CLERK, SIR GEORGE RUSSELL (1800-1889), diplomat, son of John Clerk, entered the service of the East India Company as a writer in 1817. After various appointments in Calcutta, Rajputana and Delhi, he became political agent at Ambala in 1831. He was appointed agent to the Governor General at the North-West

MORCHA, in Persian murchah or murchal meaning entrenchments, fortification or battlefront, has, apart from its usage in military strategy, entered Indian political vocabulary via the Gurdwara Reform or Akali movement of the early 1920`s. In that prolonged agitation for the liberation of Sikh historical shrines from the control of a

CUNNINGHAM, JOSEPH DAVEY (1812-1851), the first British historian of the Sikhs (his A History of the Sikhs was published in London in 1849), was the eldest of the five sons of Allan Cunningham, a noted poet and playwright. Born at Lambeth on 9 June 1812, Joseph had his early education

PARTAP SINGH KAIRON (1901-1965). political leader of wide influence and chief minister of the Punjab from 1956 to 1964, was born on 1 October 1901 in the village of Kairon, in Amritsar district of the Punjab, in a farming family of modest means. His father Nihal Singh, who had

DESH BHAGAT PARIVAR SAHAIK COMMITTEE, originally named Sikh Desh Bhagat Parivar Sahaik Committee, to help the families of patriots, was set up in October 1920 under the chairmanship of Baba Vasakha Singh, a Ghadr revolutionary who had been sentenced to transportation for life, but was released from the Cellular Jail,

PRATAP SINGH, MAHARAJA (1919-1995). Tall and handsome, His Highness Maharaja Sir Pratap Singh, Malvendra Bahadur, was the ruler of the princely state of Nabha. The state ceased to be in 1948 when a new and larger political unit called Patiala and East Punjab States Union, short PEPSU, came into

GOBINDGARH FORT, raised in the lime of Maharaja Ranjit Singh on the ruins of an old fortress built at Amritsar by Guj[jar Singh (d. 1788) of the Bharigi clan, was named in honour of Guru Gobind Singh. The Fort took four years, 1805-09, to build. According to

RICHMOND. COLONEL A.F., agent to the Governor General, North-West Frontier Agency (June 1843November 1844), who came to the Sutlej frontier when the political situation at Lahore had become unstable. It is believed that the Italian General Ventura, who had gained influence with the new Wazir, Hira Singh, feeling insecure at

GURU GOBINDA SINGHA, by Basanta Kumar Banerjee, is a biography in Bengali of Guru Gobind Singh, the tenth spiritual teacher of the Sikh faith. According to the author\'s statement, the book is an enlarged version of a chapter on the Tenth Guru in his book Sikh Guru. However, neither the

RIYASTI AKALI DAL, representing Sikhs living in the princely states of Patiala, Nabha, Jind, Faridkot and Malerkotla, was set up in 1939 as a political forum parallel to the Riyasti Praja Mandal which had been in existence since 1928 and which had till then represented the people living mainly in

HARSARAN DAS was news writer of the British government at the Sikh capital of Lahore who sent his reports to the political agent at Ludhiana. His despatches cover the period of political turmoil at Lahore from the death of Karivar Nau Nihal Singh, 8 November 1840, to the assassination of

SEVA SINGH THiKRIVALA (1882-1935), one of the founders of the Praja Mandal, a platform for ventilating the grievances of and for an open expression of the political opinion of the inhabitants of territories, mainly in the Punjab, ruled by Indian princes during British times, was born at Thikrivala, a