Source Material in Pakistan on “Muslim-Sikh Relations in the British Punjab: 1940- 47”
Tariq Hameed Bhatti, Dr. Akhtar Hussain Sandhu

Abstract
Akhbar-i-Darbar-i-Mu’alla was a court bulletin of the Mughals which included the provincial reports of the transfers, appointments, promotions, dismissals, and other state matters to update the royal authority. Such a manuscript of the reports from 1708 AD to 1730 AD with gaps has been preserved at Bikaner in Rajasthan (India). These documents reveal the royal campaigns against Banda Singh Bahadur Bairagi and the decrees against the Sikhs by the Mughal emperors Farrukh Siyar and Bahadur Shah. Dr. Ganda Singh worked on these Persian manuscripts and separated with special reference to the Punjab and Sikhs and now the manuscript Akhbar-i-Darbar-i-Mu’alla is preserved in the Punjabi University Library.1 The British Punjab was the cornerstone for the All-India Muslim League to win Pakistan while this region religiously, economically, politically, culturally and historically was everything to the Sikhs, the followers of Guru Nanak Dev. It was a main focus of the political panorama of the 1940s particularly for the Muslims and Sikhs as both claimed to be the masters of the region. England and India are said to have preserved a huge source material on the British Punjab and many researchers perceive it as nothing has been done in this regard in Pakistan. This article is an endeavour to explore the source material relating to the topic ‘Muslim-Sikh relations in the British Punjab during the period of 1940 to 1947,’ one of the most critical phases of the political history of British India. Many misperceive that the scarcity of the sources in Pakistan has made research impossible on the British Punjab as all the material locates either in the British Library, London or India. This survey undertakes to pinpoint the locations in Pakistan which contain abundant material relating to the subject of Muslim-Sikh relations in the Colonial Punjab.

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