Faridkot Tika

In 1877 the German Indologist Ernest Trumpp published an English translation of the Adi Granth, and Sikhs who read it were offended. Trumpp had approached the scripture as a linguistic puzzle rather than a living faith, calling parts of it repetitive and obscure, and his tone read as contempt for a text Sikhs held as their eternal Guru. The insult reached the ruling house of the small princely state of Faridkot in Punjab, where Raja Bikram Singh, a patron of the Amritsar Khalsa Diwan, decided the answer was not a rebuttal of Trumpp but a commentary of the Sikhs' own, complete, careful and printed for anyone to read.

The Raja commissioned Giani Badan Singh of Sekhvari, a scholar of the Nirmala order, the ascetic Sikh scholarly tradition trained in Sanskrit and steeped in exegesis of Vedic and Vedantic texts, to prepare a full verse by verse commentary on the Guru Granth Sahib. Badan Singh worked in Braj Bhasha, the literary north Indian idiom his order's scholarship customarily used, and had a complete draft ready by 1883. Rather than publish a single scholar's reading, the Raja convened a synod of Sikh scholars from several schools of thought to review and refine it, chaired by Mahant Sumer Singh of Patna Sahib. Printing began under Bikram Singh's successor Raja Balbir Singh, and three volumes appeared in 1905 and 1906, a fourth following under Maharaja Brijindar Singh not long after. It was the first time a complete printed exegesis of the Guru Granth Sahib had existed anywhere.

The Faridkot Tika earned its standing honestly. For decades after 1906 it was the commentary Sikhs actually had, the only complete printed guide to the Guru Granth Sahib's verses, and its Nirmala authorship shows in every entry: the text is read through the same Vedantic and Sanskritic philosophical vocabulary the order had used for generations to expound Hindu as well as Sikh scripture, treating concepts like maya and Brahman as the natural language for explaining what the Gurus meant.

That reading did not go unchallenged. In the early twentieth century the Singh Sabha reform movement and its more assertive Tat Khalsa wing argued that Sikhism needed to be understood on its own terms, gurmat, and not through inherited Hindu philosophical categories the Nirmalas and the related Udasi order had long applied to it. To reformers building a distinct Sikh identity separate from the wider Hindu tradition it had grown up alongside, a Sanskritized Guru Granth Sahib commentary looked like exactly the kind of blurring they wanted to end. The criticism reached the Tika directly, and Sikh scholarship has argued the point ever since without fully settling it. What has not been undone is the Tika's historical place. It remains, whatever its interpretive lens, the work that first made a complete printed Sikh scriptural commentary exist at all, still kept in print by Punjab's own Languages Department more than a century after Raja Bikram Singh commissioned it.