Sardar Karam Singh was born in Jhabal village near Amritsar in 1884. Among the first prominent Sikh historians of the post-Empire era, his most significant contribution to Sikh history was to collect oral histories, memories and testimonies of Punjabi elders who had witnessed the era of the Sikh empire. While Sardar Karam Singh also put together some books, his most important research was published in the form of articles in various Punjabi periodicals. A compilation of his research was published by SGPC’s Sikh History Research Board in 1964. No significant English translation of this exists. Over the coming weeks, I will be gradually translating and sharing Karam Singh’s valuable historical research through this newsletter.
Beginning with a short note by Sardar Karam Singh on the nature, relevance and purpose of Sikh history, which first appeared in ‘Sada Itihaas’ (Our History), No. 1.
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“Our destination is distant, and we are far off the right path, yet for some reason we have deluded ourselves into believing that we have already accomplished what we were meant for achieving. Our reckoning with our history is yet to be. The truth is we are yet to understand what the real meaning of our history is - it is definitely not the grasping of day to day events, or glorified anecdotes which are mere scribbling on walls.
Our destiny, though, is to achieve such a state of historical consciousness, as is the nature of historical reckoning in all self conscious civilisations, which makes our past as a lived reality alive before our eyes, through which we can see the trajectory of the past, and by understanding it, especially by drawing lessons from our failures, know how, during the course of history, came many a fall, but more importantly, what we did after we fell to once more rise again.
I must reiterate then, that our destiny is to possess such a history. By which we can understand the many cycles of causes and effects. A history which does not possess this character, we should understand, is mere scribblings on the wall, and akin to a peacock hastily drawn on a wall by a child with charcoal, which no matter how great it looks to its amateur artist, is a mere orchestration of careless lines.'”
— Sardar Karam Singh.