04/16/2026
A new series begins today.
In 1705, Guru Gobind Singh wrote a letter in Classical Persian to the emperor whose armies had waged war against the Sikh capital at Anandpur, resulting in unimaginable loss for the Sikhs. That letter is the Ẓafarnāma — the Epistle of Victory. Not the victory of arms on a battlefield, but the victory of truth over power that had abandoned it.
The text runs to 111 verses composed in the mutaqārib meter — the meter of martial epic and classical wisdom, used by Firdawsī in the Shāhnāma, Niẓāmī in the Iskandarnāma, and Saʻdī in the Būstān. The Guru wrote not in a new form but in a tradition with its own standards of rule, and held the emperor to those standards.
Until now, scholars have worked on this text without a reliable edition. Nearly a third of all verses in modern printed editions suffer from serious defects — broken meters, missing rhymes, grammatical errors, and even manufactured readings found in no manuscript at all. Harpreet Singh's critical edition of the Ẓafarnāma, based on thirty-eight manuscript witnesses — including the Anandpurī bīṛ (1696), the Patna bīṛ (1698), the Bhai Manī Singh vālī bīṛ (1713), and the Aurangabad vālī bīṛ (1824) — is the most comprehensive reading of this text to date.
Over the coming weeks, we will walk through its key verses and turning points — one theme at a time. The Ẓafarnāma is more than political protest. It stands as a sustained inquiry into the nature of legitimate rule — a question as alive today as it was in 1705.
Follow along. Share with those who would want to read this text more closely.
From "Harpreet Singh, The Ẓafarnāma of Guru Gobind Singh: A Critical Edition, Translation, and Commentary (Cambridge: Harvard Oriental Series)."
