KAUL, SODHI, or Sodhi Karival Nain (1638-1706), son of Baba Hariji and a great grandson of Baba Prithi Chand, the elder brother of Guru Arjan (1563-1606), was born at Muhammadipur village in Lahore district of the Punjab (now in Pakistan). He was educated under eminent men of letters at Amritsar

LAKKHAN RAI, son of Bik Chand, a Changra Rajput of Una, now a district town of Himachal Pradesh, embraced Sikhism during the time of Guru Tegh Bahadur (1621-75), and was later counted, along with his brother Bhoj Raj, among the poets and scholars patronized by Guru Gobind Singh. The

NANAK CHAND (d. 1831), the eldest son of Hoshnak Rai and a brother of Diwan Savan Mall, governor of Multan in Sikh times, entered the service of Dal Singh of Akalgarh in 1788. He served that chief until his death in 1804 when the estate of Akalgarh, which was

RAM DIAL, DIWAN (1798-1820), a general in the Sikh army, was the eldest son of Diwan Moti Ram. He is said to have become a divisional commaner at the age of 16. In 1814, during the second expedition of Kashmir, he had independent command of a force of 30,000

SCINDIA, DAULAT RAO (1780-1827), Maratha chief of Gwalior, who in the closing decades of the eighteenth century succeeded in becoming viceregent of the shrunken Mughal empire. Pie held in his power the blind titular emperor Shah Alam, whom he had rescued from the clutches of the Ruhilas, and ruled

SURDAS, one of the medieval Indian bhakta poets whose verses have been incorporated in the Guru Granth Sahib. Surdas, whose original name was Madan Mohan, is said to have been born in 1529, in a high-ranking Brahman family. As he grew up, he gained proficiency in the arts of

BAHILO, BHAI (1553-1643), a Siddhu Jatt of the village of Phaphre, in present day Bathinda district of the Punjab, and a prominent Sikh of his time. He was originally a follower of Sultan Sakhi Sarwar and a local priest of that semi Muslim sect of Sultanias or Sarwarias. In

BRIJ RAJ (d. 1833), a learned Pandit came to settle in Lahore in the latter half of the eighteenth century, was appointed by Maharaja Ranjit Singh to the position of raj purohit, or royal priest, which office he held till his death in 1833. The Maharaja and the court

DEVI DAS, PANDIT, one of the numerous poets and scholars who kept company with Guru Gobind Singh (See Bavanja Kavi), was born in a Chhibbar Brahman family who had been followers of the Gurus. His father, Hardayal, was the younger brother of Bhai Gavaldas who, according to the Bhatt

GOBINDJAS, RAI (d. 1846) served, like his father Rai Anand Singh, as a vakilor agent of the Sikh kingdom, first at Ludhiana and then at Delhi. His despatches from Ludhiana contain reports concerning various political matters such as the Indus navigation scheme, the Ropar meeting, Alexander Burncs` mission to

JALLA. PANDIT (d. 1844), a Brahman priest of Jammu, who, assigned tutor to Hira Singh Dogra when he was a small boy, remained his lifelong companion and became his adviser and deputy as he assumed the office of prime minister of the Sikh kingdom in September 1843. Jalla completely

KAURA MALL, DIWAN, MAHARAJA BAHADUR (d. 1752), a Sahajdhari Sikh and trusted officer under the Mughals in the eighteenth century Punjab, was the son of Valid Ram, an Arora of the Chuggh clan, originally from a village near Shorkot in Jhang district, now in Pakistan. Little is known about the