Lehal Library

A HISTORY OF THE SIKHS Volume I: 1469-18!39 First published in 1963, this remains the most comprehensive and authoritative book on the Sikhs. The new edition updated Lo the present recounts the rerurn of the community to the mainstream of national life. Written in Khushwant Singh's trademark style to be accessible to a general, non-scholarly audience, the book is based on sound archival research. Volume I covers the social, religious, and political background which led to the fonnation of the Sikh faith in the fifteenth century. Basing his account on original documents in Persian, Gurmukhi, and English, the author traces the growth of Sikhism and tells of the compilation of its sacred scriprures in the Granch Sahib. Volume II covers a range of issues related to the Sikh struggle for survival as a separate community-conflict with the English and the collapse of the Sikh kingdom; its consolidation as a part of Britain's Indian empire; religious and sociological movements born under the impact of new conditions; the growth of political panics-nationalist, Marxist, and communal; the fate of the Sikhs in the division of the Punjab and the great exodus from Pakistan; and resettlement of the Sikhs in independent India and the establishment of a Punjabi-speaking state within the Union. Khushwant Singh a renowned journalist, is the author of several works of fiction, and an authority on Sikh history. A former editor of the lllustraced WeeklJ1 of India (1979-80), and the Hindustan Times (1980-3), he was Member of Parliament from 1980-6. He returned his Padma Bhushan, awarded in 1974, in protest against the Union Govemment's siege of the Golden Temple in Amritsar.