Why Scholars Disagree, and What the Atlas Does Not Decide

The authenticity of the Kartarpur volume has been argued for well over a century, and the argument is real rather than manufactured. On one side stands the traditional identification, held by the Sikh community and by many scholars, that this is the 1604 manuscript. On the other stand scholars who have raised specific difficulties: erasures and insertions in the text, features of the index that are hard to reconcile with a single act of compilation, and questions about how the volume relates to the earlier Goindval Pothis, the collections that Guru Arjan is said to have drawn on.

Neither side has been able to close the case, and the reason is practical as much as scholarly. The manuscript is in private hands. It has been available for examination only rarely and on the custodians' terms, and it has never undergone material analysis of the kind that would date its paper and ink. The published descriptions on which the argument depends were made during a small number of supervised viewings.

The atlas records that the disagreement exists, records who holds which position, and does not adjudicate. It also declines to treat the custodians' reluctance as evidence of anything. A family holding the most sacred object of its tradition and refusing to hand it over for testing is behaving exactly as custodians of sacred objects generally behave.