Dr. Ganda Singh
Dr. Ganda Singh (1900-1987) was a pioneering Sikh historian whose rigorous, source-based works shaped modern Sikh history.
Courses
Foundations of Sikh History
An introductory survey of Sikh history from the birth of Guru Nanak Sahib in 1469 through the era of the Ten Gurus, the founding of the Khalsa, the eighteenth-century struggle, the Sikh Empire, and the colonial and modern periods. The course teaches not only events and dates but also the historical method of the…
The Khalsa & the Eighteenth Century
This course studies the most formative century of Sikh history. It begins with the founding of the Khalsa by Guru Gobind Singh in 1699 and ends as the Sikhs approached sovereign statehood. In these decades the community took on a clear identity with its own ideals and institutions. It survived years of persecution…
Hukamnamas: The Official Letters of the Sikh Gurus
A semester-length intermediate study of the ਹੁਕਮਨਾਮੇ — the official letters and edicts issued by the Sikh Gurus to their ਸੰਗਤਾਂ across India. Working from Ganda Singh's foundational compiled edition, the course examines what these roughly seventy surviving documents are, their language and diplomatics, their geographic reach, and what they reveal about early Sikh administration, the ਮਸੰਦ system, the offering economy, ਦੇਗ and weaponry, and the lived organization of the Panth from Guru Hargobind through Guru Gobind Singh and into the era of Banda Singh Bahadur and the Mata Sahibs.
Miri-Piri: The Spiritual and the Temporal
A close study of the Sikh teaching that the spiritual and the worldly belong together: the two swords of Guru Hargobind Ji, the Akal Takht, the saint-soldier ideal, and what just power (Halimi Raj, Deg Teg) means in Sikh life.
Justice, Tyranny, and the Sikh Response
A graduate-level, plain-English course on the Sikh tradition of standing against injustice. It studies the historical martyrdom of Guru Tegh Bahadur in 1675 as a sacrifice for others' freedom of conscience, the ethic of dharam (righteous duty) in public life, the high bar Sikh tradition sets before resistance to…
Sovereignty and the Khalsa
This course is a historical and doctrinal study of the Sikh idea of sovereignty. It asks what Sikhs have meant by the words ਰਾਜ ਕਰੇਗਾ ਖਾਲਸਾ, the Khalsa shall rule, and how that claim sits beside the older Gurbani idea of ਹਲੇਮੀ ਰਾਜ, a humble and just rule. We examine the belief that sovereignty belongs not to a…
From Misls to the Sarkar-i-Khalsa: Sikh Statecraft, 1716–1849
How Sikhs actually governed — the misl confederacies of the eighteenth century, the Dal Khalsa, and the Sarkar-i-Khalsa under Maharaja Ranjit Singh: justice, revenue, religious pluralism, and the lessons and limits of that statecraft.
Guru Tegh Bahadur Ji and the Ethics of Interfaith Defense
This 300-level seminar reads the ਸ਼ਹੀਦੀ of ਗੁਰੂ ਤੇਗ਼ ਬਹਾਦਰ ਜੀ not as biography but as a sustained philosophical argument about the universality of religious freedom. The Ninth Master gave his life in 1675 at ਚਾਂਦਨੀ ਚੌਕ for the ਧਰਮ of the Kashmiri Pandits — a tradition whose theology the Gurus themselves had critiqued. The course treats this as the founding human-rights event of its kind: a defense of conscience offered to people one philosophically disagrees with. Students analyze the Gurmat concept of ਨਿਆਉ (justice) as standing above any single community's ਧਰਮ, compare the act with natural-law theory and the modern human-rights tradition, distinguish Sikh ਸ਼ਹੀਦੀ from martyrdom in Islam, Christianity, and Hinduism, and build a Gurmat framework of unconditional defense applicable to 1984, the Rohingya, Gaza, and beyond…
Documenting Sikh History
Source-based historiography in the work of Dr. Ganda Singh — archives, evidence, and the discipline of Sikh history.
