Among the major concerns of the Anglo-Saxons, as the surviving Old English prose and poetry attest, were the questions of fate and free will, providence and individual responsibility. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a great deal of scholarly attention was given to a search for a common philosophical background for Germanic literature (distinct from the Latin learned tradition) to complement the readily identifiable shared elements in diction, style and verse form among Old English, Old Norse, Old Saxon and Old High German. One school of thought, once espoused widely and not without adherents today, holds that the belief in fate was a key feature of paganism, and that the degree to which humankind is seen to be controlled by fate in Old English literature shows the extent to which the inherent paganism of the text comes through untarnished or unalloyed. When fate is in competition with God, the text has been 'contaminated', usually by a 'pious interpolator', whose 'spurious' additions obscured the underlying Germanic heroic fatalism (never clearly defined or exemplified in any extant text).

In an image of compelling sadness, the Wanderer evokes the life of a lordless man. Cold and alone, he can do nothing but remember the joys of the past-companions in the hall, the giving of treasure and the favour of his lord. Not even sleep brings forgetfulness:

Sleeping, the lordless man dreams of what he longs for most, the life of a retainer, here represented by synecdoche in the act of homage and the giving of treasure. To lack a lord is to lack place and role, friend and kin, help in need, and vengeance after death. The Wanderer's misery, having no remedy in this world, is balanced by the astringent comfort of the next. But even the Wanderer's final spiritual rejection of the world is figured in a lovingly detailed enumeration of its heroic joys: horse, kinsman, giftgiving, feasting, hall-joys, treasure, warriors and lord (The Wanderer 92-5).

Unlike the Old Testament poetry from the Anglo-Saxon period, Old English poems on New Testament themes were essentially non-narrative works. Anglo-Saxon poets ignored what one might consider to be the most attractive parts of the gospels, the stories of the nativity, the shepherds and the magi, the baptism of Christ, the turning of water into wine at the marriage at Cana, the raising of Lazarus, the moral teachings of the sermon on the mount and the accounts of miraculous healings, and chose instead to write about the great events of salvation history: the incarnation, the crucifixion, the harrowing of hell, the ascension and the last judgement. Moreover, in treating these subjects they did not draw primarily on the gospel texts: their main sources were the liturgy, apocryphal writings such as the Gospel of Nicodemus, Latin homilies and the traditions of the church.

If in the literature of Anglo-Saxon England there are strong motifs of fatalism about life in this world and a sense of its transience, there is the equally persistent belief that this life prepares one for a more enduring life. At the end of The Seafarer, the speaker declares that wyrd ('what happens') and meotud (God as the ordainer of what happens) are more powerful than anyone's gehygd ('mind', 'thought') and concludes:

This present, worldly life is passing, but there is hope for a more stable and enduring life. The content of this hope and the forms it took are the subject of this chapter. We shall consider first the major thrust of early medieval eschatology, its focus upon the last judgement and the kingdom of God which the judgement will initiate. Then we may review the lesser motif of expectations concerning the state of the soul between the time of death and the day of judgement.

If a modern English traveller could suddenly be transported back a thousand years into an Anglo-Saxon church, he would be astonished at the differences between that and the churches with which he is familiar today: here, the atmosphere inside most churches is one of calm and beatific silence; there, the prevailing atmosphere would be one of tumult and squalor, the church packed day and night with crowds of diseased and penitent persons seeking release from their sufferings through the intercession of the saint whose shrine they were besieging. A memorable picture of such tumult is given by Lantfred, a foreign monk at Winchester in the 970s, who, describing the miracles performed through the agency of St Swithun - then recently discovered and recently translated - shows us the inside of the Old Minster crammed with persons afflicted with appalling physical deformities, festering wounds, blind, paralytic, deaf, dumb, mutilated indescribably by the just process of the law or by self-imposed penitential torture, all clustered around the shrine of St Swithun, lying there day and night moaning in pain and praying aloud for deliverance from their suffering. On occasion, Lantfred reports, the church's precincts were so plugged with diseased persons that they had periodically to be cleared to make way for the clergy. Whereas today such appalling sights of disease, deformity and suffering are hidden from sight in sanitized hospitals, a thousand years ago they were on full view, every day of the year, in every church which had a saint deemed to be capable of performing a miraculous cure.

