From Vernacular Authority to Political Sovereignty: The Sikh Tradition Across Five Centuries
My research examines how the Sikhs articulated and sustained a claim to sovereignty (pātshāhī dāvā) from the early modern period until 1947, when the pathways to realizing that claim were deliberately closed off. Foreclosure did not extinguish the claim; it left it unresolved, with consequences that ran through 1984 and persist today. At the center of the work stands a vision of rule that emerged within the Sikh tradition, in which sovereignty meant an obligation to collective welfare rather than a license for extraction. That vision challenged Mughal imperial authority in one era and modern nationalism in another.
I trace the claim through three junctures. In Mughal Panjab, the Sikhs built a political identity through vernacular literary production, competing with established Islamic and Hindu models of legitimate authority. When Mughal power fractured in the eighteenth century and Sikh institutions were repeatedly destroyed, the community’s founding principles survived in texts, carried by scribes and congregations rather than courts. And between 1931 and 1947, Congress and the Muslim League, for all their apparent differences, converged as majoritarian projects that shut down every workable arrangement for Sikh sovereignty. What contemporaries recognized as “a triangular problem” was forced into a bilateral partition, and the third claim was destroyed in the process.
Running through all of this is an argument about political imagination. The communities I study constituted authority through cultural production and understood sovereignty as obligation long before they held territory. The genealogies of legitimate rule they left behind developed outside European frameworks, and the interest in recovering them is more than antiquarian: they offer a way of thinking past the tired opposition between 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.
The book begins from a paradox. Mughal Panjab (1469–1708) produced revolutionary vernacular literatures without the royal patronage that drove vernacularization nearly everywhere else in South Asia. Resolving that paradox changes how we understand political authority: in the absence of courtly sponsorship, religious communities seized the vernacular to articulate sovereign visions that challenged imperial power instead of adapting to it.
Three models emerge. Foundational Sovereignty (Sikh) built parallel institutions through Gurmukhi texts, establishing the principles of a polity before any territory was held. Negotiated Autonomy (Hindu) maintained dual archives, Persian for imperial negotiation and Sanskrit and vernacular for cultural authority, and thereby secured operational independence within Mughal frameworks. Jurisdictional Authority (Sufi) circulated power through oral traditions and charismatic networks that ignored territorial boundaries altogether.
The three were rivals, not isolated traditions. Sikh commitment to textual fixity and institutional form stood against Hindu documentary flexibility and Sufi trust in oral transmission, while Hindu establishments balanced Persian legal fluency against Sanskrit prestige, and Sufi networks offered an authority that required neither institutions nor negotiation. Each claim took its shape partly through contrast with the others.
The Persian monopoly did more than order a linguistic hierarchy; it normalized extraction as the essence of sovereignty. Imperial power meant revenue for dynastic glory, and authority required Persian documentation. Against this, the vernacular projects imagined sovereignty as obligation: sarbatt dā bhalā, the welfare of all, for the Sikhs; reciprocal patronage for Hindu establishments; ethical transcendence for the Sufis. The vernacular became the ground on which alternative political futures could be written.
The evidence runs from Persian farmāns held by Hindu establishments to Gurmukhi hukamnāmās, Sufi oral traditions, and a wide range of vernacular manuscripts. I read these materials as performances of authority: jurisdictional acts that made sovereignty real in the everyday settings where power takes hold. For the study of South Asia, the book unsettles the assumption that vernacularization required royal courts; for political theory, it shows sovereignty constituted through cultural production rather than territorial control, and it recovers early modern experiments in non-extractive rule that still repay attention.
Between the early 1690s and 1704, the court of Guru Gobind Singh at Anandpur produced a cluster of texts that wrote down, for the first time, the customs (rahit) of the newly founded Khalsa: the Rahitnāmā and Tankhāhnāmā attributed to Bhai Nand Lal, the Rahitnāmā of Prahlad Singh, the Sākhī Bhāī Dān Singh, the Chaupā Singh Rahitnāmā (also known as the Hazūrī Rahitnāmā), and the Prem Sumārag, or Param Mārg Granth, the longest and most ambitious of the group. This project studies the corpus as a whole, as the written self-founding of a polity, and prepares critical editions and translations of its principal texts, beginning with the Param Mārg Granth.
