The Bhagats of the Guru Granth Sahib: Sikh Self-Definition and the Bhagat Bani.

• Author: Shapiro, Michael C.
• Position: Book review

The Bhagats of the Guru Granth Sahib: Sikh Self-Definition and the Bhagat Bani. By PASHAURA SINGH. New Delhi: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2003. Pp. xviii + 210. $27.50.

In 2000 Pashavra Singh, in an important work of scholarship, The Guru Grant Sahib: Canon, Meaning and Authority (New Delhi: Oxford University Press), provided an overview of many of the most central issues involved in the text criticism of the most sacred work of Sikh scripture, the Adi Granth (known to pious members of the Sikh community as the Adi Sri Guru Granth Sahib). In this work Singh took up such matters as the sources and redaction of the text by Guru Arjan in 1604, the manuscript history of various recensions of the text, the organization of the text in terms of musical ragas, scriptural adaptation in the text, broad processes of canon formation with regard to the text, the hermeneutics of the text both within and outside of Sikh tradition, processes by which religious authority has been and continues to be vested in the text, and the overall place of scripture within Sikh tradition. Singh also dealt with an issue, the status of the so-called bhagat bani within the AG, to which he has returned at much greater length in the book under review here. The new book owes its genesis to Singh's 1987 University of Alberta M.A. thesis, which predates the 2000 volume. Singh has, however, thoroughly revised and expanded the earlier work, taking into consideration a substantial body of scholarship on Sikh scripture written during the past two decades.

As is generally known, the Adi Granth (AG) in its canonic form, redacted by the fifth Sikh guru, Arjan, in 1604, contains verses, arranged by musical raga, composed by the first five of the Sikh Gurus, namely Nanak, Amgad, Amar Das, Ram Das, and Arjan. The text also includes a considerable body of poetry by earlier poet saints (called bhagats), believed to have been composed from the twelfth through sixteenth centuries, deemed worthy of inclusion by the redactor. Fifteen such poet-saints are included in the 1604 (or Kartarpur) manuscript of the AG, to wit Namdev, Ravidas, Jaidev, Trilocan, Beni, Ramanand, Sainu, Dhanna, Sadhna, Pipa, Sur, Bhikhan, Paramanand, Farid, and Kabir. Collectively the bhagat material comprises approximately eight percent of the total text of the 1604 version of the AG. The fifteen bhagats are highly diverse in their religious affiliations and geographical spread. Some (Farid, Bhikhan, Kabir) were Muslims and...