ਸ੍ਰੀ ਗੁਰ ਸੋਭਾਸ੍ਰੀ ਗੁਰ ਸੋਭਾ

Sri Gur Sobha, the earliest verse history of ਗੁਰੂ ਗੋਬਿੰਦ ਸਿੰਘ ਜੀ ਨੇ, written by his court poet Sainapati and usually dated to 1711. In twenty cantos of Braj and Punjabi verse it tells the Guru's life, his battles and the founding of the Khalsa, and it was the first work of the Gurbilas genre.

What is Sri Gur Sobha?

The name means radiance of the Guru, and the book is also known as Sri Gur Sobha Granth. It is a poem in praise of Guru Gobind Singh Ji that is also a history, part eulogy and part chronicle, by a poet who lived at the Guru's court. Its subject is the tenth Guru's life and the founding of the Khalsa, and it is the first Gurbilas, the verse histories of the Gurus.

It was written in Gurmukhi script, in a language that mixes Braj with eastern Punjabi and is thick with Sanskrit words: court poetry of its day, meant to be heard aloud, with the music of the verse carrying the story.

What sets it apart is its date. It was written within a few years of the events it describes, by a man who had seen the Guru's court at ਅਨਂਡਪੁਰ at first hand. No other life of Guru Gobind Singh Ji comes as close in time.

The poet at the Guru's court: Sainapati

The poet never gives his own name in the poem. He is known as Sainapati from his other works, the Chanakya Niti translation and Sri Sain Sukh. His given name was Chandra Sain, and Sainapati and Sain Kavi were his pen names. He was the son of Bal Chand, a literate man of Lahore.

Chandra Sain joined Guru Gobind Singh Ji at Anandpur as one of the Guru's poets. There he turned the Chanakya Niti, the ancient treatise on statecraft, into old Hindi verse. Around the close of the seventeenth century, or after the evacuation of Anandpur in 1705, he moved to Wazirabad, now in Gujranwala district in Pakistan, where at the request of his friend Vaid Jagat Rai he translated Ram Chand's Ram Binod, a work on medicine, as Sri Sain Sukh.

The poem opens with the words khalsa bach, meaning says the Khalsa, where a court poet would normally write kaviovach, meaning says the poet. Scholars read this as a sign that Sainapati had himself received the rites of the Khalsa and taken the name Singh. The old scholar Bava Sumer Singh called him Saina Singh for the same reason.

Twenty cantos: the life of Guru Gobind Singh Ji in verse

The book is divided into twenty chapters, called adhyayas or cantos. The first, Panth Pragas Barnan, lists the ten Gurus and says the tenth Guru created the Khalsa Panth in answer to a divine command, following the fifth canto of the Guru's own ਬਚਿਤ੍ਰ ਨਾਟਕ. From there the poem moves through the Guru's life in order, battle by battle.

The early cantos tell of the stay at Paonta and the battle of Bhangani, the battle of Nadaun, and the fights with Khanzada and Hussain Khan, then the chapters on the Khalsa itself, the two battles of Anandpur, Nirmohgarh, Basoli and Kalmot. The twelfth canto tells the departure from Anandpur and the battle of Chamkaur, where the Guru's elder sons died.

The later cantos follow the Guru out of the hills and across India: the journey from Chamkaur to Malwa, the battle of Muktsar and the ਜ਼ਫ਼ਰਨਾਮਾ, the letter of victory to Aurangzeb; the journey south and the battle of Baghaur; the war of succession and the meeting with Emperor Bahadur Shah; the journey through Rajasthan and the skirmish at Chittorgarh; and finally the Guru's death at Nanded. The last two cantos look to the Khalsa's future and close with a salutation to the divine.

The Khalsa at the heart of the book

Three middle cantos are the book's core. Bachan Pragas tells how the Guru ended the masand system, the network of local agents who collected offerings, and created the Khalsa in its place. Bachan Bichar sets out the Khalsa's ideal, and Rahit Pragas lays down its way of life, the rehat. For Sainapati the Khalsa is the whole community of the Guru, raised to a new standing.