The rahit itself has a much longer history. Guru Nanak contrasts those who live the true way (sacī rahit) with those who follow their own minds, and Bhai Gurdas devoted entire vārs to the discipline of the Guru’s Sikhs. The novelty of the decade around 1700 lay in the form. Alongside the increasingly systematized hukamnāmās issued from Anandpur, which were now numbered, copied, and archived, the rahitnāmās mark the moment a community’s way of life entered the written record as something like law. The texts describe their own making: deliberation among Sikhs, drafting, reading aloud before the Guru, approval, controlled copying. They read less like codes handed down than like the minutes of a community arguing itself into order, complete with live disputes over caste, intercaste marriage, and the standing of women, matters the Prem Sumārag treats with a care rare in the period’s literature.
The corpus also rewards reading across languages. The Chaupā Singh Rahitnāmā forges a Punjabi prose of administration and instruction, an imperial idiom for a court that patronized poets of Brajbhasha and Persian, while the Prem Sumārag leans toward Brajbhasha and closes with chapters adapting Persianate naṣīḥat (advice-for-kings) writing. In these texts the mirror-for-princes tradition of the Qābūsnāmā and the Siyāsatnāmā is turned inside out: the sovereign counsels the community, confers authority upon it, and asks to join the order he has founded. The chronology matters here as well. As the Chaupā Singh text absorbed the running-list format of the law books (qanūnnāmās), Aurangzeb’s nearly five hundred scholars had just completed the Fatāwā-i ʿĀlamgīrī, and Anandpur was running a legal and literary project of its own.
The dating of the corpus has been contested for decades. Much of the field, following W.H. McLeod, assigned these texts to the nineteenth century, allowing theory to adjudicate what the manuscripts themselves record. The earliest witnesses point elsewhere: dated colophons from the 1690s and a compilation copied within the first two decades of the eighteenth century place production at Anandpur itself. I take the manuscript evidence as decisive. Read whole, the corpus shows a polity constituting itself on paper before it possessed territory, and it forms the founding archive whose eighteenth-century afterlife my next project follows.
This project follows the Anandpur corpus and its companions into the eighteenth century and asks what preserves a political order when institutions crumble and sovereign authority passes from living Gurus to the Granth and the Panth. Vernacular texts, I argue, became the means by which the Sikhs survived and eventually reversed the catastrophe of that period.
After 1708, leadership passed from the personal authority of the Guru to the twin sovereignties of Guru Granth and Guru Panth. Between that transition and 1801 the community endured systematic persecution and the destruction of its sacred sites, yet emerged coherent enough to establish a state. I explain that endurance through three genres that functioned as portable political infrastructure: hukamnāmās (sovereign edicts), rahitnāmās (books of customs), and gurbilās (sacred histories). The hukamnāmās carried forward the practice of juridical sovereignty, how edicts are issued and justice administered. The rahitnāmās encoded institutional memory, from collective decision-making to the distribution of resources and the resolution of disputes. The gurbilās preserved precedent, recording how sovereignty had been claimed, defended, and exercised. Together they amounted to what I call a vernacular state-in-waiting, a political system held in textual form until territory made its actualization possible.
Earlier scholarship has read these texts as vehicles of religious preservation or community identity. I read them as technologies of political survival. They kept the principles of legitimate rule alive when no ruler existed, and they sustained organizational memory and juridical authority in the absence of standing institutions or territorial jurisdiction. Nor was the preservation passive. Every copied manuscript, every recitation, every assembly at which these texts were read was a rehearsal of sovereignty, a community practicing forms of authority it would later exercise in fact.
The Sikh case shows that sovereignty can outlive the loss of territory, leaders, and institutions when its founding principles keep circulating in text and practice. It is a story of political ingenuity as much as religious resilience: a hunted community turned the vernacular text from a medium of expression into a technology of survival, so that when the moment came to rebuild, the blueprint was intact.
The Partition of 1947 is conventionally told as a two-way contest between secular Indian nationalism and religious Pakistani nationalism. This book tells it as a three-way struggle for sovereignty, which is how contemporaries experienced it. British officials warned that forcing “a triangular problem” into a bilateral solution would require something to “be destroyed in the process.” And when Gandhi and Jinnah met in September 1944 to negotiate the subcontinent’s future between themselves, the Akali leadership protested publicly that the third community had been written out of the conversation. The book treats that protest as analysis rather than grievance.
