The Adi Granth

The greatest of Guru Arjan’s many achievements was, however, his compila­tion of the canonical scriptures of Skihism, the Adi Granth (‘Primal Book’), symbolically installed in the new temple in the year of its completion.

The Adi Granth is in essence an immense hymnal, consisting of 1,430 pages in standard modem printed editions. A prefatory section begins with the greatest of all Guru Nanak’s compositions, the Japji, which is prescribed for private recitation at dawn. This is followed by short collections of hymns prescribed for the liturgical offices of worship in the evening (sodar rahiras) and then before retiring (kirtan sohila). The bulk of the scripture is then arranged, in accordance with its hymnal character, by the mode (rag) in which the various compositions are to be performed. Within each of these thirty-one modal headings, hymns are arranged first in order of metrical length, then by author. A concluding section includes a number of miscellaneous compositions for which no place could appropriately be found under the main headings.

The language of the Adi Granth naturally varies somewhat from author to author, sometimes from genre to genre, but seldom diverges greatly from the poetic idiom so memorably established by Guru Nanak. Its archaic character, whose difficulties are compounded by the conciseness of expression favoured in medieval Indian religious poetry, means that it is no longer fully approachable by Sikhs today without some special study, and much effort has gone into the compilation of commen­taries and translations. The use of the sacred Gurmukhi script (a distinctive relative of the Devanagari script used to write Sanskrit and Hindi) both in the Adi Granth and for modern Punjabi has, however, served to blur the distinc­tion between the two.

The great bulk of the contents of the Adi Granth naturally consists of hymns by the early Sikh Gurus. It is possible to give some idea of their relative contribution by enumerating the compositions attributed to them, although the varied length of these makes this only a rough guide. At their core, and as their major inspiration, he the hymns of Guru Nanak (974), briefly supplemented by the scattered couplets of Guru Angad (62), and extensively restated in the hymns of his last contemporary Guru Amar Das (907). The new note first struck by Guru Ram Das (679) was developed on a collosal scale by the largest single contributor to the volume, its compiler Guru Arjan (2,218), whose enormous oeuvre explores almost every possibility suggested by his predecessors, and includes the Sukhmani (‘Peace of Heart’) as both its most famous item and as the longest of all the hymns in the collection.

Also included in the Adi Granth are a few eulogies of the Gurus by the bards attached to their courts. Much more remarkable is the incorporation of hymns by other teachers, whose works first entered the Sikh tradition in a collection compiled during the time of Guru Amar Das. Designed to demonstrate the universal truth of the Gurus’ message by analogy, these included extensive contributions from Namdev (60), Kabir (541) and Ravidas (41), besides the Sufi Shaykh Farid (116). While it is subordinate in status to the gurbani (‘Utterance of the Gurus’) proper, the inclusion of this bhagat-bani (‘Utterance of the Saints’) is striking testimony to the breadth of the religious vision of the early leaders of Sikhism.