Zafarnama (Guru Gobind Singh)

By the time Guru Gobind Singh sat down to write the Zafarnama, he had lost the fortress of Anandpur, watched his forces scatter at the Battle of Chamkaur, and, in the days after that battle, lost his two elder sons in combat and his two younger sons to execution at the hands of the Mughal governor of Sirhind. A letter written under those circumstances could easily have read as a plea or a lament. Instead, in one hundred and eleven verses of Persian addressed directly to the emperor Aurangzeb, it reads as an indictment. Thirty two verses speak to the emperor's own conduct, and fifteen name a specific broken promise, that Aurangzeb's commanders had sworn safe passage out of Anandpur on the Quran itself and then attacked the column once it left the fortress's protection.

The letter's title, the Epistle of Victory, is not military boasting. Guru Gobind Singh had, in the ordinary sense, just lost. What the Zafarnama claims instead is a victory of conscience over power, closing on the argument that when every honest means of seeking redress has failed, taking up arms is not merely permitted but pious. He sent the letter under armed Sikh escort rather than through ordinary Mughal channels, wanting his own emissaries to witness whatever the emperor's reaction turned out to be.

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.