RAM RAUNI, later known as Ramgarh Fort, was a small mud fortress built in April 1748 near Ramsar, in Amritsar, to provide shelter to scattered Sikh jathas, in Mughal Punjab. Sikh sardars, along with their bands, assembled at Amritsar on the Baisakhi day of 1748 and set

SANGAT SINGH (d. 1705), one of the forty Sikhs who were besieged with Guru Gobind Singh in an improvised fortress at Chamkaur, bore a close resemblance to the Guru in physical appearance. Both Kuir Singh and Sukkha Singh in their poetical biographies of Guru Gobind Singh refer to him as

SHUDDHI SABHA, a society working in the closing years of the nineteenth century primarily for the reconversion to Sikhism of those proselytized into Christianity or Islam, was established in 1893. . Christian pro-selytization had started with the advent of British rule in the Punjab with official encouragement. Though the

SIMON COMMISSION, designated after the name of its chairman, Sir John Simon (1873-1954), was constituted in 1927 as a royal parliamentary commission. As proposed by the Viceroy, Lord Irwin (later Halifax), all of its seven members were British, selected from among the members of the two Houses of Parliament. However,

TAIMUR SHAH (1746-1793), son and successor of Ahmad Shah Durrani, was born in December 1746 at Mashhad, in Iran, where his father was in the service of Nadir Shah. Taimur was educated at home and received practical training in the art of warfare by accompanying his father on many of

TRUMPP S TRANSLATION OF PORTIONS OF THE GURU GRANTH SAHIB, first published in 1877 under the title The Adi Granth, was the earliest attempt at rendering the Scripture of the Sikhs into another language. The translator, Dr Ernest Trumpp (1828-85), an eminent linguist proficient in several languages, western as

VOCHUS, a Russian, who was, in 1823, employed in the gunpowder factory at Lahore, then under the Sikhs.

AKIL DAS, an eighteenth century head of the Handali sect of Jandiala in Amritsar district of the Punjab, also known as Haribhagat Niranjania, was an inveterate enemy of the Sikhs. Giani Gian Singh, Shamsher Khalsa, describes him as "Akul Das who basked in the name of Haribhagat." He was

AZAD PUNJAB scheme, signifying a major shift in the kinds of political strategies to be pursued by Sikh political leadership in their efforts to enhance the political influence of their community, was a crucial turning point in the development of modern Sikh politics. With the introduction of the Montagu Chelmsford

BARELAVI, SAYYID AHMAD (1786-1831), leader of the militant Wahabi movement in India for the purification and rehabilitation of Islam, was born at Rae Bareli, in present day Uttar Pradesh, on 29 November 1786, in a Sayyid family. At school, he took more interest in sports than in studies. He attained

BIJAI SINGH, by Bhai Vir Singh, is a historical romance constructed around the heroic figure of Bijai Singh, a fictitious character, through whose spiritual integrity it endeavours to delineate a whole people, its inspiration and way of life. First published in 1899, Bijai Singh is the author`s second novel and,

CHANDU SHAH, a wealthy banker and revenue official at the Mughal court at Lahore. He earned the annoyance of Sikhs by uttering disparaging words when his family priest proposed Guru Arjan`s son, Hargobind, for his daughter who was of marriageable age. Chandu Shah accepted the suggestion but with reluctance