BANDI BIR (Warrior Bound), a poem in Bengali by Rabindranath Tagore, based primarily on McGregor`s History of the Sikhs and Cunningham`s A History of the Sikhs was composed by him in October/November 1899. The poem celebrates the heroism of the Sikh warrior Banda Singh Bahadur (1670-1716). The opening stanzas tell

VAR SRI BHAGAUTlJI Kl, a short anonymous poem describing an unnamed battle in which Guru Gobind Singh emerged a victor. The poem consists of eight stanzas only. It begins with a dohra, followed by six savaiyyas, and ends with another dohra. It panegyrizes Bhagauti (sword) as the source of

BILAVAL KI VAR, by Guru Ram Das, is one of his eight vars in a corpus of twenty-two included in the Guru Granth Sahib. It occurs in Raga Bilaval, and consists of thirteen pauris or stanzas, each comprising five lines, with the exception of pauri 10 which is of

CHATTHIAN DI VAR is a Punjabi ballad describing the battle between Mahan Singh, father of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, and Ghulam Muhammad Chattha, a Muslim chieftain of the Chattha clan of the Jatts. The poet is some Pir Muhammad, whose name appears in some verses of the poem. The Var was

JANGNAMA SARDAR HARJ SINGH, by Ram Dial Anad, is a versified account, in Punjabi, of Hari Singh Nalva`s last crusade against the Afghans in which he won the field but lost his life. The poet, about whom not much biographical information is available is a Hindu (Anad) Khatri of

JANGNAMA SIU GURU GOBIND SINGHJIKA, a vdr or stanzas by Am Rai describing Guru Gobind Singh`s battle with a Mughal force at Anandpur. Am Rai was one of the fifty-two poets who enjoyed the Guru`s patronage. The welcome he received on his arrival in Anandpur and the conferment through

JANG SINGHAN TEFIRANGIAN, by Matak, is a versified account, in Punjabi, of the first Anglo Sikh war (1845-46) by a contemporary or near contemporary poet about whom no biographical details are available. The poem, in its present incomplete form, is included in Panjabdian Varan (Amritsar, 1946) edited by Dr

KHALSA BAHADUR, by Chuhar Singh, is a 55 page long poetic composition in the Malvai dialect of the Punjabi language, describing the unique chivalry and sacrifice of the twenty-one Sikh soldiers of the 36th Sikh Regiment at Saragarhi in AD 1897. Written in the baint verseform, the poem was completed

KHALSA MAHIMA, literally praise of the Khalsa, is a short poem by Guru Gobind Singh inserted at the end of the thirty-three Savaiyyc in the Dasam Granth. The language is Braj Bhasa, i.e. medieval Hindi of the Mathura Agra region. The setting is provided by an incident which occurred

PAINTIS AKKHARI, lit., a poem based on paintis or thirty-Five letters, is a composition in the form of an acrostic utilizing for successive verses the thirty-five characters of the Gurmukhi alphabet. The poem is sometimes attributed to Guru Nanak but mistakenly, for it is not included in the Guru

PRARTHANATITADAN, poem in Bengali by Rabindranath Tagore on the Sikh martyr Bhai Taru Singh. Written on 2 Agrahayan, 1306 BS/1819 November 1899 and included in Kathd, a collection of Tagore`s poems published in October-November 1899, the poem refers to Bhai Taru Singh`s arrest along with some other Sikhs "who had

RANA SURAT SINGH, an epiclike poem by Bhai Vir Singh published in 1905. This poem of more than fourteen thousand lines is written in blank verse, tried for the first time in Punjabi. With all its protracted search and pang, it is ultimately a poem of complete spiritual certitude, of