From Vernacular Authority to Political Sovereignty: The Sikh Tradition Across Five Centuries
My research examines how the Sikhs articulated and sustained their claim to sovereignty (pātshāhī dāvā) from the early modern period through the systematic destruction of its constitutional pathways in 1947—a foreclosure that left unresolved claims fueling conflicts through 1984 to the present. This scholarship reveals how a religious community developed a distinctive constitutional vision—sovereignty grounded in collective welfare rather than extractive domination—that fundamentally challenged both Mughal imperial authority and modern nationalist frameworks.
My work traces this sovereignty claim through three critical junctures. First, I analyze how Sikhs constructed their political identity through vernacular literary production in Mughal Panjab, competing with established Islamic and Hindu models of legitimate authority. Second, I investigate how constitutional principles were preserved and transmitted through texts when institutional structures collapsed during the eighteenth-century crisis of Mughal power. Third, I demonstrate how Congress and the Muslim League—despite their apparent differences—converged as exclusionary majoritarian projects that systematically foreclosed viable constitutional arrangements for Sikh sovereignty. What contemporaries explicitly recognized as “a triangular problem” was forcibly reduced to a bilateral partition through sabotage and broken promises that ultimately denied Sikh constitutional claims.
This research program recovers alternative genealogies of political authority that remain theoretically and practically vital. By revealing how communities constituted legitimate rule through cultural production, imagined sovereignty as obligation rather than extraction, and developed constitutional alternatives beyond majoritarianism, these historical experiments offer critical resources for political imagination beyond the exhausted paradigms of secular liberalism and religious nationalism.
This critical edition represents five years of intensive archival research across thirty-eight manuscripts in Perso-Arabic and Gurmukhi scripts, fundamentally revising our understanding of this pivotal text in Sikh and Mughal literary history. More than a religious epistle, the Ẓafarnāma emerges through this edition as a sophisticated work of political philosophy that weaponizes Mughal literary conventions against imperial authority itself.
This edition pioneers the use of early Gurmukhi manuscripts to recover authentic Mughal-era Persian pronunciation, challenging the anachronistic dominance of modern Iranian phonology in reading classical Indo-Persian texts. By comparing how Persian words were transliterated into Gurmukhi by contemporary scribes, the edition reconstructs the actual soundscape of seventeenth-century Indo-Persian—revealing rhythms, rhymes, and wordplay invisible to modern readings.
By collating manuscripts across multiple script traditions, this edition corrects centuries of textual corruption that obscured the work’s political force. Previous editions, based primarily on late manuscripts, had accumulated errors that transformed sovereign pronouncement into supplicant petition.
The restoration reveals the Ẓafarnāma as a masterwork of political rhetoric that operates simultaneously in multiple registers. To Mughal courtiers familiar with Persian literary conventions, it displays complete mastery of classical forms. To those attuned to Islamic and Sufi metaphysics, it presents a devastating critique of Aurangzeb’s legitimacy through its philosophical framework. To Sikh audiences, it articulates foundational principles of righteous sovereignty that would guide political action for centuries.
This edition exemplifies how rigorous material text studies combined with postcolonial analysis can fundamentally reshape our understanding of resistance literature. The Ẓafarnāma emerges not as a document of accommodation or appeal but as an act of literary sovereignty—a text that performs the very authority it claims through its mastery of form, its precision of critique, and its unflinching moral clarity.
By recovering the work’s original textual integrity and interpretive context, this edition restores the Ẓafarnāma to its proper place as one of the most sophisticated examples of anti-imperial literature in the early modern world—a text that remains urgently relevant for understanding how marginalized communities can deploy cultural mastery as a form of political resistance.
This book resolves a central paradox of early modern South Asia: why did Mughal Panjab (1469-1708) produce revolutionary vernacular literatures without the royal patronage that drove vernacularization elsewhere? The answer transforms our understanding of how political authority emerges. In the absence of courtly sponsorship, religious communities seized the vernacular to articulate sovereign visions that challenged—rather than adapted to—imperial power.
