Page 252 - Lohgarh

252 w Lohgarh : The World’s Largest Fort

The English Sources:

The early English sources do not mention much about Banda Singh; the
only information available from the English sources is a letter written
th
by John Sermon and Edwards Stephen, on the 10 of March 1716, to
the then British Governor at Fort William (Calcutta), which mentions
the execution of seven hundred Sikhs at Delhi. This has been published
by Dr Ganda Singh in the book Early European Account of the Sikhs. The
English have referred to Banda Singh in other works too, but all these
books/reports were published either in the second half of the
nineteenth century or in the first half of the twentieth century. Slight
reference to this incident has also been given by C.R. Wilson in Early
Annals of English in Bengal. However, Irvine, in his work Later Mughals,
has given a lot of useful information about Banda Singh.
The first proper biography of Banda Singh was written by Karam
Singh, in 1915. He wrote two books: Banda Kaun Tha (in Urdu) and
Banda Bahadur (in Punjabi); within two years he revised his first book.
Karam Singh had used several Persian sources besides Punjabi sources.
In 1930, Sohan Singh published his book Banda the Brave in English.
Sohan Singh did not use Persian sources like Karam Singh but his was
the very first English account of the great Sikh general, hence he got a
good response. In 1935, Dr Ganda Singh published his book on Banda
Singh Bahadur, in Punjabi. Ganda Singh had based his book mostly on
Karam Singh historian, but he had added some new information as well.
It was followed by Dr Hari Ram Gupta’s History of the Sikhs in which he
gave a lot of materials about Banda Singh. After this, Mr Chandla’s book
on Banda Singh (in English), published in 2006, and some more
secondary works too appeared but none of these gave any new
information or thesis. Almost all of them depended mostly on either
Karam Singh and Ganda Singh or the Punjabi sources like Santokh Singh,
Giani Gian Singh and Ratan Singh Bhangu.