SOBHA SINGH (1901-1986), painter, famous especially for his portraits of the Gurus, was born on 29 November 1901 in a Ramgarhia family of Sri Hargobindpur, in Gurdaspur district of the Punjab. His father, Deva Singh, had been in the Indian cavalry. At the age of 15, Sobha

MAHALA, traditionally pronounced mahalla, appears in Sikh Scripture, the Guru Granth Sahib, as a special term to credit the authorship of the compositions of the Gurus recorded in it. Mahala here refers to the person of the Guru specified by a numeral following it which signifies his position in the

BHATT BANI, recorded under the title Savaiyye, is the name popularly given to the compositions of the Bhatts as included in the Guru Granth Sahib (pp. 13891409). Bhatts were bards or panegyrists who recited poetry lauding the grandeur of a ruler or the gallantry of a warrior. Bhatt was

KHALSA NAMAH, by Bakht Mall, a Persian manuscript prepared during 1810-14, is a history of the Sikhs from the time of Guru Nanak (1469-1539) to the beginning of the nineteenth century. Copies of the script, unpublished so far, are preserved in British Library; Royal Asiatic Society, London; Panjab University, Lahore;

SRI GURU GRANTH SAHIB (Guru = spiritual teacher ; Granth = book or volume ; Sahib, an honorific signifying master or lord) is the name by which the holy book of the Sikhs is commonly known. It is a voluminous anthology of the sacred verse by six of the ten

BHATTVAHIS, scrolls or records maintained by Bhatts, hereditary bards and genealogists. According to Nesfield as quoted in W. Crooke, The Tribes and Castes of the North Western India, 1896, Bhatts are an "offshoot from those secularised Brahmans who frequented the courts of princes and the camps of warriors, recited

SUNDAR, BABA, celebrated for his six stanza composition, the Ramkali Sadu, incorporated in the Guru Granth Sahib, was the great grand son of Guru Amar Das. His father, Anand Das son of Baba Mohri, was a man of a devout temperament. Sundar grew up in an environment of faith and

CHALITARJOTlJOTI SAMAVANE KE, one of a collection of seven unpublished Punjabi manuscripts held in the Khalsa College at Amritsar under catalogue No. 1579E. Comprising a bare three folios (3063-08), it is divided into two sections. The first part (ft. 3063-07) entitled "Verva Guriai ka Likhia," lit. details recorded of the

MAHIMA PRAKASH, by Sarup Das Bhalla, is a versified account, in Gurmukhi script, of the lives of the ten Gurus, completed according to inner evidence, in 1833 Bk/AD 1776. Three copies of the manuscript, are still extant: one (No. 176) in the Languages Department, Punjab, Patiala, the second (No. 792)

TAHLA SAHIB, GURDWARA, sacred to both Guru Tegh Bahadur and Guru Gobind Singh, is in the revenue limits of Rajgarh Kubbe, a village 5 km southeast of Maur Kalan (30"4 N, 75"14E), in Bathinda district of the Punjab. Lying 2.5 km to the west of the village, there used to

DABISTANIMAZAHIB, a seventeenth century work in Persian, is a unique study of different religious creeds and systems, including early Sikhism. It first attracted wide notice when it was translated into English by David Shea and Anthony Troyer and was published by Oriental Translation Fund of Great Britain and Ireland,