The Kartarpur Bir: The First Volume of the Sikh Scripture

In 1604, Sikh tradition holds, the fifth Guru, Guru Arjan, completed a great anthology of hymns. It gathered the compositions of the first five Gurus with those of Hindu and Muslim devotional poets such as Kabir, Namdev, Ravidas and the Sufi Shaikh Farid. The scribe was the Guru's relative and follower Bhai Gurdas. The volume, the Adi Granth, was installed in the newly built Harmandir Sahib at Amritsar. A century later the tenth Guru, Guru Gobind Singh, ended the line of human Gurus and declared the scripture, as Guru Granth Sahib, the Guru for all time. A manuscript that Sikh tradition identifies as that first 1604 volume is kept today, privately, in the town of Kartarpur. It is the Kartarpur Bir.

A manuscript held by a rival line

• After Guru Arjan, the volume passed to the family of Dhir Mal, a grandson of the sixth Guru, Guru Hargobind. Dhir Mal claimed the Guruship himself and held the book as a sign of his claim.
• Sikh sources tell that followers of the ninth Guru, Guru Tegh Bahadur, seized it, and that the Guru ordered it returned. It stayed with Dhir Mal's Sodhi descendants at Kartarpur.
• It later passed to Maharaja Ranjit Singh (d. 1839), who kept it at Lahore. After the British annexation of the Punjab it was returned in 1850 to Sodhi Sadhu Singh of Kartarpur on his petition, and it has stayed with the family.
• It is shown to the public on special occasions. Scholarly access has been rare: the most famous examination was by Bhai Jodh Singh, who described it page by page in Sri Kartarpuri Bir de Darshan (1968).

Its place in the history of the text

The Adi Granth did not arise from nothing. The Goindval pothis (also called the Mohan pothis), compiled under the third Guru, Guru Amar Das, in the 1570s, already collected hymns of the Gurus and the bhagats, and scholars such as Gurinder Singh Mann have shown how Guru Arjan built on them.

The Kartarpur Bir is the key witness to the 1604 stage. The text that Sikhs use today follows the Damdami Bir, the recension traditionally associated with Guru Gobind Singh at Damdama Sahib (c. 1706). That recension adds the hymns of Guru Tegh Bahadur. Other early manuscripts, such as the Banno Bir, differ at points, and their relationship to the Kartarpur volume has been argued for more than a century.

Scholarship and controversy

In 1991 Pashaura Singh submitted a doctoral thesis at the University of Toronto, The Text and Meaning of the Adi Granth, supervised by W. H. McLeod. It compared early manuscripts to trace how Guru Arjan edited the text. Some Sikh critics read the work as questioning the scripture's integrity. In 1994 Pashaura Singh was summoned before the Akal Takht, the highest seat of Sikh religious authority, where he submitted a statement and undertook to revise his work. The affair became a lasting debate about academic study of a living scripture and about who has the authority to examine it.

The Kartarpur Bir itself is at the centre of this. Its supporters regard it as the authentic original written under the Guru's supervision. Critics and some historians have asked how the text of the Kartarpur volume relates to the Banno Bir and other copies, and whether the whole of it dates from 1604. The debate is limited by how few scholars have been allowed to examine it directly.

Symbology and sacred encoding

Ik Oankar (ੴ). The scripture opens with the numeral one joined to the letter-sign for Oankar, the sacred syllable. The sign declares the oneness of the divine and is the most important visual symbol of Sikhism.

The Mul Mantar. The opening statement, shown above, is the "root formula" of the faith: a creed of about a dozen words describing the Creator.

Gurmukhi. The scripture is written in Gurmukhi script ("from the mouth of the Guru"), which tradition credits the second Guru, Guru Angad, with standardising. Choosing a script for the community's own writings made the script itself part of Sikh identity.

The book as Guru. The Guru Granth Sahib is treated as a living Guru. It is installed under a canopy each morning, attended with a whisk (chaur), laid to rest at night, and consulted at random for guidance (hukamnama). Its physical manuscripts carry an exceptional reverence, which shapes the conditions of any study of them.

Connections

Sikhism (ch34), Bhakti (ch30) and Sufism (ch27), whose poets are included in the Adi Granth. Compare the Codex Sinaiticus (V18) and the Birmingham Qur'an (V28) as early scripture manuscripts studied by textual historians.

From The Divine Archives · https://getconexto.com/vault/kartarpur-bir.html