Beowulfis generally held to be the first great narrative poem in the English language. This heroic tale, 3,182 lines in length, is about a man and his people in north European lands during the period when Germanic precursors of the English were still migrating to Britain. The poem is strongly linked to the Germanic roots of the English nation and displays the qualities of English before the language and literary tradition became quite intermingled with French, classical and other non-Germanic cultures. The style and metre of Beowulf is essentially that of other early Germanic poems like the Old High German Hildebrandslied and the Old Saxon Heliand, and many of the characters and incidents in the poem are referred to independently by early Germanic writers on the Continent. Indeed, although it is usually seen as the first great masterpiece of English literature, from another perspective it may be said that by virtue of its large scale, refined style and lofty theme Beowulf is also the chief glory of early Germanic poetry at large.

The verse form used for vernacular poetry throughout the Anglo-Saxon period was that common to all the Germanic peoples, and was carried to England by the migrating tribes of the fifth century. It is therefore rooted in an oral tradition of poems composed, performed and passed on without benefit of writing. Some signs of the ways in which this poetry was created and transmitted can be gleaned from occasional references in vernacular and Latin literature. Heroic poetry in Old English tells of the professional minstrel at the court of kings, singing traditional legends from the Germanic past, and occasionally adding Christian stories to his repertoire, familiar tales made delightful to his audience by his skill in developing and embellishing them. In Latin works we learn something of the transmission of poems in more humble surroundings: William of Malmesbury, in the twelfth-century Gesta pontificum, reports King Alfred's story of Abbot Aldhelm (d. 709) reciting secular poetry at the bridge in Malmesbury to attract an audience for his preaching, and Bede, in the Ecclesiastical History, suggests that it was normal in the seventh century for men of the lowest social classes when attending festive gatherings to recite poems that they had learnt by heart.

In 1799, a process of unification was started by Ranjit Singh virtually to establish an empire during the first quarter of the nineteenth century. He made use of an efficient army raised and trained more or less like the army of the East India Company. The use of the time-honoured suzerain-vassal polity was equally important in establishing his political control. Paying personal attention to revenue administration and trade in his large dominions he revived prosperity in the Punjab. Extending state patronage to all important sections of the population he attached them to the new empire. In the ruling class too, Hindus and Muslims came to form a substantial element.

The Sikhs formed the dominant element in the ruling class and had the largest share in jāgīrs assigned by Ranjit Singh and his successors. In state patronage in the form of revenue-free land, the Sikhs received a much larger share than Hindus and Muslims, but not at their cost. The state alienated more revenues now in favour of the religious grantees than in Mughal times. In fact Ranjit Singh only extended the pattern first set by Akbar and enlarged later by the early Sikh rulers. Some Sikh members of the ruling class patronized art and literature; a few took personal interest in traditional learning. The number of Sikhs was increasing during the early nineteenth century though only a small number of the new entrants were associated with government and administration or the army.

To the task of framing a constitution for free India was added the problem of resettlement and rehabilitation almost immediately upon Independence. The integration of princely states with the Indian Union too was urgent. Equally important were a long-term territorial reorganization and economic growth. The politics of the Sikhs in the early decades of Independence were linked up with these major issues.

The political decision to partition the subcontinent into two sovereign states resulted eventually in the largest transfer of population known to history. Nearly a million persons perished, and over 13 million crossed the borders. Over 4 million refugees from West Pakistan crossed into the Punjab and a larger number of Muslims from the Indian side went to Pakistan. In 1951, when the total population of the Indian Punjab was over 12½ millions, there were nearly 2½ million refugees, forming a fifth of its population.

Resettlement of refugees became the most urgent task of the new governments. The Indian Government retained the responsibility of rehabilitating urban refugees, delegating the responsibility of rehabilitating rural refugees in the Punjab to the Punjab Government. The non-Muslim landowners, who had left 5,700,000 acres of land in the West Punjab, had to be settled on 4,500,000 acres left by Muslim landowners in the East Punjab. The government evolved a scheme of graded cuts by which the refugees lost land in increasing proportion to the size of their holdings, putting a virtual end to large landholdings.

For every twenty Sikhs in the Punjab there are no more than four in the rest of India and not more than one in the rest of the world; among those who live outside, there are not many who do not have their roots in the Punjab.

The literal meaning of the Persian term panj-āb is ‘five-waters’. It was meant to signify the land of five rivers. But it was not meant to be taken literally. When it became current in the reign of Akbar in the late sixteenth century, it was synonymous with the province of Lahore and, therefore, actually smaller than the area lying between the rivers Indus and Satlej. The British Punjab, however, embraced the entire plain between the Jamuna and the Indus. This region had a geographical entity of its own. Its southern boundary was marked by a desert in historical times. The Himalayas stood in its north even before the Punjab plains emerged as a geological entity.

