Guru Gobind Singh figures in world history as a great leader of men, a versatile genius of the highest order, a God-man and mystic par excellence, a redoubtable warrior and adept strategist, a fearless revolutionary, a classical Hero of Carlylian description, a powerful poet and patron of poets, a unique religious law giver and champion of the downtrodden, a relentless defender of faith and an allsacrificing martyr for the cause of suffering and persecuted humanity. In fact, it is impossible to encompass and delineate in words all the facets of his highly charismatic and remarkable personality.
Here in this important monograph based upon the well-known biographical writing in Urdu by Daulat Rai, we are concerned with an Indian Historian of note. He was a man of considerable insight and acumen, who rose much higher than the ordinary class of historiographers and was thus able to grasp and understand the real historical situation obtaining in India before and during the turbulent times of Guru Gobind Singh.
Daulat Rai, now a very popular and famous name in Sikh circles, was a man of deep thinking and impartial religious conviction. Though an Arya Samajis himself, he was completely free from religious bias. Though he wrote in 1901 A.D.when the Punjab was seething with inter-religious wrangling and communal friction of an invidious nature, he was a rare person who evinced in his Biography of Guru Gobind Singh a highly patriotic and national feeling by transcending all narrow-minded limitations. Thus he was able to see Guru Gobind Singh in his true perspective. He saw the great Guru as a national hero and a national saviour. In fact, he found Guru Gobind Singh as a unique and peerless world figure, a prophet with a difference, before whose divine refulgence, other prophets appear dim and faded - a warrior and general whose dauntless spirit and unyielding courage has no match among the great warriors in history –a religious law-giver and social revolutionary whose like is rarely to be found among the galaxy of political reformers and law-givers of the world.
Daulat Rai was, of course, well-versed with the world history, so as to compare and contrast relevant situation while discussing the inimitable character of Guru Gobind Singh. He says with a sense of pride in praising his matchless hero:
Written by an ARYA SAMAJI, some details of Guru Sahib, we ordinary Sikhs are not even aware of.
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