Granthi

A granthi is the custodian and reader of the Guru Granth Sahib, and because Sikhs regard the scripture as the living Guru, that framing determines the whole character of the office.

Attending the scripture

The granthi reads from the Guru Granth Sahib in the gurdwara, leads the congregation in the recitation and the daily ceremonial care of the volume, its installation in the morning and its putting to rest at night, and attends to it as one serves a living and honoured Guru. The office is therefore one of service and custody rather than priesthood: the granthi does not stand between the worshipper and God, since Sikhism has no priestly caste, but serves the scripture and the congregation as a reader and caretaker.

Not a priest

There is no ordination and no sacerdotal order, and in principle any competent and observant Sikh who can read the scripture properly may perform the functions of the granthi, so the office rests on knowledge and good standing rather than on a conferred sacred status, and larger gurdwaras employ granthis while smaller congregations may share the duties. The granthi commonly also leads ceremonies and gives instruction, and in practice serves much of the function a clergyman serves in other traditions, but the tradition is careful to insist that this is a role of service to the Guru Granth Sahib and the community, not a priesthood, in keeping with the Sikh rejection of a mediating clerical class.

The office of granthi in its full modern sense follows directly from Guru Gobind Singh's declaration in 1708 that the compiled scripture, rather than any living person, would be the eternal Guru of the Sikh community: once the Guru was a text rather than a person, someone had to read it aloud, keep it correctly, and attend to its ceremonial presence in every gurdwara, and that practical need is what the office of granthi exists to meet, a role with no real predecessor before the scripture itself took on that unique status. The text the granthi reads had itself been compiled earlier, first by the fifth Guru, Arjan, in 1604, and then given its final form under Guru Gobind Singh.

Although Sikh doctrine sets no bar against women serving as granthi, the largest and most prominent Sikh institutions have not always matched that principle in practice: the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee, which administers the Golden Temple in Amritsar, has faced public pressure and campaigns in recent decades over the exclusion of women from performing certain granthi duties at that specific shrine, a gap between doctrine and institutional practice that Sikh reform voices have actively contested, even as many other gurdwaras around the world do appoint women as granthi without controversy.