Description
Thought the book, what will impress the discerning reader is the author’s method. Dr Sarna is scrupulous in distinguishing early, near-contemporary testimonies from later accretions. He moves with ease between Sikh chronicles, Persian court histories and European accounts, yet does not succumb to the fashionable temptation of treating imperial records as automatically more “objective” than indigenous sources. Each sources is tested against the others; gaps are acknowledged; conjectures are marked as such. This careful scholarship allows him to affirm the grandeur of Guru Gobind Singh’s vision without inflating it with uncritical legend.
