ADI GRANTH. — “The fundamental book,” also simply called Granth, “Book” (par excellence, in the religious sense: Bible), or Granth Sahib, “The fundamental holy book”: a collection of hymns and discourses composed and publicly recited by Nānak (1469–1538), the founder of the religion of the Sikhs (v.) or “disciples,” a religious community of northern India, which very soon transformed itself into a politico-military Church, and by three other masters (guru) who followed him.
Another Granth, entitled “The Granth of the tenth guru,” was compiled by the Sikhs in 1734. In addition to prayers by Govind Singh (1675–1708), the tenth and last guru (to whom the true organization of the Sikhs into the aforementioned politico-military theocracy is owed, though with a distinctly democratic character), this second Granth, which nevertheless does not enjoy the same authority as the first, also contains, among other things, hymns by the ninth guru, Teg Baltadur.
The Ā constitutes the Bible of the Sikhs, whose last master, or guru, Govind Singh considered himself to be (indeed, in the second Granth he alludes to his divine mission). After him, the sole guru, or Master, was to be considered the Granth Sahib, the true representative of God on earth, the incarnation of the gurus. This sacred book is still preserved today in the principal copy, used by those responsible for its daily reading (grāntis), beneath the dome of the “Golden Temple” (Har Mandar), the sanctuary of the Sikhs, erected in 1762 at Amritasar, the holy city of the Sikhs, on the foundations of a destroyed Muslim sanctuary.
The Ā, whose language is the Brajbhākhā dialect (a variety of western hindi) with considerable influence from pañjabi and with Prakrit, Persian, mārāthi, and gujarāti admixtures (the “Granth of the tenth guru,” on the other hand, is in ancient hindi), contains, like the second one, the fundamental principles of Sikh doctrine. These are: belief in the oneness of God, with the consequent rejection of all idolatry; the equality of all human beings before God, entailing the abolition of the castes; the prohibition of widows’ sacrifice on their husbands’ funeral pyres; and the obligation to abstain from wine and every other alcoholic beverage, as well as from smoking. The consumption of meat, on the other hand, is permitted, and this has made the Sikhs a people far stronger than their other Indian brethren.
The latest census (1941) put the number of adherents of Sikhism at 4,335,771.