Dr Gurbhagat Singh

Dr Gurbhagat Singh was a literary critic and teacher who became one of the more original interpreters of Sikh thought in the late twentieth century. His family came from a village near Kotkapura in what is now Faridkot district. His father, Giani Hari Singh Jaachak, was a poet and man of religion who moved to Ambala to run a small printing press and a gurdwara. Gurbhagat Singh took an MA in Punjabi and then in English, began teaching at Khalsa College, Patiala, later taught at Khalsa College, Delhi University, and took his doctorate on William Blake at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He joined Punjabi University, Patiala, in 1976 or 1977, rose to Professor and Chair of the English department and Dean of Languages, and retired in 1998.

Key moments

• His main books include Poetry as Metaconsciousness, Western Poetics and Eastern Thought, Literature and Folklore after Poststructuralism, Sikhism and Postmodern Thought and The Sikh Memory: Its Distinction and Contribution to Mankind.
• Drawing on postmodern, poststructuralist and postcolonial thinkers, he developed ideas of external and internal colonialism and applied them to the Sikh condition. He saw the world view of Sri Guru Granth Sahib as an original, indigenous (maulik) paradigm free from colonial subjugation.
• 1984: Pritam Singh, who wrote his obituary in the Journal of Punjab Studies, says Operation Bluestar shook him to the core. He read it not only as an armed invasion of a shrine but as an ideological and cultural attack on a world view asserting its autonomy. He then took the lead in setting up a study group at Patiala, with social scientists from Patiala and Chandigarh, on the challenges facing minorities and smaller nationalities in India.
• His last great project was an English translation of Sri Guru Granth Sahib. He thought existing translations carried colonial distortions and rendered Waheguru as "the Wondrous Guru" rather than as God. He translated 1208 pages; more than two hundred remained undone when he died on 3 April 2014.

Remembered for: giving Punjabi and Sikh studies a vocabulary of theory drawn from within their own tradition, and for the unfinished translation. Pritam Singh asked Punjabi University to have the remaining pages translated by scholars who share his aims, to gather his papers into a separate section of the library and to fund a study of his whole work.