What Have You Got?

[SikhKhoj]

What Granths do you have, preferably the Ithasak Granths, Rehatnamas not modern day books. I got many books (modern day) like hundreds but not that many Puratan - would be nice to see what we got and especially after DalSinghs ideas to transcribe. We could start with the shorter ones - Rehatnamas and smaller Granths.

And also tell if you could help to contribute in transcribing the granths.

Edited June 14, 2012 by SikhKhoj

[dalsingh101]

Bhai ji, the transcribing thing was an idea. I haven't got time for it right now though.

[SikhKhoj]

Same here veer, but if we got more interested individuals we could start doing it individually whenever we have time.

[dalsingh101]

Just thinking, if we theoretically limited it to say 5 early granths, which ones should we choose?

Sainapati Gursobha must definitely be one. And Sewa Das's parchian another.

Bansavali?

What about Bhangu's Panth Prakash? I know this one is a later work, but should it be included?

Just thinking out loud: A site which had searchable Gurmukhi text, like Sikhitothemax or the srigranth site would be best. So we type in the search criteria(s), and they come back with any instances in each of the works. Fuzzy searches too.

In reality though, we'd need English translations of the works as well (maybe these could be added later?) to make them accessible to the masses, especially the youth.

I know parchian have been translated, I know someone is working on translating Gursobha right now too. Bhangu's PP has been done.

This sewa could be quite valuable for khojee Sikhs, all 20 odd left of them on the planet. lol

A Gurmukhi text OCR has been produced, though I don't know how good it is, which could make the task of typing text from books less labourious?

Not a bad idea when you think about it, even if only a handful of apnay may actually be using the site regularly.

[SikhKhoj]

Leave that aside, think for a bit. What if we succeed in making one, where will we get the texts from? Books from the likes of Padam right? The thing is there are several works whose latter manuscripts were used by these historians. For example Rehat Chaupa Singh, I have read of 4 manuscripts (one of them used by Padam), and the thing is it has a latter addition where it says Guru meditated on devi etc, which is absent in the other 3. So before doing any of that work I'd prefer to collect all manuscripts, or atleast the details of known ones and compare them - and first get one most 'authentic' version printed. Besides that we need to do a Muslim style research (as they did with the Al Hadiths) where we take the unauthentic works out. Remember unauthentic is not the same as interpolated.

An example of unauthentic would be Rehat Prehlad Singh, i.e. claims to be written earlier than it was. An example of interpolated is Chaupa Rehat, it is clearly written in the first part of the 18th century as it is mentioned in 1769 Bansawlinama.

Sadly SGPC is too busy with other stuff.

[SikhKhoj]

How come there are not many Granths from the period of 1699 to 1740? I personally date Gur Sobha, Parchian Das in the 1741.

[dalsingh101]

So before doing any of that work I'd prefer to collect all manuscripts, or atleast the details of known ones and compare them - and first get one most 'authentic' version printed.

That's a big job that could take years, and needs a level of expertise I frankly do not possess (let alone the time), plus whoever does that needs to be based in Panjab/India. I doubt i personally could be of much use in such an endeavour in any case.

Besides that we need to do a Muslim style research (as they did with the Al Hadiths) where we take the unauthentic works out. Remember unauthentic is not the same as interpolated.

I agree, but such a monumental task sounds like it requires years of dedication and even then, in reality we will only be left with opinions as clinching things could be very difficult. Not that such a hadith style examination should be discouraged. Anyone who does do it needs to be strong too, because you know how ape like our people get over any 'controversy'. Next thing you know your dragged up in front of the Akal Takhat because some fudu fundementally disagrees with your assertions. lol

How come there are not many Granths from the period of 1699 to 1740? I personally date Gur Sobha, Parchian Das in the 1741.

I thought that would have been obvious - war.

Any particular reason behind your dating of Gur Sobha/Parchian??

[SikhKhoj]

Agreed, but what if we take lots of time to type up Chaupa Rehat for example, and turns out 2/3rd of it is a latter addition and some parts are missing which are included in some other manuscript. I don't know, wouldn't that be wasted time? I like things to be as perfect as possible but yes as you said its a monumental task requiring patience, dedication, economical resources and most important of all TIME.

Well there were wars even after right? Like second Ghallughara. But it is rather difficult to ignore how most of the books (that we know of) written between 1700 and 1770 are from the decade 1740s. Any explanation?

