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When I look back I find that I developed interest in Sikh literature quite early in my academic career. My article on the Prem Sumārag appeared in 1965 (rewritten all afresh for the Oxford University Press in 2009). Working on the British historians of medieval India, I had discovered that the worldviews, the assumptions, and the attitudes of the historians were embedded in their historical situations. I realized that a literary work was similarly embedded in the historical situation of the author. The works of literature even more than the works of history tell us much about the social situation in which they are produced.
My interest in Sikh literature then got linked up with the work I undertook to do on Sikh history. In connection with a biographical study of Guru Gobind Singh, published in 1967, I analysed the Bachittar Nātak, the Zafarnāma, and the Srī Gur Sobhā. For a study of Guru Nanak, published in 1969, I analysed the compositions of Guru Nanak in detail and studied the compositions of his four successors, the Vārs of Bhai Gurdas and the Janamsakhis known as the Purātan and the Miharbān. Subsequently, I studied the compositions of Guru Tegh Bahadur for a book published in 1776 on the treatment of Guru Tegh Bahadur by the Persian chroniclers. Working on The Sikhs of the Punjab for the New Cambridge History of India in the 1980s I thought of studying in detail the eighteenth century Bansāvalīnāma of Kesar Singh Chhibber and the early nineteenth century Panth Prakāsh of Ratan Singh Bhangu. For the colonial period I analysed the Ham Hindu Nahīn of Bhai Kahn Singh Nabha. As Visiting Professor at the Punjabi University, Patiala, in 2006–8, I got the opportunity to lecture on all the major works of Sikh literature from Guru Nanak to Bhai Kahn Singh. This literature produced in its various forms in different historical situations reflects the views, attitudes, and concerns of the authors in those situations.
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