Rehras Sahib

Rehras Sahib is the Sikh evening prayer, recited at sunset at the close of the working day. It is not a single composition but a collection of hymns drawn from the Guru Granth Sahib, from the compositions of several of the Gurus, together with passages from the Dasam Granth attributed to Guru Gobind Singh, arranged into a set order for daily recitation. Its hymns give thanks, seek God's grace, and reflect on the divine name and the transience of worldly life, marking the transition from the labours of the day to the evening with an act of remembrance and gratitude. Recited daily by observant Sikhs, individually or in congregation in the gurdwara, Rehras is one of the fixed prayers (nitnem, the daily rule) that structure the Sikh devotional day alongside the morning and night prayers. Its assembling of hymns from across the scripture and the tenth Guru's collection into a single evening office reflects the ordered discipline of daily prayer that the tradition sets before its followers.

Its compiled character, drawing hymns from several different Gurus across roughly two centuries of Sikh scripture alongside later material from the Dasam Granth, distinguishes Rehras from morning prayers such as Japji Sahib, which are single-authored compositions, and communities and scholars have debated the exact set and order of hymns that should make up the evening prayer, since minor variations exist between printed prayer books used in different regions and denominational strands of Sikhism.

Rehras Sahib's current fixed content, an assembled sequence of compositions by Guru Nanak, Guru Ramdas, Guru Arjan and Guru Gobind Singh, was not always uniform across the Sikh world, and its specific selection and length were formally standardized only in the twentieth century, through the Sikh Rehat Maryada, a code of conduct and practice developed by a representative committee and adopted in 1945 by the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee, the body overseeing major Sikh institutions including the Golden Temple, precisely in order to establish one agreed standard evening liturgy where regional and historical manuscript traditions had previously varied in exactly which compositions were included and in what order.

This institutional standardization effort was part of a broader twentieth century Sikh reform movement addressing considerable variation that had developed in liturgical practice, ritual custom and doctrinal interpretation across different Sikh communities and gurdwaras over preceding centuries, and the Rehat Maryada's fixing of Rehras Sahib's content is one concrete instance of that broader modern effort to establish a single agreed standard practice for the whole Sikh community rather than leaving significant liturgical variation between regions and lineages in place indefinitely. Older manuscripts and regional practice from before 1945 preserve evidence of that earlier variation, which specialists in Sikh liturgical history study to understand how the now standard evening prayer took its current settled form only relatively recently in the tradition's long history.