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This book offers an exploration of the material aspects of Sikh identity, showing how material objects, as well as holy sites, and texts, embody and represent the Sikh community as an evolving historical and social construction. Widening traditional scholarly emphasis on holy sites and texts alone to include consideration of iconic objects, such as garments and weaponry, the book moves further and examines the parallel relationships among sites, texts, and objects. It reveals that objects have played dramatically different roles across regimes—signifers of authority in one, mere possessions in another—and like Sikh texts, which have long been a resource for the construction of Sikh identity, material objects have served as a means of imagining and representing the past.

This book deals with one of the only Persian compositions attributed to the tenth Sikh Guru, Guru Gobind Singh (1666–1708), the Ẓafar-nāmah or “Epistle of Victory.” Written as a masnavi or Persian poem this letter was originally sent to the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb (d. 1707) rebuking his most unbecoming conduct. Yet the missive does far more than censure. By teasing out the letter’s direct and subtle references to the Iranian national epic, the Sh āh-nāmah, the epistle’s mythic template, and to Shaikh Sadi’s thirteenth-century Būstān, from which the letter’s most popular couplet derives, the book demonstrates how this letter served as a form of Indo-Islamic verbal warfare, ensuring the tenth Guru’s moral and symbolic victory over the legendary and powerful Mughal empire. In the process of analyzing the Ẓafar-nāmah, this book resurrects one of the key components of the Sikh tradition, its Islamicate aspect.