Eleventh & Eternal Guru Granth Sahib

Sep 1, 2004, 12.00am IST
Pranav Khullar.


A striking feature of the Adi Granth — popularly called the Guru Granth Sahib — is its distinctly lilting literary flavour, eloquently described as the "musicalisation of thought". Even as one pays homage to Guru Granth Sahib, on the 400th anniversary of its being established as the Holy Book and as the eternal Guru of the Sikh faith, one is struck by the rich literary underpinnings of this compilation and the systematic manner in which each part has been set to music.



Besides, Guru Arjan Dev, while enshrining the Guru Granth Sahib at the Har Mandir in 1604, was also encapsulating the religious, mystical and philosophical currents of almost four centuries.

The Adi Granth is unique in having compositions of sage-poets and mystics of different faiths, including those of Kabir, Baba Farid, Namdev, Jaidev, Dhanna Bhagat and Ravidas. Guru Gobind Singh, the tenth guru, later enshrined the Holy Book as the eleventh Guru, a living testament to the bani or sayings of the Gurus.

Meticulously compiled and arranged into 5,894 hymns, the Adi Granth is set equally meticulously to 31 ragas of the classical music tradition, a "powerful appeal to the heart as much as the mind", as writer Pearl Buck once pointed out. This setting to music forms the underlying basis of the classification of hymns into Ashtapadas or hymns of eight verses, Chhands or verses of six lines, Chaupadas or hymns of four verses. This intricate division of the Adi Granth according to ragas, the metre of the poem, the author of the poem and its ghar in which the raga is to be sung, has a fascinating raga-mala towards the end of the Holy Text, an index of musical measures.


The Adi Granth has another interesting feature, the Bhatt bani or hymns of the bards. In the latter half of the Adi Granth are incorporated hymns by eleven Bhatts, who were ballad singers composing martial and war poetry — Var or heroic ballads — in the vernacular of the times in a particular form called Swaiyya Chhand, verses of praise, where they would employ a narrative style to describe war, exhorting warriors to action. Genealogically tracing their lineage to the ancient Saraswat Brahmins, they were themselves called Saraswat or learned ones, who saw all the Gurus as personifying one Light — the basic tenet of the faith today — and articulated their poetry in praise of the spiritual grandeur of Guru Nanak and all the Gurus.
Its unique catholicity and prosody apart, the Guru Granth Sahib also engendered the Gurmukhi script, which Guru Angad Dev developed to reach out to people in their vernacular dia-lect, refining and shaping it by use of 10 vowels. The development of the script and language reflected the casteless and creedless socio-economic vision of society that the Sikh Gurus envisioned. This vision also incorporated gender equality, as both genders are free to read from the Guru Granth Sahib.


Guru Gobind Singh invested the title of the Guru to the Adi Granth at Nanded in 1708, after preparing a new edition and including some hymns of Guru Tegh Bahadur. He said, "... let him who wishes to speak to the Guru, read and reflect on what the Granth says..." The Adi Granth is a powerful rendering of the oneness of God, free of rituals and observances, but spelt out in hauntingly beautiful poetry and melodies; not an abstruse work of philosophy for the few, but something that endears itself to everyone with its musical appeal. In fact, the musical-emotive appeal of the Guru Granth Sahib is a potent spiritual tool to draw the faithful nearer to the cosmic Oneness of Godhead.