Compilation
Guru Arjan compiled the Adi Granth in 1604 from the compositions of the first five Gurus, together with verse by fifteen non-Sikh poets — Sufi and Hindu, high caste and low, among them Kabir, Namdev, Ravidas and Farid. Guru Gobind Singh produced the final recension, adding the hymns of Guru Tegh Bahadur, and in 1708 declared the text itself his successor. There has been no human Guru since.
The volume runs to 1,430 pages in a standard pagination used universally, so that any citation refers to the same place in every copy.
Arrangement
The text is ordered by raga, the musical measure to which each composition is sung, rather than by author, subject or chronology. Within each raga the compositions are ordered by Guru and then by poetic form. The whole is designed to be sung: kirtan, sung recitation, is the primary mode of Sikh worship, and the musical arrangement is a structural feature of the scripture rather than a performance convention laid over it.
The language is not one language but several — Punjabi, Braj, Sanskritised registers, Persian vocabulary, and the idioms of the various contributing poets — written throughout in Gurmukhi.
As Guru
The Guru Granth Sahib is treated with the deference owed to a living Guru. It is installed on a raised platform under a canopy, fanned with a chaur, opened in the morning and put to rest at night, and never placed lower than those present, who uncover their heads and remove their shoes in its presence. Decisions are sought by opening it at random and reading the first composition on the page.
This is not regarded within the tradition as book-worship. The reasoning is that the Guru was never the body but the word conveyed through it, so that the corpus is the Guru in the only sense that mattered.
Significance
Fixing the canon in the founding generation, in the community's own script, with the founder's own verse and by the Guru's own hand, gave Sikhism a textual stability unusual among world religions. It also embedded a plural authorship — Muslim and Hindu, brahmin and outcaste — in the scripture itself, which no later editing could remove.
Further reading
- Fenech, Louis E. The Sikh Zafar-namah of Guru Gobind Singh. Oxford University Press, 2013
- Grewal, J. S. The Sikhs of the Punjab. Cambridge University Press, 1998
- Grewal, J. S. Guru Nanak in History. Panjab University, 1969
- Singh, Khushwant. A History of the Sikhs. Oxford University Press, 2004
- Singh, Pashaura. The Guru Granth Sahib: Canon, Meaning and Authority. Oxford University Press, 2000
See also
This entry was last revised on 1 August 2026.