The Petition of the Ardas

The Ardas as recited today divides cleanly into three movements, and this atlas now catalogues all three as their own entries: a fixed opening that invokes the divine name and recalls the ten Gurus in sequence, a middle section recounting Sikh history and asking Waheguru's blessing on the Panth, and a fixed closing, sarbat da bhala, that widens the prayer's concern from the Sikh community outward to all humanity. Of the three, the middle section has the most complicated textual history. Where the opening and closing are essentially stable across Sikh institutions today, the middle historically carried real latitude, granthis and sangats naming specific contemporary concerns, recent hardships, ongoing struggles, particular community needs, within an otherwise recognisable frame.

That latitude narrowed considerably over the twentieth century as Sikh institutional authority moved toward a single standardised text. The Sikh Rahit Maryada, the Code of Conduct promulgated by the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee, sets out an authorised form of the Ardas including this middle portion, intended to be used uniformly across gurdwaras rather than left to local variation. The standardisation did not erase the section's historical character entirely; it still recounts specific named episodes of Khalsa history, martyrdoms, sacrifices and steadfastness, that a purely fixed liturgical formula would not typically carry. What changed is that the specific naming of contemporary concerns, once genuinely open to the moment, is now itself part of a text fixed in advance.

What sets this section of the Ardas apart from most petition prayers catalogued elsewhere in this atlas is that its plea is inseparable from an act of historical memory. Before the petition is voiced, the prayer recounts, often by name, the endurance of Sikh martyrs and the community's historical sacrifices, treating remembrance itself as the ground on which the request for blessing stands. This is a communal petition in a stronger sense than simply being spoken by a group rather than an individual: what is asked for is explicitly asked on behalf of the Panth as a continuing historical community, defined by what its predecessors suffered and held to, not merely by who happens to be present in the room reciting it.

That structure, remember first, then ask, is not unique to Sikh prayer, but it is unusually explicit here. Many petition traditions ground a request in praise of the deity addressed; this one grounds its request substantially in the deeds of the community itself, treating communal steadfastness as a form of standing before Waheguru that authorises the petition that follows. It is also what most sharply distinguishes this middle section from the Ardas's own fixed closing, sarbat da bhala, which asks nothing particular for the Sikh community at all, turning instead to the welfare of everyone. Read together, the sequence moves from a community remembering and asking for itself to that same community explicitly setting its own interest aside, a structural progression built into three consecutive parts of one recited prayer.