The book also fixes the meaning of words the Sikhs still use. It defines the Khalsa as the community in direct relation with the Guru once the masands were gone, and it uses the word misl for a military subunit, one of the earliest written uses of a term that would later name the Sikh confederacies. Historians value these passages because they show what the words meant when they were new.

Sainapati knew the Guru's Bachittar Natak, written in 1696, and used it as a model, yet his theology is his own: where that work traces the Guru's line to the Sun dynasty of Rama, Sainapati traces it to Guru Nanak, and where it calls Guru Tegh Bahadur the protector of Hindustan, Sainapati calls him the protector of the whole world. The Guru Panth, the community itself, is the arbiter at the turns of history.

When was Sri Gur Sobha written?

The book itself gives a date. It says it was completed on Bhadon sudi 15 in the year 1758 of the Bikrami calendar, which is 6 September 1701. But that cannot be the end of the story: the poem describes events from as late as October 1708, including the Guru's death at Nanded. A book finished in 1701 could not tell of 1708.

Scholars therefore read 1701 as the date of the first draft. The poet, they believe, kept enlarging it over the years and finished it later, probably in 1711. That year is supported by two old authorities: Bhai Kahan Singh Nabha, who gave 1768 Bikrami in his Gurmat Sudhakar of 1922, and Baba Sumer Singh of Patna Sahib, who gave the same year in his Gur Pad Prem Parkash of 1882, and 1768 Bikrami is 1711 in the common era.

G. S. Mann has argued from the manuscripts that the work belongs to the years 1701 to 1708, ending shortly after the Guru's death, and Karamjit K. Malhotra agrees. This entry dates the book to 1711, the year most often given, and notes the debate: either way the poem was written within a few years of the Guru's life, not generations later.

Can Sri Gur Sobha be trusted as history?

It is both a praise poem and a history, and it must be read as both. The historian J. S. Grewal wrote that it is based partly on personal observation and partly on hearsay and poetic imagination. Its translator's preface calls it the first reliable source of the Guru's biography. Both judgments can be true at once.

Its strength is closeness. The poet lived at the court he describes, and the book gives a clear outline of the Guru's life: the battles, the war of succession, the meeting with Bahadur Shah, and the attack on the Guru at Nanded. Ami Praful Shah, whose doctoral study gave the first full English translation, calls it a contemporary narrative of the Guru's life and death, an eyewitness account.

Its limits are the limits of praise poetry. Events are told with flourish, and some stories rest on what the poet heard rather than saw. A later tradition, recorded in the Guru Ratanmal of 1734, says the Guru himself read the poem as it was written and corrected it, but that is a tradition, not a document. The fair way to read Sri Gur Sobha is as the nearest contemporary telling we have: rich in detail, close to the events, and best checked against the Guru's own writings and the later histories where dates are in question.

Reading Sri Gur Sobha today

The book nearly vanished. It was forgotten by scholars until Akali Kaur Singh rediscovered it and had it published at Amritsar in December 1925, through Bhai Nanak Singh Kirpal Singh Hazuria. Dr Ganda Singh brought out a second edition through Punjabi University, Patiala, in 1967. Two old manuscripts of the work were kept in the Sikh Reference Library at Amritsar and were lost in the army action of 1984.

English readers were long without a translation. Ami Praful Shah's doctoral dissertation of 2010 gave the first full English translation, and Prof. Kulwant Singh's published translation followed in 2014 from the Institute of Sikh Studies, Chandigarh.

Sri Gur Sobha stands at the head of the Gurbilas tradition, the verse histories of the Gurus that filled the eighteenth century, and beside the Guru's own Bachittar Natak as the earliest account of his life. Later writers, from the Gurbilas poets to Kavi Santokh Singh Ji and his ਸੂਰਜ ਪ੍ਰਕਾਸ਼ of 1843, worked in the world this book opened. For a reader who wants the Guru's life as his contemporaries told it, there is no earlier place to start.