A Rahitnama ("epistle of conduct") is, at its heart, an attempt to answer a question every young faith eventually has to face: once the founder is gone, how is his way of life to be preserved and passed on? In the decades following the death of Guru Gobind Singh in 1708, a number of Sikh scholars and courtiers — several of whom had served closely in his retinue — set down their own accounts of the conduct expected of an initiated Khalsa Sikh: how to dress, eat, pray, and live, and what marked a true follower of the Guru's teaching from one in name only.

No single Rahitnama ever held universal authority. Several circulated side by side — among them the Rahitnama attributed to Chaupa Singh, the Rahitnama of Prahlad Singh (also called Prahlad Rai), those of Desa Singh and Daya Singh, and Bhai Nand Lal's own Tankhahnama and Rehatnamah — composed by different hands, in different decades, and not always in full agreement with one another. Some draw more heavily on earlier regional Hindu custom than later Sikh reformers found comfortable; their authorship and precise dating have been the subject of real, ongoing scholarly debate, most notably in the critical work of historian W. H. McLeod.

This fractured, sometimes-contested body of literature was eventually the raw material from which a unified modern code was built. Kamboozal treats that later document, the Sikh Rahit Maryada (1950), as its own separate work, with its own dedicated page — this Collection exists to preserve and make legible the older, more contested literature that came before it, and that the Maryada itself was written to reconcile.

Historical Context

The idea of a prescribed Sikh way of life reaches back to Guru Nanak Dev Ji in the sixteenth century, but the Rahitnama genre specifically took shape after Guru Gobind Singh's founding of the Khalsa in 1699, and especially after his death in 1708, when the community could no longer look to a living Guru for direct guidance on disputed questions of conduct.

Several texts emerged from this period, their dating and relative reliability still debated by scholars today. The Tankhahnama attributed to a Sikh in the name of Nand Lal is generally placed around 1718–19, roughly a decade after the Guru's passing. The Chaupa Singh Rahitnama, attributed to a member of the Guru's own retinue, is more difficult to date precisely — estimates range from close to 1700 to as late as the 1760s — and it has drawn particular scholarly attention for provisions scholars have identified as reflecting surrounding Hindu social custom, especially regarding gender and interaction with Muslims, more than later, more standardized Khalsa practice would come to permit. The Rahitnamas of Prahlad Singh, Desa Singh, and Daya Singh followed across the eighteenth century, each offering its own, sometimes diverging, account of proper Khalsa conduct.

By the early twentieth century, the accumulation of these divergent texts, alongside broader social and political pressures within the Sikh community, prompted a sustained effort to produce a single, authoritative code. Early attempts in 1915 and 1931 did not achieve lasting consensus. The Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee finally approved the Sikh Rahit Maryada in 1950, drawing on this older Rahitnama literature while resolving many of its inconsistencies — the document that today serves as the Sikh community's internationally recognized code of conduct.