Chandigarh, 12 September 2026 (Yes Punjab News)
On the four hundred and twenty-second anniversary of the first Parkash of the Adi Granth at Sri Harmandir Sahib, the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee has been requested to open a respectful dialogue with the Sodhi family of Kartarpur for the transfer of the Kartarpuri Bir — the original Adi Granth of 1604 — to the custody of the Panth, and meanwhile to arrange a complete, high-resolution digital scan of every folio, a step requiring no transfer of possession at all. The request has been made by KBS Sidhu, retired IAS officer and former Special Chief Secretary, Government of Punjab, in a submission to the SGPC President, Advocate Harjinder Singh Dhami, with a copy to the Secretariat of Sri Akal Takht Sahib.
KBS Sidhu has made the submission in his capacity, he says, as a humble Sikh and not as a scholar, and has timed it to today’s Pehla Parkash Purab, which falls on Bhadon Sudi 1 — the day in Samvat 1661 when Guru Arjan Dev Ji Maharaj had the newly compiled Adi Granth carried into Sri Harmandir Sahib at Amritsar and opened before the sangat.
The argument turns on what else happened at Sri Harmandir Sahib that day. Having installed the Granth, Guru Arjan Dev Ji conferred the office of first Granthi upon Baba Buddha Ji, who was not of the Guru’s household and who received the seva because he had earned it. “He appointed; he did not bequeath,” KBS Sidhu says. The Gurus set aside hereditary succession repeatedly, to establish that spiritual authority does not descend through the blood; and yet the original Granth itself ended up in the one category they took the greatest trouble to abolish. It became an heirloom.
The manuscript is held by the descendants of Dhir Mal at Gurdwara Thum Sahib, Kartarpur, and is shown for darshan once a year, at Baisakhi. Two concerns arise, which KBS Sidhu says call for different answers: access, and conservation. A paper manuscript in its fifth century needs controlled humidity and light, arrested acidification and periodic survey by trained conservators — a regime no household can supply from its own resources. Nobody outside the family, he notes, knows what regime is in place.
The present arrangement, he notes, is neither immemorial nor unbroken. Maharaja Ranjit Singh had the Bir brought to Lahore as a treasure of the Sikh state; after the annexation of 1849 it passed to the British; and a colonial court, in a civil suit, restored it to Dhir Mal’s descendants. An arrangement produced by litigation, he argues, can be revisited by negotiation.
On the route, KBS Sidhu has been emphatic that compulsion is the wrong instrument. Legal avenues exist — the law on antiquities and art treasures, the Punjab law on historical monuments, a bespoke State statute — but he treats them as a reserve position he hopes is never reached, since a manuscript retrieved over the family’s objection “would arrive at Amritsar carrying a bitterness that no quantity of ceremony would wash off.” The Punjab Government’s role, he says, is not to acquire but to convene. Any transfer should carry formal honour and compensation to the Sodhi family, whose custodianship preserved the manuscript when much else was lost.
KBS Sidhu has taken care to separate the custody question from the Guruship. The living Guru is the Damdama recension, into which Guru Gobind Singh Ji incorporated the Salok Mahala 9 in 1706 and upon which he conferred the Guruship at Nanded in 1708. The Kartarpuri Bir, he says, is not the Guru but the Guru’s first body — which is why its custody may be discussed as a question of heritage and conservation, with no anxiety about the Guruship.
On the scholarly dispute over the Bir’s authenticity, KBS Sidhu declines to take a side, noting only that doubt propagates indefinitely around a manuscript seen once a year at a distance — and that the scan the sceptics demand and the step he requests are one and the same.
The full paper has been published in The KBS Chronicle.
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