Babba and the Decorated Manuscript

Manuscript volumes of the Guru Granth Sahib were not always plain. Copies were produced with illuminated openings, decorated borders and elaborated initial letters, and the making of such a volume was an act of devotion and often of patronage as well as a piece of copying. That tradition sits in tension with an important principle, which is that the text is a Guru rather than an artefact, and that its authority lies in its words and not in the beauty of any particular copy. Sikh practice resolves the tension by treating decoration as permissible around the text and never as an alteration of it: the wording, the spelling and the pagination are fixed, and what a scribe or an illuminator may do is add to the setting rather than to the substance.

The consequence for the letters themselves is that Gurmukhi never developed the range of display hands that some scripts did, since a letter in a scriptural volume has to be the same letter it is everywhere else and cannot be stretched or stylised for effect. A common letter like Babba is therefore remarkably consistent across centuries of manuscript production, which is convenient for palaeography and is one reason Gurmukhi hands are dated more by their proportions and their small habits than by any dramatic change in the shapes.