Editorial Silences, Fragmented Presents: Interrogating Kuir Singh’s Gurbilas Patshahi Das’s Archival Records

The early modern period in Punjab was a time of thriving literary and cultural production, connected in complex ways with cultural production in both distant and near cultural centres. Gurbilās literature— which refers to a collection of biographies of the Sikh Gurus produced in Brajbhasha and in the Gurmukhi script from the end of the seventeenth century into the nineteenth — represents a powerful example of a body of texts clearly associated with the Sikh tradition that reflect the existence of active networks of cultural exchanges in the period. Yet, our understanding of patterns of circulation, reception, and archiving of gurbilās manuscripts is still limited and fragmentary. In this presentation, I offer preliminary reflections on the making of the printed edition of Kuir Singh's Gurbilās Pātshāhī Das by Shamsher Singh Ashok which was published in 1968 by the Publication Bureau of Punjabi University, Patiala. Based on the examination of two manuscripts of Kuir Singh's Gurbilās Pātshāhī Das — mss 605 held at Khalsa College in Amritsar and mss 469 held at Bhasha Vibhag, Patiala— I interrogate what the editorial silences, absences, and additions in Ashok's printed edition might reveal about contemporary political, social, or religious concerns. I also examine what a close reading of verses excluded from Ashok's printed edition might tell us about the context of production of the two gurbilās manuscripts