The book reveals three distinct models of vernacular sovereignty. Foundational Sovereignty (Sikh) built parallel institutions through Gurmukhi texts that established constitutional principles before territorial control. Negotiated Autonomy (Hindu) deployed dual archives—Persian for imperial negotiation, Sanskrit-vernacular for cultural authority—to secure operational independence within Mughal frameworks. Spiritual Sovereignty (Sufi) circulated power through oral traditions and charismatic networks that transcended territorial boundaries.
These weren’t isolated traditions but competing political projects. Each model defined itself through contrast with the others. The Sikhs’ commitment to textual fixity and institutional formality stood against both Hindu documentary flexibility and Sufi privileging of oral transmission. Hindu establishments mastered Persian legal discourse to maintain autonomy while preserving Sanskrit authority to mark their distinct religious ground. Sufi networks transcended territorial boundaries altogether, offering spiritual authority that bypassed both Sikh institution-building and Hindu negotiation with power. This triangular competition was constitutive—each tradition’s sovereignty claims emerged through defining what the others were not.
The Persian monopoly did more than create linguistic hierarchy—it normalized extraction as sovereignty’s essence. Imperial power meant revenue collection for dynastic glory; authority required Persian documentation. Against this extractive model, vernacular projects imagined sovereignty as obligation: the Sikh principle of sarbatt dā bhalā (welfare of all), Hindu reciprocal patronage networks, Sufi ethical transcendence. The vernacular became the domain where alternative political futures could be articulated.
Drawing on Persian farmāns from Hindu establishments, Gurmukhi hukamnāmās, Sufi oral traditions, and vernacular manuscripts, the book demonstrates how texts functioned as jurisdictional acts. These materials didn’t describe authority—they performed it, making sovereignty real in everyday life where power actually takes hold.
For South Asian studies, this work explodes the myth that vernacularization required royal courts, revealing instead how political innovation emerged from religious establishments. For political theory, it demonstrates that sovereignty can be constituted through cultural production rather than territorial control. Most urgently, it recovers historical experiments in non-extractive sovereignty that remain vital for imagining political community beyond the exhausted alternatives of secular authoritarianism and religious fundamentalism.
This project presents the first critical edition, translation, and analysis of the Param Mārg Granth (Book of the Supreme Path), also known as the Prem Sumārag (Book of the Righteous Path of Love), composed at Guru Gobind Singh’s court in Anandpur around 1700. More than a religious text, this work represents a foundational moment in Sikh political thought—a comprehensive constitutional vision articulated from within a community actively building the institutions to realize it.
I approach the Param Mārg Granth as constitutional theory rather than solely religious prescription. Written during the crucial decade when the Khalsa was taking institutional form, the text articulates not just ideals but operational principles for a functioning polity. Its detailed provisions for justice, governance, gender relations, and social hierarchy represent programmatic statements from a community that understood itself as sovereign even before achieving territorial control.
The text’s vision is remarkably comprehensive. It delineates systems of justice where even rulers must answer to law, economic frameworks based on redistribution rather than extraction, and social structures that challenged both Mughal hierarchy and Brahmanical caste order. These weren’t utopian dreams but blueprints for institutions the Khalsa was actively constructing at Anandpur.
This edition demonstrates how vernacular texts didn’t merely describe but actually constituted political order. The Param Mārg Granth functioned as what J.S. Grewal called “a theory of Sikh social order”—not in the abstract philosophical sense, but as a working document that shaped lived practice. When the text mandates that justice (niāo) must be accessible to all regardless of status, or that the ruler’s legitimacy depends on welfare provision, it performs sovereignty by establishing the terms through which power becomes legitimate.
The text’s circulation and reception history reveals its constitutive power. Manuscript traditions show it was copied, studied, and debated across the eighteenth century—not as antiquarian curiosity but as living constitutional guidance. Communities facing persecution preserved and transmitted these principles even when institutions collapsed, using the text to maintain political coherence through catastrophic disruption.
