Chronicles & Prophecy

The Nadistuti, the praise of rivers, names the rivers of the Vedic world from east to west, and among them the rivers of the Punjab by their oldest names: the Shutudri is the Sutlej, the Parushni the Ravi, the Asikni the Chenab and the Vitasta the Jhelum. The hymn's real hero is the Sindhu, the Indus, which it praises as the mightiest of all.

In the war books of the Mahabharata, Karna quarrels with his charioteer Shalya, king of the Madras of the Punjab, and pours scorn on the people of the country where the five rivers flow. The Bahlikas and Madras, he says, keep no Vedic rites, eat and drink what is forbidden, and let their women sing and dance in the open.

It is the oldest surviving insult to the Punjab, spoken from the Gangetic heartland that saw the north-west frontier as half foreign, and it shows how early the Punjab was thought of as a land apart.

The Milindapanha opens with a description of Sagala, the modern Sialkot, capital of the Greek king Menander: a great centre of trade laid out by skilled architects, with parks, gardens, tanks and lotus ponds, walls and gateways, and shops full of muslins from Benares and fine cloth, gold and silver and jewels.

Then it tells how the king, proud of his learning, met the monk Nagasena and was beaten in argument, and became a follower of the Buddha.

Al-Biruni, the great scholar of Khwarazm, came to the Punjab in the train of Mahmud of Ghazni, learned Sanskrit and wrote the most careful account of Indian science and religion of the age. He did not hide what his master's campaigns had done.

Written in the same hymn in which Guru Nanak laments Babur's sack of Saidpur, the 'wedding party of sin' that rode from Kabul. Sikh commentators read the years in the Bikrami calendar: Babur came in Samvat 1578 (1521 CE) and his son Humayun was driven out of India in Samvat 1597 (1540 CE).

The 'disciple of a man' is usually read as Sher Shah Suri, who expelled Humayun, though some read it as a promise of the Khalsa to come.

Guru Nanak addresses these verses to his host, the carpenter Bhai Lalo of Saidpur, after Babur's army had sacked the town and the Guru himself had been taken captive. They are the earliest eyewitness poetry of the Mughal conquest, and the first great protest against the suffering of ordinary people in war in Punjabi.

Bhai Gurdas, scribe of the first edition of the scripture, goes on to compare Guru Nanak's coming to the sun rising and the stars vanishing, and to a lion's roar scattering a herd of deer.

In the sakhi, Guru Tegh Bahadur is held in Delhi in 1675. Aurangzeb accuses him of gazing from the roof of his prison towards the imperial women's quarters. The Guru answers that he was not looking at the emperor's palace but towards the south and the sea, at the men from beyond the ocean who would come to tear down the Mughal veils and bring the empire to its end.

British writers of the 19th century recorded the story, and Sikh soldiers are said to have recalled it in 1857 as they fought before the walls of Delhi, where the last Mughal emperor was captured and his sons shot.

Tradition says Guru Tegh Bahadur, in prison in Delhi, wrote a salok asking whether his son had the strength to carry on; the young Gobind Rai answered with this line, which the scripture records among the ninth Guru's saloks.

The Chaubis Avtar, a long poem in the Dasam Granth, retells the stories of the incarnations of Vishnu and ends with Kalki, the avatar who will appear at the end of the dark age (Kali Yug) at a place called Sambhal, ride out on a white horse and destroy the wicked in a battle the poem describes at great length.

After Kalki the poem tells of Mehdi Mir, who rises in pride and is in turn destroyed. Sikh readers have taken the passage as a warning that every power that exalts itself is brought down by the Timeless, Akal Purakh, alone.

From the Guru's autobiographical poem, which goes on to say that he came to spread righteousness and to uproot the wicked.

These lines are sung by the sangat at the close of the Ardas in gurdwaras around the world. They are found in the 18th-century rahitnamas, the codes of conduct attributed to the Guru's companions, and are understood as the Guru's promise to the Khalsa.

For the 18th-century Sikhs, hunted with a price on their heads, the promise came true within two generations: the misls held Lahore by 1765 and Ranjit Singh was crowned in 1801. Many Sikhs today read it as a promise still to be fulfilled, of sovereignty, justice and freedom from fear.

A condition rather than a prediction: the Khalsa's power depends on keeping its own identity, the five Ks and the Guru's way. The lines are often paired with 'the Khalsa is my own form'.

The idea behind the Guru's last command at Nanded: the Guru's spirit lives on in the scripture, and his body in the Khalsa.

Written from the Malwa after he had lost his four sons and his mother, the Zafarnama, 'epistle of victory', rebukes the emperor for the broken oaths of Anandpur and tells him that a victory of the spirit has been won though the battle was lost.

The cauldron (deg) of the langar that feeds the hungry and the sword (tegh) that protects the weak: the Persian couplet on Banda Singh's seal, and later on the coins of the misls and of Ranjit Singh, sums up the Khalsa's idea of sovereignty. Kings put their own names on coins; the Sikh rulers put the Gurus'.

An 18th-century code that imagines how a Khalsa ruler should govern: justice without regard to caste or creed, care for the poor, honest weights and measures, and a king who sees himself as servant of the Guru. It is the fullest early picture of what 'Khalsa Raj' was meant to look like.

Bulleh Shah lived through the collapse of Mughal rule, the invasions of Nadir Shah and Ahmad Shah Abdali, and the wars of the Sikh misls. In this kafi he wrote of the Punjab turned upside down, as if the end of the world had come.

The Sau Sakhi presents itself as a hundred conversations of Guru Gobind Singh, recorded by a disciple. Many of its stories are prophecies: of foreigners from the west ruling Punjab, of their eventual departure after great wars, and of the Khalsa rising to rule again.

It became famous in the 1860s and 70s, when the Namdharis of Baba Ram Singh read its prophecies as foretelling the end of British rule. Scholars date its present form to well after the Guru's time and doubt that it is his, but its stories are still widely told.

A Muslim poet from near Amritsar, Shah Mohammad wrote his ballad of the First Anglo-Sikh War within months of the defeat, and mourned it as the defeat of the whole Punjab. He blamed not the soldiers but the quarrels at the Lahore court after Ranjit Singh's death.

In his poem 'Nanak', in the collection Bang-e-Dra, Iqbal lamented that India had not listened to the Buddha, and greeted Guru Nanak as the man through whom the message of the oneness of God rose again from the Punjab.