Louis E. Fenech. The Cherished Five in Sikh History.

Abstract

Over many years Louis Fenech has immersed himself in numerous sources on Sikh history, producing nuanced histories of the deep Indic and Islamicate connections of Sikh pasts in the making of distinct Sikh cultures and mores. His work has addressed the complex politics around the time of the Tenth Guru Gobind Singh to show the effulgence of the Guru’s darbār (court), and the framing and firming of varied traditions associated with the Guru’s person, family, and followers. Often surrounded by hostile Rajput kingdoms in Anandpur in the Himalayan foothills on the one hand and the Mughal imperium on the other, the Guru deployed diplomacy and fought battles while playing a pivotal role in fashioning Sikh poetics, histories, and traditions. In this book Fenech sojourns through the earliest sources on the life of the Guru, from the early to mid-eighteenth century, and gradually onward into the twentieth, to recreate how the idea, persons, and legends of the Panj Piare, the Cherished Five, evolved.