This work speaks directly to current debates about religion and politics, sovereignty and law, tradition and modernity. The Param Mārg Granth demonstrates that constitutional thinking emerged not just from European Enlightenment but from vernacular traditions. Its vision of sovereignty grounded in welfare rather than domination, of law binding even rulers, of religious authority creating rather than opposing political order, offers resources for reimagining contemporary political possibilities.
By recovering this text as constitutional theory, this edition contributes to decolonizing political thought—showing how communities outside European frameworks developed sophisticated theories of legitimate rule, institutional design, and collective self-governance. The Khalsa’s constitutional imagination, preserved in texts like the Param Mārg Granth, reminds us that sovereignty has been imagined otherwise and might be again.
When institutions crumble and sovereign authority passes from living Gurus to the Granth and the Panth, what preserves a political order? This project traces how vernacular texts became the technology through which the Sikhs survived—and ultimately transcended—the catastrophic eighteenth century.
Building on my work on vernacular sovereignty, which examined how Sikh texts established constitutional principles during the Guru period, this project investigates the critical next chapter: how those texts functioned as survival mechanisms after 1708, when leadership transformed from the personal authority of the Guru to the twin sovereignties of Guru Granth (scriptural authority) and Guru Panth (collective authority). Between this pivotal transition and 1801, the Sikh community endured systematic persecution and the destruction of sacred sites. Yet they emerged with sufficient political coherence to establish a sovereign state. How?
This project argues that vernacular texts—hukamnāmās (sovereign edicts), rahitnāmās (codes of conduct), and gurbilās (sacred histories)—functioned not merely as religious documents but as portable constitutional infrastructure. When Sikhs were hunted in forests and institutional continuity became impossible, these texts preserved and transmitted the essential architecture of legitimate authority.
The hukamnāmās carried forward models of juridical sovereignty, demonstrating how edicts should be issued and justice administered. The rahitnāmās encoded institutional memory about collective decision-making, resource distribution, and conflict resolution. The gurbilās narratives preserved not just history but constitutional precedents—how sovereignty had been claimed, defended, and exercised. Together, these genres constituted what I call a “vernacular state-in-waiting”—a complete political system preserved in textual form, ready for territorial actualization when conditions permitted.
Previous scholarship has treated these texts primarily as vehicles for religious preservation or community identity. This project reframes them as technologies of political survival that maintained three crucial functions:
Constitutional Continuity: Preserving principles of legitimate rule when no ruler existed
Institutional Memory: Encoding organizational structures in the absence of physical institutions
Juridical Authority: Maintaining legal frameworks without territorial jurisdiction
This textual preservation was not passive archiving but active political work. Each manuscript copied, each oral recitation, each gathering where these texts were read constituted a rehearsal for sovereignty—communities practicing the forms of political authority they would later exercise territorially.
This textual preservation was not passive archiving but active political work. Each manuscript copied, each oral recitation, each gathering where these texts were read constituted a rehearsal for sovereignty—communities practicing the forms of political authority they would later exercise territorially.
The Sikh experience reveals that sovereignty can survive the loss of territory, leaders, and physical institutions when its constitutional principles are preserved through continuous textual circulation and communal practice. In an era of forced displacement and institutional disruption worldwide, this history demonstrates that the vernacular text can function not merely as memory but as political infrastructure—preserving not just what was, but what might be again.
This is not just a story of religious resilience but of political ingenuity: how a hunted community transformed the vernacular text from a medium of expression into a technology of survival, ensuring that when the moment arrived to rebuild their political order, they possessed the complete constitutional blueprint to do so.
The 1947 Partition of India is conventionally understood as a two-way division between secular Indian nationalism and religious Pakistani nationalism. This book reveals it as a three-way struggle for sovereignty—a reality explicitly recognized by contemporaries who warned that forcing “a triangular problem into a bilateral solution” would require something to “be destroyed in the process.”