And I stick to the Padam dating for those two Granths,

So to conclude yes we can start off by typing the current Granths instead of going deeper which will take much more time. What about 5 Granths and 5 short Rehats?

Some of these can't be missed out in the 5:

Gur Sobha - 1741

Gurbilas Pt 10 - 1751

Bansawlinama - 1769

Mehma Parkash - 1776

Gurbilas Pt 10 - 1797

Bhangus Panth Parkash - 1841

For rehats I prefer we dont include fake Rehats like Prahilad Singh (as confirmed by internal evidence). And there are quite a few short ones which don't have too many anti-Gurmat stances (devi worship, sun worship etc) or strong anti-Muslim (showing that they were written late eighteenth century or after)

Edited July 13, 2012 by SikhKhoj

[dalsingh101]

Agreed, but what if we take lots of time to type up Chaupa Rehat for example, and turns out 2/3rd of it is a latter addition and some parts are missing which are included in some other manuscript. I don't know, wouldn't that be wasted time?

We can preface/introduce the site with a warning about the uncertainty you speak of. Such an endeavour wouldn't be a waste of time in my opinion. Sure, we can't know everything we would like with absolute certainty - buts that's life. Personally I feel that stressing that point wouldn't be bad thing anyway, especially in the face of staunch closed minded brothers/sisters who see in black and white!

The way I see it, theoretically such a project would be the first steps towards opening up the texts for our quom. The real good work that could come out of it would probably happen after we pass away. When I think about it, there isn't a better thing I could be spending my life on. If we pulled it off, I might even consider this life of my not to be a waste.

I like things to be as perfect as possible but yes as you said its a monumental task requiring patience, dedication, economical resources and most important of all TIME.

We need to be realistic then and face up to the fact that this is involves a lifetime of work and is a long term project. That being said, we could do it within 5 years.

Well there were wars even after right? Like second Ghallughara. But it is rather difficult to ignore how most of the books (that we know of) written between 1700 and 1770 are from the decade 1740s. Any explanation?

And I stick to the Padam dating for those two Granths,

Well, the dating is up for debate. A possible reason for the above could be that at that time, intelligent people realised that the Khalsa meant business and had a chance at power and that also, if they never recorded what they knew, that it would be lost - that would explain the Chibber family contributions - that plus wanting to remind people of a family closeness to the Gurus.

So to conclude yes we can start off by typing the current Granths instead of going deeper which will take much more time. What about 5 Granths and 5 short Rehats?

This would just be the first steps - the point is that intelligent, up and coming young scholars could use this and possibly nail things we can't (in future).

Some of these can't be missed out in the 5:

Gur Sobha - 1741

Gurbilas Pt 10 - 1751

Bansawlinama - 1769

Mehma Parkash - 1776

Gurbilas Pt 10 - 1797

Bhangus Panth Parkash - 1841

That is a good list we could work from, I would add Parchian though - and it is easily available apparently.

For rehats I prefer we dont include fake Rehats like Prahilad Singh (as confirmed by internal evidence). And there are quite a few short ones which don't have too many anti-Gurmat stances (devi worship, sun worship etc) or strong anti-Muslim (showing that they were written late eighteenth century or after)

If we just included 1 or 2 rehats to the above list it would be fine in my opinion. Obviously that first Tankhahnama has to go in, and then maybe Chaupa Singh's??

[SikhKhoj]

We can preface/introduce the site with a warning about the uncertainty you speak of. Such an endeavour wouldn't be a waste of time in my opinion. Sure, we can't know everything we would like with absolute certainty - buts that's life. Personally I feel that stressing that point wouldn't be bad thing anyway, especially in the face of staunch closed minded brothers/sisters who see in black and white!

The way I see it, theoretically such a project would be the first steps towards opening up the texts for our quom. The real good work that could come out of it would probably happen after we pass away. When I think about it, there isn't a better thing I could be spending my life on. If we pulled it off, I might even consider this life of my not to be a waste.

Agreed, we could even make a special programme like Sikhi To The Max (okay maybe far fetched but still) where one could type on word in Gurmukhi and then find it in the several Granths - just like the site but then a programme.

Agreed, Gurbani says 'babaneaa kahaneaa poot sapoot karen'. Preserving our Ithas is very important.

