Kartarpur Bir

Sikh tradition holds that in 1604 Guru Arjan, the fifth Guru, gathered the compositions of his predecessors together with those of his own and of a number of Hindu and Muslim devotional poets, dictated them to Bhai Gurdas at Ramsar near Amritsar, and installed the completed volume in the Harmandir Sahib on 1 September of that year, with Baba Buddha as its first granthi. That volume is the Adi Granth, the first Granth, and everything in Sikh scripture descends from it. When Guru Gobind Singh conferred the status of Guru on the scripture itself in 1708, it was this text, with the ninth Guru's compositions added, that became the Guru Granth Sahib.

The volume kept by the Sodhi family at Kartarpur, near Jalandhar, is held to be that manuscript. The Sodhis are descendants of the Guru's line and have held it privately for generations. The Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee, which administers the historic gurdwaras, has sought custody more than once and the family has not agreed.

If the identification is right, this is the most important physical object in Sikhism: not a copy of a scripture but the scripture, in the form in which it was first fixed, from the hand of the man the Guru dictated it to.

The authenticity of the Kartarpur volume has been argued for well over a century, and the argument is real rather than manufactured. On one side stands the traditional identification, held by the Sikh community and by many scholars, that this is the 1604 manuscript. On the other stand scholars who have raised specific difficulties: erasures and insertions in the text, features of the index that are hard to reconcile with a single act of compilation, and questions about how the volume relates to the earlier Goindval Pothis, the collections that Guru Arjan is said to have drawn on.

Neither side has been able to close the case, and the reason is practical as much as scholarly. The manuscript is in private hands. It has been available for examination only rarely and on the custodians' terms, and it has never undergone material analysis of the kind that would date its paper and ink. The published descriptions on which the argument depends were made during a small number of supervised viewings.

The atlas records that the disagreement exists, records who holds which position, and does not adjudicate. It also declines to treat the custodians' reluctance as evidence of anything. A family holding the most sacred object of its tradition and refusing to hand it over for testing is behaving exactly as custodians of sacred objects generally behave.