The Sikh scripture is treated as a living Guru, so its pages are limbs
Sikhs revere their scripture not as a book about a teacher but as the teacher itself. In 1708 the tenth Guru declared that no human would succeed him; the text would. Its 1,430 pages are called angs, meaning limbs, and it gathers hymns by Sikh Gurus alongside Hindu saints and a Muslim Sufi.
Guru Nanak's hymns were first collected during his years at Kartarpur in a manuscript known as a pothi, and later Gurus added their own work. The fifth Guru, Arjan, grew alarmed that his elder brother Prithi Chand, a rival claimant to the leadership, was circulating early hymns mixed with his own compositions. Arjan sent associates across the subcontinent to gather authentic texts and, with Bhai Gurdas as scribe, edited them into the Adi Granth. Completed on 29 August 1604, it was installed at the Golden Temple in Amritsar days later, with Baba Buddha as its first reader. Arjan bowed before it and sat lower than the book.
At Damdama Sahib in 1704, in a year-long lull in the war against Aurangzeb's Mughal forces, the tenth Guru, working alongside Bhai Mani Singh, added the hymns of his father, Guru Tegh Bahadur, and closed the canon. Guru Gobind Singh's own writings went instead into a separate collection, the Dasam Granth. Shortly before he died at Nanded on 6 October 1708, he proclaimed the scripture his eternal successor, ending the line of human Gurus.
The text holds 5,894 compositions set to music and arranged mainly by 31 principal ragas, the melodic frameworks in which they are sung. Written in Gurmukhi script, it moves across many languages, from Punjabi and Sanskrit to Persian and Arabic. Beyond six Sikh Gurus, contributors include Bhakti poets such as Kabir and Namdev and the Sufi Sheikh Farid. Its vision is of a society built on freedom, mercy, love and justice, respectful of Hindu and Muslim scriptures without merging with them.
Manuscripts show the canon evolving. The oldest surviving version, Guru Nanak Dev University Manuscript 1245, dates to about 1599. An early variant preserved by the Sodhi family at Guru Harsahai was stolen in 1970 during a transfer; only photographs of some pages remain.
Source: Guru Granth Sahib