We need to be realistic then and face up to the fact that this is involves a lifetime of work and is a long term project. That being said, we could do it within 5 years.

Yes, we could do that.

Well, the dating is up for debate. A possible reason for the above could be that at that time, intelligent people realised that the Khalsa meant business and had a chance at power and that also, if they never recorded what they knew, that it would be lost - that would explain the Chibber family contributions - that plus wanting to remind people of a family closeness to the Gurus.

That is indeed a possible explanation. By the way, not wanting to start a debate but the Gur Sobha is not very accurate for example the Chamkaur Jung part is pretty flawed for someone who was the 'Gurus contemponary'.

This would just be the first steps - the point is that intelligent, up and coming young scholars could use this and possibly nail things we can't (in future).

Indeed.

That is a good list we could work from, I would add Parchian though - and it is easily available apparently.

Yes add Parchian. There are some more we could add but this would be a good start.

If we just included 1 or 2 rehats to the above list it would be fine in my opinion. Obviously that first Tankhahnama has to go in, and then maybe Chaupa Singh's??

Chaupa Singh one is a conflution of atleast 3 sources and is a huge rehat, so yes we can add that one.

-----

How do we proceed? Find more dedicated men/women?

Edited July 13, 2012 by SikhKhoj

[dalsingh101]

Agreed, we could even make a special programme like Sikhi To The Max (okay maybe far fetched but still) where one could type on word in Gurmukhi and then find it in the several Granths - just like the site but then a programme.

Theoretically, if we had all the text available, the program you speak of, shouldn't be too difficult to develop. The problem with this regards 'updates'. By this I mean that we are likely to be updating the text for mistakes, or additions that we uncover during subsequent research, whereas updating a central location like a website would be easy, doing this for the theoretical 'program' will be more challenging. Just to make things manageable I'd suggest sole focus on the web based tool first. The program thing can be a later project.

By the way, not wanting to start a debate but the Gur Sobha is not very accurate for example the Chamkaur Jung part is pretty flawed for someone who was the 'Gurus contemponary'.

I have Ganda Singh's edition - can you point me to the exact pages where I can find this?

Yes add Parchian. There are some more we could add but this would be a good start.

Let's not get over ambitious. We have a job with what we have already mentioned.

Just out of interest though, what others did you have in mind?

I noticed you never included the Gurbilas Chevvin Patshah in your list btw, any reason?

How do we proceed? Find more dedicated men/women?

Let's just scope things out for the time being. No rush.

I'm wary of spending months/years typing text out only to discover someone else has already done it. We need to think smart and decrease the amount of manual work we have to do with various strategies. So we need to find out about OCR in Gurmukhi for instance (Prof. Lehal of the Patiala University would probably be of help here).

It would also be a good idea to outline the concept here, so that we are both talking about the same thing or seeing the same picture/vision. I think the srigranth site is an excellent model. I like the way you can easily choose/change transliterations in various languages as well as the commentary/exposition.

What we are really looking at here is quite an incomplete tool, because at this moment we will have some Gurmukhi text with translation available, and a lot (most??) without. Plus some of those who have translated may not wish to have their translation available like this.

By the way I only have Ganda Singh's Gursobha from the list, I presume you have all of the works you've mentioned?

Obviously, we need to keep strictly to conventions too. Like using unicode for instance. Also - we need to make sure any typists we use are the careful, diligent type - last thing we need is someone sloppy who makes mistakes all the time. We have to find trustable, reliable people for such labourious tasks, so we don't have to recheck and redo large chunks of what they do.

As a POA (plan of action), I suggest we first 1) establish what texts we have access to. 2) Find out if we can get the text in Gurmukhi unicode easily (i.e. someone may have it available already - for instance I know someone has translated Gursobha for their masters/Phd dissertation so they may have the Gurmukhi text already available in a form we could use).

All those questions about dating, authenticity, versions etc. you alluded to earlier can be addressed in introductory essays for each work on the site.

People could have options to see the original Gurmukhi text, and an English translation (where available), both should be searchable. I'm wondering if we should have an option for Roman transliteration also? If so, it shouldn't be difficult because a program is available to automatically transliterate Gurmukhi text in this way. Personally I rarely (if ever) use transliterations.

Okay so what books do we have and how large are they? Out of our list, which are the bigger ones, which the shorter?