In 1604 Guru Arjan brought together the hymns of the earlier Gurus, a body of compositions by Hindu and Muslim saints, and his own verse, and had them set down as a single authoritative scripture at Amritsar; Bhai Gurdas served as the scribe. This first volume, the Adi Granth, was installed in the Harmandir Sahib, the Golden Temple, an act that gave the young Sikh community a fixed canon.
The manuscript identified with that original followed a particular family line. When the sixth Guru, Hargobind, left Amritsar in 1634, the volume came into the keeping of his grandson Dhir Mal, and it has stayed with Dhir Mal's descendants, the Sodhi family, at Kartarpur near Jalandhar ever since. That descent is significant because the line of the Guruship, and the later canonical scripture, passed differently: the tenth Guru, Gobind Singh, gave final form to the scripture at Damdama and conferred perpetual Guruship on the Guru Granth Sahib, the text now enthroned in every gurdwara. The Kartarpur Bir thus stands as a revered early witness held outside the main line of scriptural transmission, which has at times made its custody a matter of community sensitivity.