Guru Granth Sahib

The standard printed volume has 1430 pages, called angs, limbs, and the pagination is identical in every copy; Sikhs cite by ang the way other traditions cite by chapter and verse. It opens with the Mul Mantar, the statement of one being, timeless and self-existent, and then the Japji Sahib of Guru Nanak, recited at dawn. It closes with miscellaneous compositions and Guru Arjan's Mundavani, the seal.

Between those, the arrangement is musical. The bulk of the text is divided into thirty-one ragas, the classical modes of North Indian music, and within each raga by the metrical form of the hymn and then by author in order of succession. A hymn's placement tells a performer how it is to be sung; the scripture is designed for kirtan, sung performance, and that is how it is chiefly encountered in a gurdwara. The compositions run to some 5,894 hymns and are largely in verse.

The authorship is deliberately wide. Six of the ten Gurus contributed, Nanak, Angad, Amar Das, Ram Das, Arjan and Tegh Bahadur, along with bards and attendants of the Guru's court. Beyond them stands the bhagat bani, the compositions of fifteen devotional poets who were not Sikh: Kabir, the weaver of Banaras, most heavily represented; Namdev and Trilochan from Maharashtra; Ravidas, a leather-worker and therefore an untouchable by caste; Jaidev, Ramanand, Dhanna, Pipa, Sain, Sadhana, Beni, Parmanand, Surdas, Bhikhan; and the Muslim Sufi Sheikh Farid. Their inclusion is not an anthologist's courtesy. It states a position: that truth spoken by a Hindu low-caste cobbler or a Muslim Sufi belongs in Sikh scripture on the same page as the Gurus. The script is Gurmukhi, but the languages are several, an old Punjabi and Hindavi core, with Braj, Sanskrit, Persian, Sindhi and Marathi elements.

Guru Arjan, the fifth Guru, compiled the Adi Granth at Amritsar, completing it in 1604 with Bhai Gurdas as scribe. He had reason to act. Hymns were circulating in collections of uneven reliability, and rival claimants to the succession were putting their own compositions into circulation as the Gurus' work; a fixed authorised text settled the question. Arjan gathered the hymns of his four predecessors, added his own, incorporated the bhagat bani, and imposed the raga arrangement. The volume was installed in the Harmandir Sahib at Amritsar, with Baba Buddha as its first custodian. The manuscript held at Kartarpur, near Jalandhar, is traditionally identified as that original, the Kartarpur Bir, and its status has been debated by scholars.

Arjan was executed in Lahore in 1606 under the Mughal emperor Jahangir, the first of the Gurus to be killed. The volume he compiled did not then change for a century.

The final recension came from Guru Gobind Singh, the tenth Guru, at Damdama Sahib in 1706, dictated to Bhai Mani Singh. Its one substantive addition was the hymns of his father, Guru Tegh Bahadur, executed at Delhi in 1675. Gobind Singh added nothing of his own; his compositions are collected separately in the Dasam Granth, which has a different and contested standing. Then, at Nanded in the Deccan on 20 October 1708, shortly before his death, he ended the line of human Gurus and conferred guruship on the scripture. From that point the community's authority rests on the Guru Granth Sahib as the living and eternal Guru, together with the collective body of the Khalsa, a settlement made deliberately, in the presence of the Sikhs, and not a doctrine that developed afterwards.

The protocol follows from the doctrine. In a gurdwara the volume rests on a raised platform, the manji sahib, beneath a canopy, covered in cloths called rumala. An attendant waves a chaur, a whisk of yak hair, over it, the gesture made for a sovereign. Worshippers remove shoes, cover their heads, and bow to it on entering. Each morning it is brought out and opened in the Prakash ceremony, carried on the head of an attendant; each night it is closed and taken to its own resting room for Sukhasan. No one sits at a level above it.

Its authority is functional as well as ceremonial. A Hukamnama, the Guru's order for the day, is taken by opening the volume at random and reading the hymn at the top of the left-hand page. Sikh life-cycle rites, naming, the Anand Karaj marriage, funerals, are conducted in its presence rather than before a priest, and Sikhism has no ordained priesthood; a granthi is a reader and custodian, not a clergyman. An Akhand Path, an unbroken relay reading of all 1430 angs, takes about forty-eight hours and marks occasions of significance.

The treatment is not veneration of paper. Sikh teaching is emphatic that the object of reverence is the shabad, the word, and that the volume is honoured as its vehicle; worn copies are cremated with rites rather than discarded. This is why photographs, translations and quotations circulate freely while the volume itself is handled under strict discipline, and why printing is centralised under the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee at Amritsar, which controls production to ensure that every copy carries the same text on the same 1430 pages.