Gobind Singh to Aurangzeb: Persian Epistles of the Sikh Guru
The article concerns the two poems Fatehnama and Zafarnama written in 1705 by the tenth Sikh Guru Gobind Singh (the years of Gurta: 1675-1708) and addressed to the Mughal shah Aurangzeb (r. 1658-1707). I translated the poems from Farsi into Russian in verse. Both poems represent a conspicuous example of psychological warfare waged by the rising Sikh community against the Mughal Empire parallel to their armed resistance in the early eighteenth century. The goal of the Guru's first poem was to make the shah solve the prolonged conflict by a decisive battle, while that of the second one -to conciliate the empire. Being not only a skillful warrior, but a gifted writer as well, Gobind Singh managed to persuade Aurangzeb that the empire could not hope to crush the Sikhs by force of arms. Zafarnama was in fact the political manifesto of the tenth Guru in which he expressed his views on the proper character of Sikh-Mughal relationship. Gobind Singh insisted on the relative political and absolute religious autonomy of the Khalsa (the Sikh militarized brotherhood) within the empire; as yet he saw the place of the former as a dependent principality of the latter. Since the shah favoured negotiations at last, Guru Gobind's poems proved to be one of the first psychological victories of the Khalsa over its Mughal adversaries.