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.

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.” A century later Guru Gobind Singh, the tenth Guru, added the compositions of his father and, according to Sikh tradition, declared before his death 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.

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 — the weaver-poet Kabir, the leather-worker Ravidas, the Sufi Sheikh Farid, and others drawn from the broad current of North Indian bhakti and Islamic mystical devotion. The hymns are arranged not by author or theme but by raga, the melodic mode in which each is to be sung, so that the book’s organising principle is music. Its language is largely an older devotional register written in the Gurmukhi script, with a recurring insistence on the oneness of a formless God and on the divine name as the means of liberation.

In practice the scripture is handled as a person of rank. In a gurdwara it rests on a raised platform under a canopy, is ceremonially opened in the morning and laid to rest at night, and is the focal point before which the community gathers; a randomly opened hymn read aloud serves as guidance. This is what practitioners mean when they speak of a living Guru — not metaphor, in the tradition’s own understanding, but the form the Guru now takes.

Historians treat the standardisation of the text, the attribution of particular hymns, and the exact circumstances of the 1708 succession as matters reconstructed from sources of varying date, and the critical study of the Adi Granth’s manuscript history is an active field. 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)

→ Related: Unity · Mahabharata