The Dasam Granth
A large second scripture associated with Guru Gobind Singh, containing compositions used daily by every Sikh — and others whose authorship has been argued over for two centuries. The most contested text in the tradition.
What it is
The Dasam Granth — the book of the tenth — is a large collection of compositions associated with Guru Gobind Singh, compiled after his death. It is distinct from the Guru Granth Sahib, and it is not the Guru: the Guruship was vested in the Guru Granth Sahib in 1708 and in nothing else.
It is nevertheless woven through daily Sikh life more thoroughly than most people outside the tradition realise. Compositions from it include:
- Jaap Sahib, read every morning as part of the nitnem.
- Tav-Prasad Savaiye and Chaupai Sahib, also in daily use.
- The verses recited during the preparation of amrit at initiation.
- The Zafarnama, the Guru’s Persian letter to Aurangzeb, written after Chamkaur.
So a Sikh who reads the daily prayers is reading from it, whatever position they hold on the questions below.1,3,4
What is disputed
This is the genuinely contested text in the tradition, and this site is not going to pretend otherwise or quietly take a side.1,2,3
Authorship. The collection contains material of very different kinds — devotional praise, autobiography, martial verse, and a long section retelling stories drawn from Puranic and Persian sources, some of them erotic or violent. One position holds the whole to be the Guru’s own composition. Another holds that only part is his and the rest is the work of poets at his court, of whom there were many, gathered into one volume afterwards. A third narrows the Guru’s authorship further still.
Status. Whether the collection as a whole should be treated as scripture, whether it may be installed and read in a gurdwara as the Guru Granth Sahib is, and what authority its non-nitnem sections carry, are all live questions between Sikh groups today.
Text. There is no single agreed recension. Manuscripts differ, and the printed editions in circulation descend from a nineteenth-century standardisation whose basis is itself argued about.
Why the argument is hard
The dispute is not a matter of a missing document that would settle it. It runs into questions the tradition finds difficult from more than one direction at once: what a Guru’s authorship means when a court of poets wrote around him, whether martial and mythological material sits comfortably with what the first Guru taught, and who has standing to rule on any of it now that the Guruship is closed.
Positions on it also track other divisions — between institutional bodies, reform movements and the taksals — which means the textual question is rarely argued on textual grounds alone.
What can be stated plainly is the part nobody contests: that several of its compositions are recited by Sikhs every day, and that the Guru Granth Sahib alone is the Guru.2,3,5
In the history
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