RISALAINANAK SHAH, a Persian manuscript by Buddh Singh Arora of Lahore, who was employed in the court of the Mughal Emperor Shah Alam II (1759-1806) at Delhi, written in 1783 in collaboration with Lala Ajaib Singh Suri of Malerkotla. The work deals with the history of the Sikhs from the

SAKHlAN BHAI ADDAN SHAH is a collection of sakhis or anecdotes concerning Bhai Addan Shah, a celebrated saint of the Sevapanthi sect. The extant manuscripts of the work are all undated, but the surmise is that these were written around the middle of the eighteenth century when Bhai Addan Shah

SRIJASSA SINGH BINOD, manuscript dealing with the career of Sardar Jassa Singh Ahluvalia (1718-83), a prominent Sikh warrior of the eighteenth century and founder of the erstwhile state of Kapurthala in the Punjab, was written by Ram Sukh Rao at the instance of Sardar Fateh Singh, ruler of Kapurthala from

Singh, Narinderpal is one of the leading novelists of the Punjabi language. He was born at Kama Bungalow in District Lyallpur (now in Pakistan). Formerly in Defence Services, he retired as Brigadier in 1972. He was commissioned in 1942 and served in West Asia during World War II. He

TIKA, derived from the root tik, a loan word from the aboriginal languages, meaning `to mark` or `to explain`, signifies commentary, exegesis or explanation, especially of a scriptural text. Originally meant to provide a simple paraphrase of the spiritual and mystical revelations, a tika may now embrace an exhaustive analysis

AKHBAR-I-DARBAR-I-MAHARAJA RANJIT SINGH, also called Akhbari Deorhi Sardar Ranjit Singh Bahadur, is a set of Persian manuscripts comprising 193 loose sheets of unequal size and containing, as the title indicates, news of the court of Maharaja Ranjit Singh (1780-1839). These sheets are believed to be newsletters sent from the Punjab

Tiwana, Dalip Kaur is a foremost novelist and short-story writer of contemporary Punjabi literature. She has mostly written about the mind scape of the downtrodden women and her secondary position in society. Even if some of the women in her novels are educated and economically independent, they are unable

BRAHAM GIAN (Knowledge of the Divine), by a Sevapanthi saint Gopal Das, is a treatise in Punjabi on theology. The work is unpublished and the only extant copy of the manuscript is preserved in the private collection of Dr Tarlochan Singh Bedi at Patiala. It contains 219 folios and was

Bhagwan Singh (1850 - 1902) born in the village of Marajh, now in district Bhatinda in 1850,has given the story of Heer a popular rural colour characteristic of the Malwa or the southern region of Punjab. It is written in the classical Kabit form in the Hindu tradition. Sohni

Baba Kalu, the father of Guru Nanak, had worldly ambitions for his only son and wished that he should learn how to read and write and one day take his own place as the revenue superintendent of the village. So when Nanak was seven he was led to Gopal,

GILL, TEJWANT SINGH THE most promising moderncritic is Tejwant Singh Gill (1928 -). His viewpoint is rather para-Marxist, but he is cautious enough not to lose his dialectic materialist moorings. In his essay, "Lekhak Te Raj Satta" (The Writer and the State) included in his collection titled Punjabi Sabhyachar,

HUKAMNAMA, a compound of two Persian words hukm, meaning command or order, and ndmah, meaning letter, refers in the Sikh tradition to letters sent by the Gurus to their Sikhs or sangats in different parts of the country. Currently, the word applies to edicts issued from time to time from