Perspectives on Sikh Identity (1997) and Contesting Interpretations of the Sikh Tradition (1998).

Reception and legacy

The book was received as the standard single-volume history of the Sikhs, and it has held that place for more than three decades. In his Sahapedia interview, Grewal noted that it was meant at first for the common reader, and that it has been reprinted many a time to become a classic. It is cited in almost every serious work on Punjab that followed it, and it is the book teachers reach for when a student asks where to begin.

For readers of the Kosh, it is the natural companion to the two histories already here: Khushwant Singh's A History of the Sikhs and The Sikhs. Grewal's volume is the more scholarly of the three, built on Persian and Punjabi sources as well as English ones, and it is the one that carries the story through the twentieth century to the present day.