Guru Har Sahai and its pothi

Guru Har Sahai in Ferozepur district was founded by and named for a Sodhi family descended from Guru Ram Das Ji through Prithi Chand.

The family held a manuscript known as the Guru Har Sahai pothi, claimed as a very early collection of hymns, possibly of Guru Nanak Dev Ji's own period, and a set of relics.

The pothi was reportedly stolen from a train in 1970 while being transported and has not been recovered. Photographs and partial descriptions exist.

That loss removed one of the three earliest Sikh manuscripts from the record, and it happened in living memory, in transit, without any institution having copied it first.

The town holds a gurdwara and the family's establishment and is otherwise a small tehsil town in a border district.

The lesson is the one repeated across this site: material that has survived four centuries can be lost in an afternoon, and the copy that should have been made was not.

Prithi Chand was Guru Arjan Dev Ji's elder brother, and the line descending from him kept its own establishment and its own manuscripts for centuries. Material held by a branch the mainstream rejected is exactly the material most likely to preserve an early state of a text, which is why the loss matters more and not less.

What is known about it comes from a handful of scholars who were allowed to look and from photographs of a small number of pages. Whether it was earlier than the Kartarpuri birh, and whether it carried compositions that never entered the volume, cannot now be settled in either direction.

The loss is total and it has not been investigated. One of the two or three most important manuscripts in the tradition went missing and there is no public account of what happened.

What we don't know

  • The whereabouts of the pothi and its full contents. Both are unknown.

Where to check this

Named but not linked. These are real, findable documents. This project has not consulted them for this page.

  • Scholarly literature on the Guru Har Sahai pothi.
  • Contemporary reports of the 1970 loss.

This page has not yet been read through by the editor. Treat it with more caution than the rest.

How this page was written. The text is compiled from the standard published histories and reference works, not from a document held in hand. Nobody from this project has visited the place or read the archive. The list above is where a reader can go to check it, not a record of what was consulted line by line. Dates and figures are the received account. If you hold something better, write in and it will be corrected.

This is one of 130 accounts in The Ten, the chapter of this site covering the Gurus, from 1469 to 1708.