‘Guru Gobind Singh was the First Diaspora Guru’

In time for the 350^th anniversary of 10^th Sikh Sovereign Guru Gobind Singh’s coronation, Harinder Singh, a senior fellow at the Sikh Research Institute, New Jersey explores the life of the last founder-Guru in his book Guru Gobind Singh Sahib: Life, Vision & Wisdom, released in late 2025. Working with a calligrapher Albel Singh, painter Kiran Kaur and graphic designer Praveen Kumar, Harinder combines poetic text, original art, and a contemporary translation of original manuscripts and secondary texts written by the Guru’s court poets—Bhai Nand Lal Goya in Persian, and Chandra Sain Sainapati in Braj and old Panjabi. Harinder also situates Guru Gobind Singh as 'the first diaspora Guru'. Born outside of Panjab and shaped by civilizations across South Asia, the Guru’s life modeled how to meet cultural conflict 'not with otherness, but with oneness'. Harinder says, 'I have two audiences in mind. One is Sikhs who want to know the Guru’s thoughts. The second is non-Sikhs who talk about the Guru, reference him, but don’t really know his thoughts. Sikhs and non-Sikhs who talk about Guru have reduced him to a particular stereotype.’ Harinder says the main stereotype of the Guru is that he was a great warrior and that feeds into this larger stereotype about Sikhs in India—that Sikhs are the martial race, which Harinder says is not just a colonial import, but is also part of the Indian nationalism import. ‘I’m not countering that, but I’m addressing it because the Guru is invoked by a set of political nationalistic people in India. One of the things I’m trying to say is the contemporary politics of India does not define who the Guru is. He created great poets. He created great warriors. He chiseled them...The Guru, in his representative democracy model, gave the next Guruship, or the leadership, to the Khalsa’, he adds. Among the first Panj Piare (enthroned lovers), only one was a Panjabi man, the other four were non-Panjabis from South Asia, including one from Gujarat. Harinder notes that this was how Sikh wisdom worked in South Asia back then. It was demonstrated that we treat everyone equally.