FATEHNAMAH GURU KHALSA JI KA, by Ganesh Das, an employee of the Sikh Darbar, and published as edited by Sita Ram Kohli, contains accounts, in Punjabi verse, of three of the major battles of Sikh times. The first of these was fought at Multan in 1818 between Maharaja Ranjit Singh`s forces and the army of the local Afghan ruler Muzaffar Khan. The second, the first battle of Peshawar, also known as the battle of Naushera, was fought in 1823 between Sikhs and Muhammad`Azim Khan, who after the death of his brother Fateh Khan, had acquired power in Afghanistan and wished to reestablish Afghan supremacy over Peshawar.
GHANI KHAN and his brother Nabi Khan, Pathan horse dealers of Machhivara in present day Ludhiana district of the Punjab, were admirers of Guru Gobind Singh whom they had visited at Anandpur and to whom they had sold many good animals. When they learnt that, travelling in a lonely state after the battle of Chamkaur (1705), the Guru had come to Machhivara, they at once turned out to meet him and offered their services. They provided him with a blue coloured dress and carried him out of Machhivara in a palanquin disguised as a Muslim divine. They declared him to be Uchch da Pir, the holy man of Uchch, an old seat of Muslim saints in south-west Punjab.
GURU GIRARATH KOS is a dictionary of the Guru Granth Sahib compiled by the Nirmala scholar Pandit Tara Singh Narotam. The kos, completed in AD 1889, is in two volumes printed at Rajendra Press, Patiala the first (pp. 702) in 1895 and the second (pp. 706) in 1898. The first volume has a lengthy Introduction which carried no title except the abbreviated form of the mul mantra, i.e. Ik Oankar Satguru Prasad, at the head. The Introduction beginning with a definition of the word kos contains detailed information about the contents of the book, the method of arrangement of words and phrases, abbreviations used, a list of the Sanskrit prefixes, some specimens of the words which have different meanings in Sanskrit and Persian, and a few examples of the words which take different forms in different languages of India.
HARIMANDAR (lit. the House of God; hari = Visnu, or God; mandar = temple, house), Golden Temple to the English speaking world, is the Sikhs` most famous sacred shrine. Also called Sri Darbar Sahib (the Exalted Holy Court), it lies in the heart of the city of Amritsar in the Punjab. The city in fact grew around what initially stood as the temple portal. The present structure could well be described as a golden beauty amid a glittering pool of water.