Zafarnama of Guru Gobind Singh

In 1705, the tenth Sikh Guru Gobind Singh addressed a Persian verse letter to the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb. Known as the Ẓafarnāma, the “Epistle of Victory,” it is one of the most important documents in Sikh history, and one of the least reliably transmitted. Modern printed editions, most of them descended from Ganda Singh’s 1949 Maʾākhiz-i Tavārīkh-i Sikhān, suffer from broken meters, missing rhyme patterns, and readings that appear in no manuscript witness. Nearly a third of all verses in circulation carry serious defects.This volume is the first critical edition of the Ẓafarnāma. It draws on thirty-eight manuscripts in both Gurmukhi and Perso-Arabic scripts, with particular weight given to early eighteenth-century witnesses closest to the text’s composition. The edition treats all 111 verses, giving each the Persian text alongside Gurmukhi transliteration, scansion, and a versified English translation. Grammatical analysis and commentary place each verse in its literary and political world. Verse 69, for instance, reworks a verse from Niẓāmī’s Sharafnāma that no previous scholar had identified. The edition also recovers how Persian was actually spoken in Mughal South Asia, using the phonetic evidence preserved in Gurmukhi-script manuscripts. These historical vowel patterns find confirmation in modern Dari, which has remained closer to subcontinental usage than contemporary Iranian Persian.An introduction by Harpreet Singh and a preface by Wheeler M. Thackston offer rich context for this new critical edition. The introduction argues that the Guru wielded his command of Persian literary convention not to participate in Mughal culture, but to judge the emperor by his own standards, turning the idiom of imperial power against the empire.