The Sikh Reference Shelf: Encyclopedias, Dictionaries & Gazetteers

What a reference work is — and is not

A reference work is a book you reach into for one piece of information and then put back down. You do not read it cover to cover; you look something up. Encyclopedias, dictionaries, gazetteers, and bibliographies are the four main shapes this takes, and Sikh studies has strong examples of each.

The reason they matter is trust. When you want to know what a word in Gurbani means, when a person lived, where a place is, or what has already been written on a topic, a good reference saves you from guessing. But a reference is only as good as the person who wrote it and the sources they used. Learning to use these works well is partly learning to read them with healthy suspicion (Singh and Fenech 2014).

The four shapes of reference

Keep this table in mind for the whole course: most research mistakes come from reaching for the wrong shape of tool.

One scholar, one enormous book

The Gurushabad Ratanakar Mahan Kosh — usually just called the Mahan Kosh, the 'great dictionary' — is the single most important Punjabi-language reference for Sikh studies. It was compiled by Bhai Kahn Singh Nabha (1861-1938), a scholar of deep learning who set out to gather, under alphabetical headwords, the words, names, places, and ideas a reader of Gurbani and Sikh history would need (Nabha, Mahan Kosh).

Its strength is its scope. It explains difficult words of Gurbani, identifies persons and places, gives historical notes, and quotes lines to show usage. For more than a single human lifetime it has been the first place Punjabi-reading scholars look, and it shaped almost every reference work that came after it.

What it does well, and where to be careful

Treat the Mahan Kosh as the foundation stone of the shelf: indispensable, but a starting point to be checked against newer work, not the last word (Singh and Fenech 2014).

The field's standard encyclopedia in English

The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism, edited by Harbans Singh and published in four volumes by Punjabi University, Patiala, is the standard English-language encyclopedia of the tradition. Unlike the Mahan Kosh, which is mostly one scholar's work, this is a collaborative project: many contributors wrote signed entries on persons, places, scriptures, institutions, concepts, and events (Singh, ed., Encyclopaedia of Sikhism).

This makes it a true encyclopedia in shape: entries are usually longer than dictionary definitions, they explain why a topic matters, and many end with a short list of sources so you can read further. For an English-reading graduate student it is the natural first stop after a quick web search.

How to read an entry well

Because entries are signed and dated, you can do something you cannot always do with a website: judge the author and the moment. Notice three things in any entry.

Used this way, the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism is both an answer and a map to better answers (Singh and Fenech 2014).

From one word to its meaning

When the question is narrow — "what does this single word mean here?" — you want a dictionary or glossary, not an encyclopedia. Sikh studies has several layers of these. The Mahan Kosh is the broadest. Alongside it sit word-by-word glosses, often called ਸ਼ਬਦਾਰਥ (shabadarath, 'word-meaning'), that walk through a shabad term by term and give the sense of each word.

The honest warning is this: a single word in Gurbani often has more than one possible meaning, and a dictionary lists the possibilities — it does not always choose for you. Choosing well usually needs grammar. That is why a glossary works best beside a ਵਿਆਕਰਣ (viakaran), a grammar of Gurbani, which narrows the possibilities by looking at how the word ends and how it sits in the line.

A workflow for a hard word

This staircase keeps you honest: never let a one-line dictionary entry become the whole interpretation (Singh and Fenech 2014).

Places, people, and the map of what's been written

Two more shapes of reference round out the shelf. The first is the gazetteer — a geographic and statistical reference, usually organized by place. Many of the most-cited gazetteers for the Punjab were produced under British colonial administration as district handbooks, packed with notes on towns, populations, castes, shrines, and revenue. They are rich with detail you can find nowhere else.

They also carry the assumptions of the people who wrote them. A colonial officer describing a Sikh shrine recorded real facts through a particular lens. So gazetteers are wonderful for raw data and risky for interpretation: take the figures, question the framing (Singh and Fenech 2014).

Bibliographies: the map of the conversation

The second shape is the bibliography — a list of what has been written on a subject. N. Gerald Barrier's The Sikhs and Their Literature is a well-known example, surveying printed Sikh works and the debates around them. A bibliography answers the question that saves the most time: "has someone already done this?"

A bibliography is where serious research starts, because it shows you the conversation you are about to join (Barrier, The Sikhs and Their Literature).

Match the question to the shape

Putting the shelf to work is mostly a matter of naming your question correctly. "What does this word mean?" is a dictionary question. "What is this and why does it matter?" is an encyclopedia question. "Where is this and how many people lived there?" is a gazetteer question. "Who has written on this?" is a bibliography question. Reach for the matching shape first, and you will rarely waste an afternoon (Singh and Fenech 2014).

Five tests for whether to trust an entry

Every reference, old or new, deserves the same quiet interrogation. Run each entry through five tests.

The two-source habit

The single most useful rule in reference work is never to let one entry stand alone for anything that matters. Cross-check the Mahan Kosh against the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism; check both against a recent scholarly study such as the Oxford Handbook. When sources agree, you can write with confidence. When they disagree, you have found exactly the place worth investigating — and that, not the lookup, is where real scholarship begins (Singh, ed., Encyclopaedia of Sikhism; Singh and Fenech 2014).