The image most Sikhs have of the Gurus, of the Sahibzade, of Baba Deep Singh Ji and of the martyrdoms comes from cheap colour prints sold at shrines and given away by shops as calendars.
The imagery was largely fixed between the 1930s and the 1970s by a small number of painters, Sobha Singh above all, and by the Amritsar print workshops.
It is the most widely distributed art in Punjab by an enormous margin. It hangs in houses, shops, tractors, trucks and offices in every district and across the diaspora.
It is also entirely modern, imagined, and doctrinally awkward in a tradition that did not depict its Gurus.
Nobody has collected it, dated it or attributed it systematically. The painters of most of the prints in circulation are unknown and the plates are in private hands or lost.
A complete visual culture, universally recognised, produced within living memory, is uncatalogued.
The calendar print is the dominant visual culture of Sikh households: the Gurus, the Sahibzade, the martyrdoms, all in a style descended from Sobha Singh and the Amritsar print shops.
The images are recent. There is no contemporary portrait of any Guru, and what circulates is a twentieth century iconography made fixed by repetition.
The prints are made in Amritsar and Delhi and sold at every shrine. Nobody has catalogued them, dated them or identified their artists, which is a straightforward piece of work that nobody has done.