A Letter Whose Own Wording Is Not Fully Settled

That the Zafarnama was sent, and that it said what it says about Aurangzeb's broken oath, is not seriously disputed. What scholars have questioned is whether the verses that survive today are exactly what Guru Gobind Singh first composed. The historian Anil Chander Banerjee has proposed that the original communication was prose, only later recast into the elaborate Persian verse form now attached to it. The scholar Christopher Shackle has suggested something more deliberate still, that a later hand reshaped the letter to echo Ferdowsi's Shahnameh, the great Persian epic every literate reader in the Mughal court would have recognized, so that Aurangzeb would be answered in a literary register his own culture treated as authoritative.

Neither scholar disputes the letter's underlying history, its 1705 composition, its addressee, or the grievances it names. What is unsettled is a narrower and more technical question, the fidelity of the surviving text to a first draft nobody alive today has seen. That kind of question rarely reaches the readers who encounter the Zafarnama through its content rather than its transmission, verses 78 and 79 warning that the Khalsa's resolve would outlast any single defeat. Whichever hand ultimately shaped its wording, that warning is the line later generations kept returning to.