Bhai Gurdas

The hand that wrote it

Bhai Gurdas was a nephew of Guru Amar Das and served four Gurus. In 1604, at Amritsar, Guru Arjan dictated the compilation that became the Adi Granth and Bhai Gurdas wrote it — the volume known as the Kartarpur Pothi, the ancestor of every copy of the Guru Granth Sahib since.

The work was editorial as well as manual. The Guru selected, arranged by raga, and set the boundary against the compositions of rival claimants; Bhai Gurdas executed a scheme that had to be exactly right, because it was going to be fixed.^1,2,3

The Var and the Kabitt

His own writing is substantial: thirty-nine vars in Punjabi and a body of kabitt-savaiyye in Braj. They are the earliest Sikh writing that explains rather than sings — the first attempt to set out what the Gurus taught in expository form, and the earliest near-contemporary account of Sikh history and institutions.

Guru Arjan is traditionally reported to have called them the key to the Guru’s Word. That formulation fixes their status precisely: they are not in the scripture and never were, and they are the only non-scriptural texts that may be recited in a gurdwara alongside it. Later Sikh scholarship still leans on them heavily, because for the sixteenth-century Panth there is not much else written from inside it.^1,2,3

Two Gurus, two eras

He lived through the transition that the martyrdom of Guru Arjan forced. He served Guru Hargobind as well, and his writing is one of the sources for how the community understood the change when the sixth Guru took up arms and built the Akal Takht — the doctrine later named miri-piri. He died at Goindwal in 1636.^1,2,3