| Honorific Prefix: | Lala |
| Sohan Lal Suri | |
| Death Date: | 1852 |
| Employer: | Lahore Durbar of the Sikh Empire |
| Known For: | Court chronicler of the Sikh Empire |
| Notable Works: | Umdat-ut-Tawarikh |
Sohan Lal Suri (died 1852) was the son of Lala Ganpat Rai, the waqai navis or court chronicler. Sohan Lal inherited the position from his father and served at the court of Lahore till after the death of Ranjit Singh in 1839. The period covered by him as a court chronicler begins in 1812 and includes the Anglo-Sikh War.
Sohan Lal was born in a Hindu Khatri family from the Pothwar region of Punjab, now in Pakistan. The family was said to be descended from Raja Khokhar Anand, a 12th-century ruler of Lahore.[1]
His father, Lala Ganpat Rai, had served as a Munshi for three generations of the Sukerchakia Misl. He gained employment under Sardar Charat Singh in 1771 and on his death, served under Maha Singh and then in Ranjit Singh's court till 1811–12.
Sohan Lal penned events at the Lahore Durbar in Persian, contiguous with the rule of Maharaja Ranjit Singh. The work, in five daftars or volumes, was translated into English in the twentieth century by Vidya Sagar Suri, his descendant.[2]
Daftar 1 History of the Sikhs from the birth of Guru Nanak in 1469 to 1771.
Daftar 2 Charts the career of Charhat Singh and the rise of Ranjit Singh and covers the period from 1772 to 1830.
Daftar 3 Is divided into five parts and covers the events in the court of Lahore from 1831 to 1839, the year Ranjit Singh died.
Daftar 4 Is divided into three parts and covers significant events in the Sikh Court from 1839 to 1845. A part of the narrative from this period is missing. After the First Anglo-Sikh War, Sohan Lal Suri gave the account of the wars from 29 September 1845 to 20 September 1846 between the ‘Singhs’ and the ‘glorious Sahibs’ to Herbert Benjamin Edwardes who served at the Punjab Frontier to peruse. Edwardes did not return the records. As there was no copy, this period is missing from the Umdat-ut-tawarikh, the Lahore court chronicle.[3]
Daftar 5 This volume deals with the period commencing in 1845 till 1849, the year the Sikh Empire was annexed by the East India Company.
Claude Martin Wade was appointed the political agent by the East India Company and was ordered to report the proceedings of Maharaja Ranjit Singh's court. In speaking of the indigenous work, he said—
"Allowing for the partiality of the writer’s views and opinions, as regards the fame and credit of his patron, yet, as a record of dates and a chronicle of events, tested by a minute comparison with other authorities, and my own personal investigations into its accuracy during a residence of seventeen years among the Sikhs, I am enabled to pronounce it, in those two respects, as a true and faithful narrative of Runjeet Singh’s eventful life."[4]
According to Bayly, a twenty-first-century specialist in global and Indian history, Sohan Lal Suri's Umdat-ut-Tawarikh gives ‘a good impression of the density of information coming in to Ranjit Singh…’.[5]
The village of Manga in the Amritsar District, which was the estate of Lala Sohan Lal Suri during Maharaja Ranjit Singh's reign,[6] was confirmed, in 1850, for life by the East India Company following the annexation of Punjab.[7]