Page:The Sikh Religion, its gurus, sacred writings and authors Vol 6.djvu/11

Rh Hindu poet, who flourished in the reign of Shah Jahan. If so he must have lived to a very advanced age. Several additions and amplifications were made to Nabhaji's work by Priya Das and Pandit Lai Ji of Bindraban. It was subsequently written out in Hindu prose and translated into Urdu by different hands. Other writers in most of the great Indian dialects have written lives of the Vaishnav saints, but almost all are avowedly based on the work of Nabhaji.

Nabhaji's Bhagat Mal is in all versions painfully disappointing. It may be compared to the mediaeval legends of saints once current in Europe, but it has the additional defect of brevity, and, like Hindu works generally, shows a total contempt for chronology. When one great man is but an incarnation of another who lived hundreds or thousands of years before, it seems superfluous to the Hindu biographer to consider such a trifle as the date of his successive appearances upon earth. Even the pious Hindus who at different times expounded and translated Nabhaji's work, each and all pass by the dates of the Bhagats without a word of apology to the reader. We are therefore generally left to shreds of extraneous evidence for the epochs of the Bhagats whose writings are contained in the Bible of the Sikhs.

Uddava Chidghan was born in Dharur in Khandesh. Once when he was celebrating the anniversary of the birth of Rama, and taking an image of that god into his house at Bedar in the Barars, some bigoted Muhammadans stoned the procession. A fight arose between the Hindus and Muhammadans. It is said that Hanuman, the monkey-god, espoused the cause of the Hindus, and fought against the Muhammadans, as he had done thousands of years before against Rawan. By Hanuman's aid Chidghan's party was victorious, and succeeded in burning a mosque in which the Muhammadans had