As a geographical region, the Punjab was probably wetter in prehistoric times, but there has been little climatic change during the Christian era. The rains of July and August mark the end of the extreme heat of May and June, and the return of the spring in March and April marks the end of the extreme cold of December and January. The most temperate weeks come in February-March and October-November. The rivers have changed course from time to time. The river Sarswati, which either fell directly into the Arabian Sea or joined the Indus during the second millennium before Christ, is now marked by the stream called Ghaggar and its dry bed. This was a major change.

The Akali leaders present in the Golden Temple complex during Operation BlueStar were taken into custody along with some ‘extremists’ and ordinary visitors, including women and children. The countryside was combed in search of arms and ‘rebels’, and about 5, 000 young men were taken into custody. Quite a few innocent persons were killed in the process. Those who were supposed to have waged war against the state were to be tried by Special Courts. In reaction to the rumours of an attack on the Golden Temple, Sikh soldiers at several places in Bihar, Rajasthan, Assam and Jammu ‘mutinied’ to march towards Amritsar. Scores of them got killed in the attempt and a few thousand were marked for court martial. Some retired Sikh Generals who thought that these men had acted on the spur of the moment ‘under a great emotional stress’ wanted them not to be treated as ‘ordinary deserters’ but their appeal had no immediate effect on the trials.

Sikh reaction to BlueStar induced Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to rebuild the Akāl Takht. The octogenerian Baba Kharak Singh agreed to undertake this service (kār sewā) but only on the condition that the Golden Temple was cleared of troops. This was not acceptable to the Prime Minister. Her Minister Buta Singh persuaded Nihang Santa Singh to preside over the reconstruction undertaken essentially by the government. The speedily rebuilt Akāl Takht was handed back to the SGPC by October, 1984. This could hardly help; the building or rebuilding of the Akāl Takht had always been regarded as a prerogative of the Sikhs and their chosen representatives.

The eighteenth century in Indian history is known for the decline of the Mughal empire and the rise of successor states and new powers like the Marathas and the British. The rise of the Singhs into power during the eighteenth century was a part of this political process. But there was nothing in the process itself to ensure their rise to power. The combination of religious piety and disciplined worldliness that was evolved by Guru Nanak and elaborated by his successors was extended to the realm of politics by Guru Gobind Singh. The political struggle of the Singhs can be appreciated not merely in terms of the growing weakness of the Mughal empire but also as an extrapolation of the pontificate of Guru Gobind Singh.

Only about a year after Guru Gobind Singh's death, Bahadur Shah heard of a serious uprising in the Punjab and left the Deccan for the north. This uprising was led by Banda Bahadur who had met Guru Gobind Singh at Nanded and become his follower. He was commissioned to lead the Singhs in the Punjab against their oppressors. Some of the old followers of Guru Gobind Singh accompanied him, and he was also given letters (hukmnāmas) addressed to the Singhs for coming to his support. Banda Bahadur and his companions moved cautiously towards Delhi, entered the sarkār of Hissar and started collecting men and materials for military action. By November, 1709, they had gathered enough strength to storm the town of Samana in the sarkār of Sarhind.

This essay is by no means exhaustive. It is meant to serve as a guide to some of the best material on Sikh history, but the omission of a work is no reflection on its character. What is included is sufficiently representative of historical writing and major categories of source materials on the subject. The essay is divided into five parts. The first four cover the four distinct periods of Sikh history mentioned in the Preface. The last contains a few general observations.

After the classic work of Joseph Davey Cunningham, A History of the Sikhs (London, 1849), Gokal Chand Narang picked up the threads more than six decades later in his Transformation of Sikhism (4th edn, New Delhi, 1956) to be followed by J. C. Archer, The Sikhs in Relation to Hindus, Moslems, Christians and Ahmadiyas: A Study in Comparative Religion (Princeton, 1946); Teja Singh and Ganda Singh, A Short History of the Sikhs (Bombay, 1950); Indubhusan Banerjee, Evolution of the Khalsa (2nd edn, Calcutta, 1962); and Khushwant Singh, A History of the Sikhs (Oxford, 1963). More analytical than these general histories is Niharranjan Ray's The Sikh Gurus and Sikh Society: A Study in Social Analysis (Patiala, 1970). W. Owen Cole attempts to place the Sikh movement in a broad context in Sikhism and its Indian Context 1469-1708 (New Delhi, 1984). For ideas and institutions, the trail was blazed by Teja Singh in Sikhism: Its Ideals and Institutions (Bombay, 1937), to be followed much later by W. H. McLeod, The Evolution of the Sikh Community (Oxford, 1975). A few critical essays on the period by J.S. Grewal, From Guru Nanak to Maharaja Ranjit Singh (2nd edn, Amritsar, 1982) provide some new insights.