“The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long that nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was… The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”
- Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Sikhs have never been big on preservation. Partly because we’ve spent most of our 500+ year history fighting for very existence, but in recent years its been a greater combination of complacency, incompetence and real external efforts to mess with our past. All of this has contributed to a situation where, it has been said by some experts, that 80% of Sikh history (architecture, artifacts, texts, etc) has been destroyed in the last 100 years.
According to a 1968 publication of SGPC called ‘sādā hath likhat sāhit,’ the Sikh Reference Library contained 383 volumes that covered 980 different topics. Amongst this repository were several Hukamnāmās, 2500 hand-written sarūps of Gurū Granth Sāhib, and other rare historical documents. One historical document was written by Bhāī Gurdās and bore a hand-written Mūl Mantr page by the Ninth Nānak.
The library also consisted of a manuscript dated 1739 Bikramī that was prepared by Gurū Gobind Singh Sāhib five years after the martyrdom of Gurū Teghbahādur Sāhib – in this document, the Tenth Nānak added the writings of the Ninth Nānak at Damdamā Sāhib to the Gurū Granth Sāhib.
Unfortunately, the Indian Army set the building on fire on June 7, 1984, destroying a majority of these rare documents. In recent years, the Indian Defense Minister has also admitted to the burning or removal of material from the Sikh Reference Library.
Efforts are underway to preserve the precious little that we have remaining. However most initiatives are underfunded, understaffed, and underequipped to do the job. More importantly, our community really hasn’t come to grips with accepting that it takes more than amateur volunteers to make it happen.
One organization that I’ve come across as an exception to this is the Nanakshahi Trust’s Panjab Virsa Digitization Initiative.
The Virsā project is an effort to preserve numerous historical documents and manuscripts relevant to the Sikhs. Through digitization, libraries of information will be replicated and made readily available to the masses.
The Virsā project aims to digitize manuscripts, rare historical documents, old printed posters, maps, twentieth-century political documents, and photographs.
Historical buildings in Pañjāb will also be digitally photographed and architects will create blueprints to preserve the original layout and design.
Furthermore, all digitization will be utilized to create an Online Digital Library of the entire collection – a means of offering rare and fragile originals for viewing to the public.
As many scholars cannot presently study these documents closely due to limited time and travel constraints, a digital library will allow scholars to view the images via the Internet through a simple subscription process; a simple solution to the formidable task of finding and accessing rare manuscripts for the serious scholar.
The world is moving ahead with projects to digitize full texts of selected books and manuscripts, photographs, maps, architectural drawing, films and sound recordings in their collections. It has become essential for all communities to leverage from the latest technologies to preserve political documents and collections to be made accessible to the rest of the world. The Virsā project seeks to do just that.
With a team of 22 people under Davinder Pal Singh, the trust has in a very short period of time done some incredible work:
- Digitized over 5,00,000 folios of different manuscripts and books in total.
- Digitized over 100,000 folios from 470 books, twenty authored by Giani Dit Singh and Sixteen Hundred folios of Khalsa Akhbar, first newspaper in Gurmukhi script, it was a weekly newspaper.
- Digitized 33,000 folios of different manuscripts housed in the Government Museum and Art Gallery, Chandigarh.
- Digitized over 1,00,000 folios from over 400 manuscripts at Kurukshetra University. These include manuscripts of Gurmukhi, Devnagri and Sharda (Kashmiri) scripts, and official records in Persian and Urdu.
- Digitized more than 292,000 folios of Guru Granth Sahib.
- Scanned more than 9000 pages of different periodicals.
- Converted over 75,300 pages of more than 250 publications to searchable format.
Their future projects include documenting the collection of Dr. Trilochan Singh, twenty eight manuscripts of Gurū Granth Sāhib, six of Dasam Granth and thirteen others in Banāras and the private collection of Baba Sarabjot Singh Bedi have been completed. The trust has submitted proposals to SGPC, Khālsā College, Amritsar, Panjābī Sāhit Academy- Bhaī Vir Singh Sāhitya Sadan, New Delhi and Panjāb Archives, Patiala.
I’m always amazed at where we Sikhs invest our money. If I had the choice of investing $100,000 on a new shiny gold dome for a Gurdwara, a hydraulic lift for an even taller Nishaan Sahib, a court case with the outgoing Gurdwara management committee, or investing in the preservation of our collective history, the choice would be obvious.
For more information on The Nanakshahi Trust or the Panjab Virsa Digitization Initiative, visit their website, email them at infoatnanakshahi.org or visit them on your next trip to Punjab (2516, Sector 65, SAS Nagar, Punjab, 172 223 4867).
Buckam Singh came to B.C. from Punjab in 1907 at age 14 and eventually moved to Toronto in 1912/1913. He enlisted with the Canadian Expeditionary Force in the spring of 1915. He's one of the earliest known Sikhs living in Ontario at the time as well as one of only 9 Sikhs that we know of that served with the Canadian military in WWI.