The existing scholarship, whatever its national vantage, explains what followed as a story of Sikh deficiency. Indian nationalist historiography absorbs Sikh politics into the freedom movement and remembers its leaders as patriots whose communal anxieties the nation would accommodate. A minority-studies literature casts the Sikhs as a small community groping for safeguards it could never realistically secure. Pakistani scholarship narrates generous League offers squandered by a confused leadership held captive by Congress. Sikh writing has often turned the indictment inward, blaming the character of the negotiators themselves. These accounts disagree about everything except their premise: that the bilateral endgame was the natural container of decolonization, and that the only question is why the Sikhs fared so badly inside it. The Third Sovereignty rejects the premise and asks instead how the two-party frame was built, by whom, and at whose cost.
The book therefore begins by reconstructing the Sikh claim on its own terms: universal in its foundation, institutional in its form (embodied in the Khalsa and the Guru Granth Sahib), territorial in its anchorage in sacred sites and ancestral lands, and historical in its precedent, Ranjit Singh’s empire. Its leaders argued in the tradition’s own idiom of rule, sarbatt dā bhalā, sovereignty as obligation to the welfare of all, the vocabulary my earlier work traces to the Gurus’ courts. What the literature reads as vacillation, Azad Panjab one year, a sovereign Sikh state the next, a confederal arrangement with Pakistan the year after, the book reads as a repertoire: one claim pursued through different institutional forms as circumstances shifted. The Azad Panjab scheme was deliberate demographic calibration, a redrawn province of roughly 40 percent Muslims, 40 percent Hindus, and 20 percent Sikhs in which no single community could dominate; Sikhistan asserted the claim in full; the parleys with Jinnah explored a balance-of-power position inside a minimal-center union. Read together, these are positions along a single spectrum rather than symptoms of confusion.
Against this claim the book sets the conduct of the two nationalisms, which operated, where the Sikhs were concerned, as convergent majoritarian projects. Congress promised and then reneged, in a pattern rooted in its institutional overlap with the Hindu Sabhas since 1909 and visible as early as the Nehru Report of 1928. The starkest instance came in 1946. In July, Nehru declared in Calcutta that the Sikhs were “entitled to special consideration” and could “experience the glow of freedom” in a set-up in the north. Five months later, when Winston Churchill offered Baldev Singh a sovereign Sikh state with a mutual defense pact during the London conference of December 1946, Nehru personally intercepted the communication and forced Singh’s departure.
Four workable arrangements reached the table: Churchill’s defense-pact proposal; the Cabinet Mission’s territorial protections, with boundaries drawn on maps; Jinnah’s confederal offers, traceable down to the parleys preserved in the Punjabi memoir literature; and Viceroy Wavell’s gradualist ten-year path to sovereignty. London itself conceded the logic of the claim. Amery admitted its justice on grounds of self-determination, recognized that a “Sikhdom” followed as a corollary wherever Pakistan was pressed, and warned the Viceroy in August 1942 that the further Pakistan advanced, the harder the Sikhs would press for autonomy “sufficient to protect them from Muslim domination.” None of the four was implemented.
The account rests on a bilingual archive: Akali pamphlets and resolutions, SGPC investigative reports, the contemporary press, Punjabi memoir literature, and British records from the governors’ correspondence to the Transfer of Power files. Much of the Punjabi material has entered the English-language literature only in fragments. Read whole, it shows a political imagination that was neither confused nor utopian, and it allows the book to demonstrate, step by step, how that imagination was eliminated from the constitutional negotiations of 1946–47. Sikh sovereignty was not impossible; British ministers conceded its legitimacy, and several parties proposed mechanisms to accommodate it. Congress systematically sabotaged those alternatives while using Sikh violence to achieve partition, and the claims left unresolved in 1947 ran directly into 1984 and remain unsettled today.
The Digital Sikh Manuscript Lab, a project of the Harvard Sikh Center, is building an open-access digital infrastructure for Sikh textual history: a repository of high-resolution manuscripts joined to analytical tools for automated transcription, variant collation, and textual mapping.
The computational core of the project is a set of AI models trained for large-scale manuscript analysis. Authorship and dating are the hard problems of this manuscript culture, and standard handwritten-text recognition does not touch them. Models trained on the period’s specific paleographic, orthographic, and linguistic features will allow scholars to:
None of this is meant to authenticate or date texts by machine. The aim is to supplement codicology and philology with robust, scalable data: a new empirical footing for questions of authorship, scribal networks, transmission, and linguistic change in early modern Panjab, and a methodological model for other manuscript traditions.
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© 2026 Harpreet Singh. Harvard University.
