The evening prayer of the Sikhs, recited around sunset, Rehras is a quest for the infinite reality that is God. It is believed that Rehras, in some form or the other, has been recited since the time of Guru Nanak (1469-1539), the founder of Sikhism. Compositions of the other Gurus were added in later years, and the final arrangement of the order in which the hymns are recited was formulated by the Shiromani Gurudwara Prabandhak Committee in the 1930s. Its contents can be divided into three broad strands: the quest, the striving and the culmination. Beginning with Guru Nanak’s ‘Sodar’—literally, the Door (to God’s mansion)—it includes hymns by Guru Amar Das, Guru Ram Das, Guru Arjan Dev, and the quatrains of Guru Gobind Singh. Reema Anand and Khushwant Singh’s translations bring to a wider readership the beauty and comfort of some of the most poignant religious verse ever composed. Adding to the value of this edition are the original hymns in Devnagari script that appear alongside the translations.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Khushwant Singh
Khushwant Singh was born in 1915 in Hadali, Punjab. After university education in Lahore and London, he practiced at the Lahore High court before joining the Indian Ministry of External Affairs. He began a distinguished career as a journalist with all India Radio in 1951. Since then he has been founder-editor of Yojana, editor of the Illustrated Weekly of India and the Hindustan Times and chief editor of New Delhi. Today he is India’s best known columnist. Khushwant Singh has also had an extremely successful career as a writer. His published works include the classic two-volume A History of the Sikhs, the novels Train to Pakistan, Delhi and The Company of Women, his autobiography, Truth, Love and a Little Malice, and a number of translated works and non-fiction books on Delhi, nature, Sikh history and religion, and current affairs. Khushwant Singh was Member of Parliament from 1980 to 1986. Among other honours he was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 1974 by the President of India (he returned the decoration in 1984 in protest against the Union Government’s siege of the Golden Temple, Amritsar).
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