The Day the Sikh Guru Was a Book

On October 6, 1708, in the town of Nanded on the Godavari river, Guru Gobind Singh placed a copy of the Adi Granth before his Sikh followers, walked around it five times, set a coconut and five coins in front of it, and announced that the book was the next Guru. He had been stabbed by an assassin weeks earlier; the wound had reopened. He told his followers there would be no eleventh human guru. The line of ten ended with him.

Sikhs call the volume Guru Granth Sahib — Sahib being a term of address for a master. It runs to 1,430 pages and 5,894 hymns. The first six Sikh gurus had composed most of them, with Guru Arjan alone contributing 2,218; Guru Gobind Singh added 116 hymns by his father Guru Tegh Bahadur in the final compilation.

The text is unusual for a scripture in that the editors deliberately included voices from outside the tradition. Kabir, a 15th-century weaver-poet whose verses fit neither Hindu orthodoxy nor Islam, contributed 541 hymns. Sheikh Farid, a 12th-century Punjabi Sufi, contributed 134. Ravidas, born into the Chamar caste, contributed 41. The verses appear in their own hands, not paraphrased.

The book is treated as the living teacher it was declared to be. Each morning at the principal gurdwaras a granthi opens it on a raised platform under a canopy and begins reading, fanning the open page with a chaur sahib — a long-handled whisk — through the day. At night, it is closed, wrapped in cloths, and carried to its own bed in a small flower-decorated palanquin called a sukhasan.

The gurdwara at Nanded where Guru Gobind Singh died is called Hazur Sahib. The book installed there in October 1708 is, by Sikh teaching, still teaching.