Dasam Granth

The first thing to establish about the Dasam Granth is what it is not. Sikhi has one Guru in scriptural form, the Guru Granth Sahib, installed as eternal Guru by Guru Gobind Singh in 1708, and the Dasam Granth does not share that status. It is not installed in the same way, it is not the Guru, and treating the two as interchangeable is a serious error, which is why the atlas keeps them as separate entries and refuses to route compositions from one to the other.

The second thing is that it is nevertheless woven into ordinary Sikh life. Jaap Sahib, the tenth Guru's long hymn of divine names; Tav-Prasad Savaiye, from the Akal Ustat; and Benti Chaupai, a petition for protection, all come from this volume, and all three are in the Nitnem, the daily prayers. The first two are among the five banis recited at the Amrit Sanchar, the Khalsa initiation, at the making of the amrit itself. The opening invocation of the Ardas, the congregational prayer said at the close of every Sikh service, is from the Var Sri Bhagauti Ji Ki, which is also here. A Sikh who says the daily prayers recites from the Dasam Granth every morning and evening, whatever position they take on the questions in the next section.

The volume runs to about 1,428 pages in the standard recension and is extremely varied: hymns to the Timeless One, the Guru's own account of his life and mission in the Bachitar Natak, the Chandi compositions, long retellings of the Hindu avatar narratives, the Persian Zafarnama addressed to the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, and the Charitropakhyan, four hundred and four tales of deception. It is written mostly in Braj Bhasha, with Punjabi, Persian and Sanskrit.

Guru Gobind Singh died in 1708 and the volume was assembled after his death, traditionally by Bhai Mani Singh at the instruction of Mata Sundri, from manuscripts held in different hands. Whether everything in it is the Guru's own composition has been argued ever since, and the argument became formal in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries during the Singh Sabha reform movement. It has never been resolved and it is not the atlas's place to resolve it.

The positions, stated plainly. One holds that the entire volume is the Guru's, that its variety reflects the range of a poet-king who kept fifty-two court poets, and that the retellings of Hindu narrative are literary material turned to Sikh ends rather than endorsement of what they describe. Another holds that only some compositions (typically Jaap Sahib, Akal Ustat, Bachitar Natak, Zafarnama and the banis of the Nitnem), are the Guru's, and that others, above all the Charitropakhyan, belong to court poets. The manuscript evidence is genuinely difficult: recensions differ, the earliest are not autograph, and the standard printed text dates from a nineteenth-century committee.

The Charitropakhyan is where the dispute is hottest, because its tales of women's stratagems sit oddly in a scripture and because Benti Chaupai, which is in the Nitnem, sits at the end of it. Positions on the section range from reading it as moral instruction in the ways of the world, through reading it as court literature wrongly bound in, to reading it as a later interpolation. Robin Rinehart's Debating the Dasam Granth is the fullest English account of the controversy and takes care to present it as a live argument among Sikhs rather than a problem for outsiders to adjudicate. This entry follows that posture: the text is recorded, its liturgical use is recorded, and the dispute is recorded as a dispute.