Bhai Vir Singh

Bhai Vir Singh was a poet, scholar and exegete and a major figure of the Sikh renaissance. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism calls him the creator of modern Punjabi literature and says he was canonised as Bhai, the Brother of the Sikh Order, very early in his career, so complete was his identification with the concerns of modern Sikhism.

Who he was. He was born in Amritsar on 5 December 1872, the eldest of Dr Charan Singh's three sons. His maternal grandfather, Giani Hazara Singh, compiled a lexicon of the Guru Granth Sahib and taught him the science of Sikh exegesis. He learnt Persian, Urdu, Sanskrit and Sikh literature, and matriculated from the Church Mission School at Amritsar in 1891. He chose the calling of a writer rather than government service and set up a lithograph press a year later.

Key moments

• 1894: he launched the Khalsa Tract Society to promote the aims of the Singh Sabha movement. Its low-cost tracts, issued under the title Nirguniara, carried a down-to-earth literary Punjabi that the Encyclopaedia says marked the beginnings of modern Punjabi prose.
• November 1899: he started the Punjabi weekly Khalsa Samachar. He was among the principal promoters of the Chief Khalsa Diwan (1902), the Sikh Educational Society (1908) and the Punjab and Sind Bank (1908).
• 1898 to 1900: his romances Sundari, Bijay Singh and Satvant Kaur, set in the heroic eighteenth century, were forerunners of the Punjabi novel. Baba Naudh Singh followed in serial from 1907.
• 1905 to 1919: he serialised and then published Rana Surat Singh, the first Punjabi epic, over 14,000 lines of blank verse. His shorter lyrics followed, among them Dil Tarang (1920) and Matak Hulare (1922). The first play in Punjabi, Raja Lakhdata Singh (1910), was also his.
• 1927 to 1935: he revised and enlarged Giani Hazara Singh's dictionary of the Guru Granth Sahib, Sri Guru Granth Kosh, and annotated Bhai Santokh Singh's Sri Gur Pratap Suraj Granth in fourteen volumes of 6,668 pages.
• His last great task, a commentary on the Guru Granth Sahib, was left unfinished. About half was complete, and it was published after his death in seven large volumes. He died at his home in Amritsar on 10 June 1957.

What he is remembered for. The Encyclopaedia says he stressed the autonomy of the Sikh faith, nourished by a fresh awareness among Sikhs of their distinct theological and cultural identity, and that he made Punjabi the medium of his theology, scholarship and creative work. It adds that he kept away from political activity and put his energy into institutions, publishing and literature.