Guru Granth Sahib

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The Guru Granth Sahib is the central scripture of Sikhism: a large anthology of sacred poetry that Sikhs hold to be the eleventh and final Guru, the permanent embodiment of the spiritual authority once carried by the line of living teachers. Its contents are almost entirely hymns — devotional verse meant to be sung — and the book is treated less as a text to be consulted than as a presence to be attended. To call it the Guru is not to honor a book with a borrowed title; it is to locate, in a bound volume of some 1,430 leaves, the office that ten human teachers held before it.

The compilation arc

The compilation has a precise history. In 1604 the fifth Sikh Guru, Arjan, gathered the hymns of his predecessors together with his own and a body of verse by earlier devotional poets, producing the volume now called the Adi Granth, the “first book.” The work was carried out at Amritsar, scribed by his disciple Bhai Gurdas, and the completed pothi was installed in the Harmandir Sahib — the central shrine that later generations would call the Golden Temple — with the aged Baba Buddha appointed its first granthi, its keeper and reader. Arjan drew the earlier Gurus’ compositions in part from manuscript collections already circulating in the community, the Goindval pothis associated with the third Guru’s house among them, and shaped the whole into a single ordered book rather than a loose archive. That he fixed an authoritative text at all was itself a doctrinal act: it set the word of the Gurus beyond the reach of rival claimants and forgers, of whom the early community had several.

A century later Guru Gobind Singh, the tenth Guru, prepared a second recension — the version associated with Damdama, into which he incorporated the compositions of his father, the ninth Guru Tegh Bahadur, who had been executed at Delhi in 1675. According to Sikh tradition Gobind Singh declared, before his death at Nanded in 1708, that there would be no further human Guru: the scripture itself would carry the office. From that moment the book is the Guru Granth Sahib, and the title is not honorific decoration but the claim itself — Guru Maneyo Granth, the injunction to acknowledge the Granth as Guru. The line of living teachers, which had run for two centuries from Nanak, closed not into a vacancy but into a text.

Contents wider than its community

What the volume contains is wider than its own community. Alongside the hymns of the Sikh Gurus it preserves verse by figures from outside the tradition — drawn from the broad current of North Indian devotion gathered under the name of the Sant lineage and from Islamic mystical poetry. The weaver-poet Kabir of Banaras and the leather-worker Ravidas speak in the nirguna register — devotion to a formless, imageless absolute beyond name and attribute — the same stream of poetry that the Kabir Panth and the Ravidassia community would later carry as their own. The Punjabi Sufi Sheikh Farid contributes verse from within the devotional idiom of Islam, the inward longing for God that the wider tradition of Sufism cultivates. The Maharashtrian saint Namdev appears in his northern, Hindi-language voice. These contributors — fifteen bhagats in the established reckoning, together with the Gurus, a handful of named Sikhs, and eleven bards of the Guru’s court — make the Sahib a record of the medieval devotional ferment far larger than Sikhism itself, set down at the moment the new faith was crystallizing out of it.

The inclusion is selective and shaping, not merely archival. The Kabir who appears here is the Adi Granth’s Kabir, a portrait edited toward the emerging Sikh theology of one nameless, non-incarnate God — distinguishable, as the textual scholarship has shown, from the more abrasive Kabir of the eastern Bijak or the more Vaishnava Kabir of the Rajasthani recensions. To gather these poets into one book was to assert a kinship across the lines of Hindu and Muslim institutional religion that both clerical orders patrolled: the question of how far that convergence runs is exactly the question the Sahib’s table of contents poses. What the poets share, and what the arrangement insists on, is the oneness of a divine reality without form — and the divine name, repeated and absorbed, as the way to it. This sets the Sahib apart from the nearby world of Krishna devotion, the saguna current of love directed at a personal god with face and story: the matrix is adjacent and the vocabulary often overlaps, but the Granth’s God has no image and no incarnation, and its poets are gathered for that conviction, not against it.

