Khakkha in the Scribal Tradition

Khakkha sits at one of the meeting points between the two vocabularies Gurmukhi has always had to carry. The Punjab was a Persian-writing province for centuries before Gurmukhi became a general purpose script, and Punjabi holds a deep layer of Persian and Arabic words alongside its Indic ones. Several of those words contain a sound close to but not identical with the native kh, and the extended set answers that by putting a dot beneath Khakkha.

The Guru Granth Sahib itself contains a substantial Perso-Arabic vocabulary, including compositions by Sheikh Farid and passages that address Muslim listeners in their own religious register, so the question is not a modern one. The scripture writes these words with the plain undotted letters, because the dotted set did not yet exist, and Sikh practice does not permit the text to be respelled to match later conventions. A reader trained on the scripture therefore learns that plain Khakkha may stand where present-day Punjabi spelling would put the dot, and the same reader writing a letter or reading a newspaper uses the dot without hesitation. Two spelling systems coexist, and the older one has the authority. The presence of that vocabulary in the scripture is also a point about the book itself, since the Guru Granth Sahib includes compositions by figures from outside the Sikh Gurus, among them Muslim and Hindu devotional poets, and the range of its letters follows the range of its contributors.