What was destroyed was the Sikh constitutional vision: a coherent sovereignty claim that was simultaneously universal (founded for all humanity), constitutional (embodied in the Khalsa and Guru Granth Sahib), territorial (anchored in sacred sites and ancestral lands), and historical (based on Ranjit Singh’s empire). Between 1931 and 1947, Sikh political leaders articulated multiple sophisticated constitutional proposals—from the Azad Punjab scheme with its 40-40-20 demographic balance designed so “no one community will be able to dominate another,” to detailed federal structures negotiated with Jinnah, to sovereignty proposals backed by British defense pacts.
Drawing on contemporary political pamphlets, British colonial records, and newly available memoirs, this book demonstrates that both Congress’s ostensibly secular nationalism and the Muslim League’s two-nation theory operated as exclusionary majoritarian projects. Congress’s “secularism” masked its character as a Hindu communal organization—evidenced by the institutional overlap between Congress and Hindu Sabhas from 1909 onward, its structural representation of Hindu commercial interests over Sikh agricultural concerns, and its systematic pattern of making promises to Sikhs while sabotaging alternatives. When Winston Churchill offered Baldev Singh a sovereign Sikh state with a mutual defense pact in December 1946, Nehru personally intercepted the communication and forced Singh’s departure from London—seven months before making his public promise of “special consideration” for Sikhs.
The book documents four detailed constitutional models that were genuinely available: Churchill’s defense pact proposal, the Cabinet Mission’s territorial protections (with specific boundaries drawn on maps), Jinnah’s tripartite federal structure offering Sikhs balance-of-power in a minimal-center confederation, and Viceroy Wavell’s gradualist ten-year sovereignty option. British Secretary of State Amery explicitly recognized that the Sikh claim to “Sikhdom” was “just a corollary of the Pakistan demand” and that Britain “could not, with justice, press for the one without making provisions for the other.” Yet none of these arrangements were implemented.
The Third Sovereignty challenges the historiographical consensus that presents the Partition as inevitable or Sikh politics as confused. Instead, it reveals a sophisticated constitutional imagination systematically erased by two convergent nationalisms, leaving unresolved sovereignty claims that continue to shape South Asian politics. By recovering the political possibilities that were foreclosed in 1947, the book offers both a revisionist history of the Partition and a methodological intervention into how we understand sovereignty, nationalism, and constitutional failure in contexts where binary thinking eliminates creative alternatives.
The tragedy was not that Sikh sovereignty was impossible—British Cabinet members recognized its legitimacy and multiple parties proposed mechanisms to accommodate it. The tragedy was that Congress systematically sabotaged these alternatives while using Sikh violence to achieve partition. The unresolved constitutional claims from 1947 directly produced the violence of 1984 and fuel ongoing conflicts today.
My current initiative, The Digital Sikh Manuscript Lab, is an AI-driven project building an open-access digital infrastructure for Sikh textual history. This platform integrates a repository of high-resolution manuscripts with a suite of computationally-powered analytical tools (such as automated transcriptions, variant collation tables, and textual mapping) to enable new forms of scribal and textual analysis.
The project’s primary computational aim is to train and deploy advanced AI models for large-scale manuscript analysis. Given the challenges of authorship and dating in manuscript cultures, this project moves beyond standard Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR). By creating sophisticated models trained on the specific paleographic, orthographic, and linguistic features of the period, this tool will allow scholars to:
Cluster manuscripts based on quantifiable scribal similarities.
Analyze the “hand” of anonymous scribes across different texts.
Model diachronic (historical) changes in orthography, grammar, and vocabulary. This will assist in the chronological stratification of undated manuscripts by comparing their linguistic and scribal features against a corpus of securely dated texts.
Assess the statistical likelihood of a traditional attribution (e.g., for hukamnamas or writings attributed to Sikh Gurus) by comparing them against a verified scribal corpus.
This computational approach is not intended to definitively “authenticate” or “date” texts, but rather to supplement traditional codicology and philology with robust, scalable data. It will provide a new empirical foundation for reframing critical questions of authorship, scribal networks, textual transmission, and linguistic evolution in early modern Panjab, serving as a methodological model for other manuscript-based fields.
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© 2025 Harpreet Singh. Harvard University.
