The office of granthi in its full modern sense follows directly from Guru Gobind Singh's declaration in 1708 that the compiled scripture, rather than any living person, would be the eternal Guru of the Sikh community: once the Guru was a text rather than a person, someone had to read it aloud, keep it correctly, and attend to its ceremonial presence in every gurdwara, and that practical need is what the office of granthi exists to meet, a role with no real predecessor before the scripture itself took on that unique status. The text the granthi reads had itself been compiled earlier, first by the fifth Guru, Arjan, in 1604, and then given its final form under Guru Gobind Singh.
Although Sikh doctrine sets no bar against women serving as granthi, the largest and most prominent Sikh institutions have not always matched that principle in practice: the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee, which administers the Golden Temple in Amritsar, has faced public pressure and campaigns in recent decades over the exclusion of women from performing certain granthi duties at that specific shrine, a gap between doctrine and institutional practice that Sikh reform voices have actively contested, even as many other gurdwaras around the world do appoint women as granthi without controversy.