Bhai Nand Lal: Persian poetry, courtly learning and Sikh devotion

A learned secretary at Anandpur

Bhai Nand Lal is remembered as a learned poet associated with Guru Gobind Singh, with a life extending across Ghazni, Multan and Anandpur. Gurbachan Singh Talib’s reference account describes Persian and Arabic learning and secretarial service within the Mughal administrative world. It places his arrival at Anandpur in 1682 according to Guru Kian Sakhian, while acknowledging how little detailed information survives about his life there. His verse entered Sikh religious gatherings as an expression of devotion to the Guru.[1]

Persian forms and a Sikh devotional world

Louis Fenech explains why that poetry belongs within an Islamicate cultural inheritance: Persian connected courts and literary communities across a wide region, without determining every writer’s religious identity. Nand Lal’s Divan uses the ghazal, quatrain and couplet, and engages with the poetry of Hafiz. The signatures Goya and Lal also distinguish parts of his corpus. These are crafted literary works, drawing on established forms while giving them a particular devotional setting.[2]

The range extends beyond short lyrics. Fenech describes Ganjnama as praise of the ten Gurus arranged in ten parts, and identifies longer verse works concerned with divine life and attributes. Dasturulinsha serves a different purpose: it is an incomplete prose guide to writing letters in the courtly setting of Multan. Recognising that difference prevents every Persian text attributed to Nand Lal from being treated as an identical statement of Sikh doctrine.[2]

Revered authorship and disputed conduct texts

Talib distinguishes the poet’s devotional reputation from the authorship of two conduct works, the Rahitnama and Tankhahnama. Both present Nand Lal asking the Guru about belief and behaviour, but their attribution has been questioned. A speaker represented within a dialogue is not sufficient evidence of who composed the surviving text. Their Braj idiom also belongs to a different literary setting from the Persian poetry for which he is especially remembered.[1]

Later editors brought these writings to new readers. CiNii’s institutional catalogue records Ganda Singh’s Bhai Nand Lal Granthavali in a Punjabi University issue dated 2000, identifying a Punjabi collected edition held at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. That record documents editorial transmission, rather than resolving every earlier attribution.[3]