Installation of the Adi Granth

What Guru Arjan inherited

The familiar account runs like this: for eighty years the Gurus’ hymns survived mainly by memory; rivals were circulating forgeries signed “Nanak”; Guru Arjan gathered the scattered compositions, sifted true from false, and produced Sikh scripture in a single act of creation.

The manuscripts tell a different story. Two volumes of the Goindval Pothis survive from the early 1570s, compiled under Guru Amar Das — probably half of an original set of four, a number that would have answered both the four Vedas and the four revealed books of Islam.^1,2 They already contain the complete hymns of the first three Gurus. They already contain the Bhagat hymns — Kabir, Farid, Namdev, Ravidas and the rest — already selected, already edited, already arranged with the Gurus’ compositions above and the Bhagats’ below.¹ The organising principles are the ones the later scripture uses: division by musical measure, hymns ordered by length.¹

Earlier still there is the Guru Harsahai Pothi, held by its custodian family to be Guru Nanak’s own volume. Its orthography is archaic, it contains no hymns by any Guru after Nanak, and its structure is unsystematic in a way that reads as early rather than careless. It was lost in a train robbery in 1971; photographs survive.^1,3

So what Guru Arjan did in 1604 was to obtain the Goindval Pothis, add his own hymns and his father’s, and elaborate an organisational scheme he had inherited. Mann’s summary is blunt: the process was “logical, incremental, and apparently organic”, and the evidence offers no basis for the belief that scripture was created in one stroke to defeat a conspiracy of forgers.¹

The volume itself

The work was done at Ramsar, on the edge of Ramdaspur, with Bhai Gurdas as scribe — one part of a wider consolidation of the Panth under Guru Arjan that also produced new towns, a formalised system of offerings, and a settled centre of authority.^4,5 The resulting manuscript — the Kartarpur Pothi — runs to 974 folios and carries a colophon dated Bhadon vadi 1, Samat 1661.^1,6 It still exists, in the custody of the Sodhi family at Kartarpur near Jalandhar.

Alongside the hymns of the first five Gurus it carries those of fifteen Hindu and Muslim saints. That inclusion is the decision with no real parallel among the scriptures of the period — but it should be credited where the manuscripts place it, a generation earlier, with Guru Amar Das.¹ And the selection was not indiscriminate: compositions that contradicted Sikh theology were set aside, and many hymns attributed to Kabir that praise asceticism are conspicuously absent.^1,3

On the traditional date the completed volume was carried in procession and installed in the newly finished Harmandir Sahib, with Baba Buddha — who had known every Guru since Nanak — appointed its first granthi.^5,7 Tradition adds the detail that most carries the meaning: the Guru placed the book on the raised seat and slept on the floor beside it.

What is disputed. The date. The manuscript’s colophon reads Bhadon vadi 1; the installation is conventionally observed on Bhadon sudi 1, usually given as 16 August 1604, with 29 August and 1 September also in circulation depending on the calendar conversion used.^1,6 The year is secure; the day is not.

What happened after 1604

Three further pieces of received wisdom do not survive contact with the manuscripts.

The two branches. Tradition holds that Bhai Banno produced a rival recension in 1642 padded with apocryphal hymns to muddy the true message. In fact, with a single exception, every one of those “apocryphal” compositions appears in the original inscription of the Kartarpur Pothi itself, and in the other manuscripts of the period.¹ The idea of a true family of manuscripts and a false one was a nineteenth-century construction by writers who did not know what the Kartarpur Pothi actually contained.¹

Guru Tegh Bahadur’s hymns. These are supposed to have been added by Guru Gobind Singh after his father’s death. Two manuscripts dated 1674 contain them — meaning they entered the text in the ninth Guru’s own lifetime.¹

The Damdama recension of 1706. Manuscripts of the Adi Granth appear from the 1680s. The likely sequence is that Guru Gobind Singh, at Anandpur in the late 1670s, sought to borrow the Kartarpur Pothi; its custodians were mid-move and could not release it; so he had an independent text prepared instead.¹

None of this diminishes 1604. It relocates it — from a moment of creation to the decisive moment in a long process, which is a more interesting thing to have been.

A book worth fighting over

Possession of these manuscripts was never merely custodial. When Guru Amar Das died, his son Baba Mohan kept the Goindval Pothis at Goindval and used that possession to press his claim to the succession; Prithi Chand, Guru Arjan’s elder brother, advanced his own claim on the strength of holding the Guru Harsahai Pothi.¹ The Puratan Janam-sakhi already imagines Guru Nanak handing his pothi to Angad at the moment of nomination — the book as the token of succession itself.¹

Which is why the vesting of Guruship in the scripture in 1708 reads less as a rupture than as the conclusion of an argument the community had been having since its first generation. What Sikhs revere today as the Guru Granth Sahib — standardised by the Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee in 1951 at 1,430 pages, first printed in 1865, and re-set with separated words only in the 1970s — is the far end of that same long process.¹