NIRANJAN SINGH, PROFESSOR (1892-1979), educationist and writer, was born in 1892, the youngest of the five sons of Bhai Gopi Chand and Mai Mulan Devi, a Sahijdhari Sikh couple of the village of Harial in Gu|jarkhan tahsil, Rawalpindi district (now in Pakistan). His father died in 1901 and his brothers, Ganga Singh and the one who became famous as Master Tara Singh, took charge of him and supported him through school. After his primary classes in the village school, Niranjan Singh came to Amritsar where he matriculated at the Khalsa Collegiate School and passed his M.Sc. (chemistry) from the Khalsa College in 1916.
TARUNA DAL, army of the youth, was one of the two main divisions of Dal Khalsa, the confederated army of the Sikhs during the eighteenth century, the other one being the Buddha Dal (army of the elders). These Dais came into existence in 1734 when, during a truce with Zakariya Khan, the Mughal governor of the Punjab, different roving bands of the Sikhs were concentrated in Amritsar. Taruna Dal was subdivided into five Jathas or fighting groups of approximately 1300 to 2,000 men each, mosdy mounted. The first was commanded by Bhai Dip Singh, commonly known, after he met with a martyr`s death, as Baba Dip Singh Shahid. It was called Shahidanvala Jatha.
AKBAR, JALAL UD-DIN MUHAMMAD (1542-1605), third in the line of Mughal emperors of India, was born on 23 November 1542 at Amarkot, in Sindh, while his father, Humayun, was escaping to Persia after he had been ousted by Sher Khan Sur. Akbar was crowned king at Kalanaur, in the Punjab, on 14 February 1556. At that time, the only territory he claimed was a small part of the Punjab, Delhi and Agra having been taken by Hemu. He was then fourteen years old, but he proved himself a great general and conqueror. Upon his death in 1605, he left to his son and successor, Jahangir, a stable kingdom comprising the whole of Upper India, Kabul, Kashmir, Bihar, Bengal, Orissa and a great part of the Deccan.