I met Surjit Singh Kandhari very briefly in Oslo (Norway) about 10 years ago when I was there on a week-long lecture tour. After visiting a few universities and towns in snow-bound north, I returned to Oslo for a couple of days before proceeding on my journey homewards. Kandhari was away on a business trip but his Norwegian wife invited me over to spend a day in her home which was in a village over a hundred miles away from the capital. It was a big house full of books and Indian artifacts. Thereafter I lost contact with the Kandharis.

Surjit Singh was back in India early September to offer the government historical documents he had acquired on a visit to Pakistan in the 1970s. He was in Karachi when someone told him that a dealer in antique books had many ancient manuscripts looted from Hindu and Sikh families when they migrated to India in 1947. Kandhari went to the house of the antique dealer and found a huge pile of hand-written granths. He bought the lot for Rs 20,000. He had to square Pakistani Custom officials before being allowed to take them out of the country. Back in Norway, he had the granths examined by oriental scholars. They are two handwritten copies of Adi Granth, sacred scripture of the Sikhs, and a copy of Bhagavata Purana. The most valuable of his collection is a copy of Dasam Granth, compiled by last Sikh Guru Gobind Singh. The original was lost in 1705. A compilation was made again by the Guru's closest disciple and scribe, Bhai Mani Singh, between 1724 and 1726. It is likely that this is what Kandhari has deposited in the vaults of the Bank of Norway for safe custody. Kandhari is willing to give away his treasure to any institution, museum or archive provided it is used for historical research.