Guru Granth Sahib

The Guru Granth Sahib is the scripture of the Sikhs and, since 1708, their Guru. It is treated not as a book about God but as the living word, the bani, of the Gurus: it is seated under a canopy on a raised throne, waved over with a whisk, carried on the head, put to rest at night and woken at dawn. Every Sikh ceremony, from naming a child to marriage to death, takes place in its presence.

It began as the Adi Granth, compiled by Guru Arjan with Bhai Gurdas as scribe and installed in the Harmandir Sahib in 1604. Guru Gobind Singh added the hymns of his father Guru Tegh Bahadur and, at Damdama Sahib in 1706, dictated the final text to Bhai Mani Singh. At Nanded in 1708, before his death, he bowed before it and named it the eternal Guru.

In its standard printed form it has 1,430 pages, angs, and some 5,900 hymns. Six Gurus wrote them: Nanak, Angad, Amar Das, Ram Das, Arjan and Tegh Bahadur. Alongside them are fifteen bhagats, Hindu and Muslim saints from across India, among them Kabir the weaver, Ravidas the leatherworker, Namdev the tailor, Sain the barber and Sheikh Farid the Sufi of Pakpattan, and eleven bards of the Gurus' court and four others. Low caste and high, Hindu and Muslim, in Punjabi, Braj, Persian-tinged Lahndi and Sant Bhasha, they are given equal standing.

It is arranged not by author but by music: after the opening Japji and evening and night prayers, the hymns are grouped into thirty-one ragas, and within each raga by metre and by Guru. It is written in Gurmukhi. Its subject is one: the oneness of God, the remembrance of the Name, the illusion of ego, the equality of all people, and life lived in truth.

The Kartarpur Pothi, believed to be the original of 1604, is kept by the Sodhi family at Kartarpur near Jalandhar. In 2004 Sikhs around the world marked four hundred years since the first installation at Harmandir Sahib, where the Guru Granth Sahib is still read aloud from before dawn until late at night, every day of the year.