The B-40 Janamsakhi
An illustrated life of Guru Nanak with 57 paintings by the artist Alam Chand Raj, made in 1733 and one of the finest early examples of Sikh painting.
The B-40 Janamsakhi, named after its shelf mark in the India Office Library, is an illustrated life of Guru Nanak completed in 1733 by a scribe named Daya Ram Abrol, with 57 paintings by an artist named Alam Chand Raj.
The paintings show the Guru with Mardana in scenes of his life: his birth, his schooling, the true bargain, his meeting with Babur, his visit to Mecca and his death. The style is simple and bold, with bright colours and flat backgrounds. It is one of the earliest dated illustrated Sikh manuscripts.
It is now in the British Library in London.
Gallery
8 works
Pictures from Wikimedia Commons; select one to see it full size with its credit.
More manuscripts & inscriptions
The manuscript of the Adi Granth written out by Bhai Gurdas under Guru Arjan's direction and installed in the Harmandir Sahib in 1604, the original scripture of the Sikhs.
Two or more volumes of hymns compiled in Guru Amar Das's time at Goindwal, the earliest surviving collections of Sikh scripture and a source for the Adi Granth.
The final edition of the scripture, with Guru Tegh Bahadur's hymns added, completed at Talwandi Sabo with Bhai Mani Singh as scribe. The original is believed lost in the 18th century; every later copy descends from it.
Letters of command written by the later Gurus and their wives to Sikh congregations, asking for offerings, horses and weapons, many bearing the Guru's own hand.
The Mauryan emperor's edicts on great boulders in Gandhara, in the Kharoshthi script of the north-west: among the oldest writing in the Punjab after the Indus seals.
A copy of the Adi Granth made by Bhai Banno, a Sikh of Mangat, who was sent to Lahore to have the Guru's scripture bound and copied it on the way.
A mathematical text on seventy leaves of birch bark, dug up by a farmer at Bakhshali near Mardan in 1881. It uses a dot for zero, one of the oldest written zeros known.
The 'epistle of victory', a letter in Persian verse that Guru Gobind Singh sent to the emperor Aurangzeb after Chamkaur, rebuking him for the oaths his commanders broke at Anandpur.
A plate inscribed in Kharosthi recording a Buddhist gift by Patika, son of a Scythian satrap of Taxila: one of the few documents of Scythian rule in the Punjab.
The second scripture of the Sikhs, gathering compositions attributed to Guru Gobind Singh, survives in several 18th-century manuscripts whose contents differ, one reason its compilation is still debated.
Forty ballads by the scribe who wrote out the first Sikh scripture for Guru Arjan, traditionally called the key to the Guru Granth Sahib.