ਗੰਡਾ ਸਿੰਘਗੰਡਾ ਸਿੰਘ

Ganda Singh (15 November 1900 to 27 December 1987) was a Punjabi historian from Hariana in Hoshiarpur district who reshaped the study of Sikh and Punjab history. Working from original Persian, Urdu and Punjabi records that many scholars could not read, he published more than two dozen books, led Sikh history research at Khalsa College, Amritsar, and became the founding Director of Archives for the Patiala state government.

ਮੁੱਢਲਾ ਜੀਵਨ

Ganda Singh was born on 15 November 1900 at Hariana, an old town close to Hoshiarpur in the Punjab, the son of Jawala Singh and Hukam Devi. He began his schooling locally, passed his middle examination from the D.A.V. Middle School at Hoshiarpur and matriculated from Government High School in the same town. He then joined Forman Christian College at Lahore, but left his studies unfinished to enlist in the army in 1919. Stories of the Sikh heroes of the eighteenth century, read during the religious debates that filled Punjab in those years, had already turned his mind towards Sikh history.

How did Ganda Singh become a historian?

His road to scholarship ran through soldiering and an oil company. He served with the Supply and Transport Corps at Rawalpindi and Peshawar, then with the Mesopotamia Expeditionary Force at Basra in 1920 and the British Royal Army Pay Corps in 1921. At Basra a bullet tore through his thigh. He was hospitalised, and through an error he was reported dead to his family. When he reached home late one evening and knocked, his family, believing him gone, at first took him for a spirit and would not open the door. He slept the night outside and was recognised with joy in the morning.

After recovering, he went back to the region and joined the Anglo-Persian Oil Company at Abadan in Iran as an accounts officer, working there from 1921 to 1930. At Abadan he assisted the company manager Arnold Wilson, a noted scholar, who was preparing a bibliography of Persia. The work gave Ganda Singh his model: he resolved to prepare a bibliography of his own Punjab. Returning home towards the end of 1930, he joined the editorial board of the Phulwari, a Punjabi monthly published from Lahore.

Building Sikh history research at Amritsar

In October 1931 Khalsa College, Amritsar placed him in charge of its newly created Sikh History Research Department, a post he held until 1949. Those eighteen years made his reputation. He travelled across India searching public libraries, archives and private collections for material on Sikh history, visiting collections at Rampur, Bankipur, Patna, Kolkata and Delhi, and brought rare books and manuscripts back to enrich the department library at Amritsar. His command of Persian let him open sources that had stayed closed to most scholars of Sikhism, and the books and articles that followed were built on that original material.

Archives, a doctorate and the Punjab History Conference

In 1949 he moved to Patiala as Director of Archives and Curator of Museum under the Government of Patiala and East Punjab States Union, collecting and organising the records of eight princely states. In 1950 he took the additional charge of Director of the Punjabi Department. His thesis on the Afghan ruler Ahmad Shah Durrani earned him a PhD from Panjab University, Chandigarh, in 1954. After serving as principal of Khalsa College, Patiala, he was invited by Punjabi University, Patiala, to organise its Department of Punjab Historical Studies. There he set up the Punjab History Conference in 1965 and in 1967 launched the university journal The Panjab Past and Present, which he edited. In 1974 he presided over the 35th session of the Indian History Congress at Jadavpur.

What did Ganda Singh write?

Alongside scores of research papers, booklets and pamphlets, he published over two dozen full-length volumes in English and Punjabi, and edited Persian texts. His Life of Banda Singh Bahadur and his History of Gurdwara Shahidganj, Lahore both appeared in 1935 and were compiled from contemporary and original records. With Teja Singh he wrote A Short History of the Sikhs in 1950. His Ahmad Shah Durrani, published in 1959, grew out of his doctoral thesis. Later works included a bibliography of the Punjab in 1966, the Maharaja Duleep Singh Correspondence in 1977, and A Diary of the Partition Days 1947, his day by day record of the division of Punjab. Few historians of Punjab have left so much of the raw record, collected, edited and printed, for those who came after them.

Honours and later life

The Punjab Government gave him its Award for Literature on 31 March 1963, and the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee commended him on 28 March 1964. Aligarh Muslim University awarded him an honorary Doctor of Letters on 19 December 1964, and Punjabi University did the same on 25 February 1978. The Government of India honoured him with the Padma Bhushan, an award he returned in protest against the government action during Operation Blue Star. In November 1987 the Indian History Congress, meeting at Panaji, honoured him as one of the five distinguished historians of India. He died at Patiala on 27 December 1987.

Legacy

Ganda Singh donated his entire personal collection of rare books, maps, documents and manuscripts, which filled several rooms of his modest home on the Lower Mall at Patiala, to Punjabi University, Patiala. His lasting change to the field was method as much as fact: go to the original record, in whatever language it survives, and build the bibliography so others can follow. Students of Sikh and Punjab history, in Punjab and across the diaspora, still begin with the sources he gathered and the volumes he wrote from them.