ਪੰਥ ਪ੍ਰਕਾਸ਼ਪੰਥ ਪ੍ਰਕਾਸ਼

Panth Parkash, also called Sri Guru Panth Parkash, is a verse history of the Sikhs written by Giani Gian Singh Ji and first published in Delhi in 1880. It tells the story of the Guru Panth, the Khalsa, from ਗੁਰੂ ਨਾਨਕ ਦੇਵ ਜੀ to the death of Maharaja Duleep Singh, and it is still read in gurdwaras today.

What is Panth Parkash?

The name says what the book does. Parkash means light or revelation, and Panth is the community of the Guru, the Khalsa. Panth Parkash is a history of that community told in verse, a long poem that carries the reader from the birth of Guru Nanak Dev Ji through the ten Gurus, the wars of the eighteenth century, and the rise and fall of Sikh rule in Punjab.

It was written in Braj, the literary language of much early Sikh writing, and it is arranged in bisrams, chapters or sections that move the story forward step by step. The author names twenty three sources he drew on, from older Sikh chronicles to Persian histories of Punjab, and he opens by invoking God, the ten Gurus, the Granth and the Panth, presenting his work as a true and sympathetic account of Sikh history.

For more than a century it has been one of the most read Sikh histories. It is expounded formally in gurdwaras, quoted by preachers and writers, and it has shaped how generations of Sikhs picture their own past. That is why it matters still: it is not only a book about Sikh history, it is one of the books that made Sikh history as Sikhs remember it.

Giani Gian Singh Ji: the author

Giani Gian Singh Ji (1822 to 1921) was one of the most productive Sikh writers of the nineteenth century. He was born on 15 April 1822 at Longowal, in what is now Sangrur district, and he lived for ninety nine years, long enough to watch the Sikh Empire fall, the British take Punjab, and a new age of Sikh learning begin.

He belonged to the Nirmala sect and was a theologian, preacher and teacher. He studied under Pandit Tara Singh Narotam, one of the great scholars of his day, and worked as a granthi at Patiala. As a young man he had served in the Patiala state, and in 1849 a leg wound in a local rising ended his civil service and turned him toward a life of study and pilgrimage.

Panth Parkash was his first major work, and it launched a writing life that produced more than a dozen books. His largest was the Twarikh Guru Khalsa, a prose history of the Sikhs in five parts, the first three of which were published in 1892. He also wrote histories of Amritsar and Lahore, a prose abridgement of the Suraj Parkash, and accounts of the Bagrian family and the Malwa region. Late in life he solemnised the wedding of Maharaja Bhupinder Singh of Patiala in 1908, and he died at Nabha on 24 September 1921.

Why he wrote a new Panth Parkash

Gian Singh Ji did not invent his title. An earlier Panth Parkash, written by Ratan Singh Bhangu in the early 1810s and now called the Prachin, or old, Panth Parkash, already told the story of the Khalsa after the Gurus. Gian Singh Ji admired that book and used it as one of his sources, but he thought its poetry was weak and its account left out the Sikhs of Malwa, his own region.

His teacher, Pandit Tara Singh Narotam, suggested he write the history in verse himself, and Gian Singh Ji asked the permission of the Sikh community before he began. He wrote the book between 1865 and 1867, though it was not published until 1880, when the first edition was lithographed at Delhi.

The book therefore has two parents: the older chronicle tradition of Bhangu, which gave it its shape and much of its material, and the scholarship of the Nirmala school, which gave it its language and its devotional frame. Gian Singh Ji called it a reworking, not a copy, and he meant it to be read aloud, as verse histories were, in the sangat.

What the book covers

Panth Parkash opens with the lives of the ten Gurus, beginning with Guru Nanak Dev Ji, and follows the community through the founding of the Khalsa at ਅਨੰਦਪੁਰ ਸਾਹਿਬ, the battles that followed ਗੁਰੂ ਗੋਬਿੰਦ ਸਿੰਘ ਜੀ ਨੇ, and the career of Banda Singh Bahadur. It then tells the long eighteenth century struggle: the persecution under the Mughals, the rise of the misls, the ਦਲ ਖ਼ਾਲਸਾ, and the founding of Sikh rule in Punjab.

The story runs on past the Sikh Empire to the annexation of Punjab by the British in 1849 and the death of Maharaja Duleep Singh, the last Sikh ruler. The book ends with something no earlier Sikh history had tried: an account of thirteen Sikh sects and groups of the author's own day, from the Udasis and the Nirmalas to the Nihangs, the Namdharis, the Gulabdasias and the Satkartarias, along with his own reflections on the society around him and a few details of his own life.

Readers looking for a single battle or a single Guru will find them, but the book's real subject is the Panth itself: how a community that began with one teacher became a people with armies, courts, kingdoms and, in the end, a memory of all three.

The editions, from Delhi to Amritsar

The first edition appeared at Delhi in 1880, a lithograph of 65 bisrams and 715 pages. It sold, and Gian Singh Ji set to work on a much larger second edition, but he fell ill after writing 772 pages and the printing stopped. His publisher, Diwan Buta Singh of Lahore, went ahead and published the enlarged book anyway in 1889, in two volumes totalling 1,418 pages. Gian Singh Ji was surprised to find it on sale, and the two men quarrelled.

He took the book to a new publisher, Bhai Kaka Singh Sadhu at Amritsar, who brought out a third edition in 1889 with 73 chapters and 960 pages, and a fourth in 1898, typeset at the Wazir-i-Hind Press, with 115 chapters and 1,085 pages. The Khalsa Tract Society reprinted the fourth edition twice.

The book has never gone out of print. The Punjab Languages Department at Patiala reprinted it in 1970, and in the same year Giani Kirpal Singh, then head granthi of Sri Darbar Sahib and later Jathedar of Sri Akal Takht, published a revised and annotated edition in five volumes. That five volume edition is the form in which most readers meet the book today.

Panth Parkash and Suraj Parkash: two different books

Readers sometimes confuse Panth Parkash with Suraj Parkash, the Sri Gur Pratap Suraj Granth of Bhai Santokh Singh. The two books belong to the same world: both are long verse histories written in Braj, both draw on the same older stories, and Gian Singh Ji lists Suraj Parkash among the twenty three sources he used for his own book.

But they are different works by different authors, with different aims. Suraj Parkash is a life of the Gurus, above all of Guru Nanak Dev Ji and Guru Gobind Singh Ji, told at great length. Panth Parkash takes the story where Suraj Parkash leaves it and carries it forward through the misls, the Sikh Empire and the coming of the British.

Gian Singh Ji knew the older book well. He later wrote a prose abridgement of it, the Suraj Prakash Vartak, for readers who found the verse hard to follow. The two books are companions, not rivals, and they are often read together.

How to read Panth Parkash today

Panth Parkash is a traditional history, not a modern critical one. Its author was a devout scholar who wrote to honour the Panth, and the Encyclopedia of Sikhism warns plainly that some of its facts, dates and sequences do not bear scientific scrutiny. Modern historians treat it as a source to be checked against others, not as a final word.

Yet its influence is hard to overstate. It is expounded in gurdwaras, it is the book that fixed 1699 in the Sikh mind as the year the Khalsa was founded, and it gave generations of Sikhs the stories by which they understand their past. Few books have done more to shape the historical imagination of the community.

The book has not yet been fully translated into English, though translations of selected passages are available online. For a reader who wants to know how Sikhs in the nineteenth century told their own history, there is no better place to start.