Music as the ordering principle

The hymns are arranged not by author or by theme but by raga, the melodic mode in which each is to be sung, so that the book’s organising principle is music. After an opening section — the Japji and the daily liturgical hymns — the great central body of the scripture is divided into thirty-one ragas, and within each raga the compositions are ordered by Guru and by metrical form. A hymn of Kabir and a hymn of the third Guru may stand on the same page because they share a melody, not a doctrine or a date; authorship is recorded, but it does not govern the sequence. The principle is consistent with the whole: this is not a treatise to be read straight through but a body of song to be performed, and the structure serves the voice before it serves the eye.

Its language is largely an older devotional register — Sant Bhasha, a literary North Indian idiom drawing on Punjabi, Braj, Khari Boli, and elements of Sanskrit, Persian, and Sindhi — written throughout in the Gurmukhi script that the second Guru’s circle had stabilized for exactly this purpose. The opening words, the Mul Mantar, set the key for everything that follows: a declaration of one being, true of name, without fear and without enmity, beyond time and unborn — the formless unity the rest of the volume returns to from a hundred directions. The recurring insistence is double and inseparable: the oneness of a God without form, and the divine name as the means of liberation.

The volume as a person of rank

In practice the scripture is handled as a person of rank. In a gurdwara it rests on a raised platform beneath a canopy, set above the heads of the congregation; it is ceremonially carried in and opened in the morning and laid to rest at night in its own chamber; an attendant waves a whisk over it as one would over a sovereign or a teacher. The community gathers facing it, bows before it, and accepts its presence as the presence of the Guru. A passage opened at random and read aloud serves as the day’s guidance — the book addressing the moment, as a living teacher would. This is what Sikhs mean when they speak of a living Guru: in the tradition’s own understanding it is not metaphor but the form the Guru now takes, the eleventh in a succession of eleven, differing from the ten before it only in being made of word rather than flesh.

The logic holds together across the doctrine. Because the Guru was never, in Sikh understanding, the man as such but the divine word speaking through him, the shabad — the sound, the hymn, the name — was always the true teacher; the human Gurus were its bearers. When the line of bearers ends, the word remains, now bound into a single body that the community can tend. The veneration is not idolatry of paper and ink, because the object of reverence is the unity named on every page, present in the recitation; and it is not mere respect for a holy book, because the book holds the office. Both halves are necessary, and the tradition holds them at once.

Textual scholarship and the manuscript record

The standardisation of the text, the attribution of particular hymns, and the exact circumstances of the 1708 succession are matters historians reconstruct from sources of varying date, and the critical study of the Adi Granth’s manuscript history is an active field. The central documents are the early pothis — the Goindval manuscripts of the third Guru’s house, the disputed Guru Har Sahai pothi, and above all the Kartarpur volume of 1604 held by a branch of the Guru’s lineage — whose readings, hands, and order scholars have weighed against the printed text now standard at 1,430 pages.

The modern scholarly recovery is anchored by W. H. McLeod, whose studies of early Sikh tradition set the critical-historical method, and by Gurinder Singh Mann, whose The Making of Sikh Scripture (Oxford, 2001) traces the text’s formation from Nanak’s own collected hymns forward through the Goindval and Kartarpur pothis to the canon’s close. Pashaura Singh’s The Bhagats of the Guru Granth Sahib (Oxford, 2003) examines precisely how the verse of Kabir, Ravidas, Farid, and the other outside poets was selected and at points adapted to the developing Sikh self-understanding — the question of scriptural adaptation. Behind both stands the monumental Victorian-era apparatus of Max Arthur Macauliffe, whose six-volume The Sikh Religion (Clarendon, 1909) first carried the Gurus’ and bhagats’ hymns into English at length, in an avowedly sympathetic and Sikh-apologetic frame that its readers must keep in view. The verse of the bhagats themselves can be read in the early English of the devotional poets the Sahib drew on — among them the loose Tagore and Underhill renderings of Kabir, useful as reception history rather than as a witness to the Adi Granth’s own recension.

What is not in dispute is the result: a body of sung devotion that a religion has made the seat of its highest authority, and that it tends, daily, as it would tend the teacher it stands in for.

→ In the library: Songs of Kabir (Tagore & Underhill, 1915)

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