INSIDE THE GURU'S GATE - Anpere

hinoor Press in Lahore. 383 Three decades later at least a dozen additional reprints of
the Sikh scripture had come into existence and the number of printing presses in the
Punjab exceeded to more than a hundred. 384 With the turn of the century the city of
Amritsar developed into a centre for publications of sacred Sikh literature. Established
in 1875, the private publishing house of Bhai Chattar Singh Jivan Singh grew into
a major producer of the scripture, initially reproducing handwritten manuscripts and
later shifted to the lithographic process for production of religious literature to be
sold in the bazaar outside of Harimandir Sahib. 385
Although the autonomous Sikh organization Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak
Committee (SGPC) was formed in 1925 to provide a self-reliant system for managment
of Sikh shrines and gurdwaras in the state of Punjab, the organization came to branch
out in theological and political directions and perceive itself as a democratically based
religious “government” of the broader Sikh community with jurisdiction far beyond
the state borders. Three years after its inception the SGPC adopted a resolution to
produce an authoritative printed version of the Guru Granth Sahib to make the scripture
easily accessible to common people ‒ a decision which in the decades to follow
resulted in four different printed versions of the Sikh scripture. 386 To control the production
of Guru Granth Sahib the SGPC established its own printing press in Amritsar
‒ the Golden Offset Press ‒ in the year of 1949. The press was situated in the basement
of the five-storied building of Gurdwara Ramsar, a location which according to
the Sikh tradition is laden with symbolic meanings: the gurdwara is believed to mark
the exact spot where the fifth Guru Arjan and his scribe Bhai Gurdas pitched a camp
in the peaceful forest nearby Harimandir Sahib and started to work on the compilation
of the Sikh scripture. The place of manufacturing modern scriptures in print thus
indexes the site at which the important manuscript – the Kartarpur pothi ‒ came into
being four hundred years back. The first printed version of the scripture in one single
volume, intended for ceremonial use, was issued in 1952.
Scholars with various degrees of nostalgia for ancient oral-aural transmission of
texts have suggested that the new technique of moving words into the visual spaces
of fixed printed texts gave rise to major cultural changes and political control of the
written word. Ong (1988) among others has argued that the manuscript culture preceding
the printed word was mainly oral in character since handwritten manuscripts
383
Mann 2001: 125.
384
Oberoi 1995: 275. For details of the succeeding printed versions of Guru Granth Sahib, see
Pashaura Singh 2000: 232 ff.
385
Today Chattar Singh Jivan Singh asserts that they were the first to publish a printed version of
Guru Granth Sahib in which words were separated from each other, i.e., in padchhed format. See
the publisher’s web site on the internet: www.csjs.com. Other Amritsar-based publishers are
Jawahar Singh Kirpal Singh and The Singh Brothers, the latter of which started in the 1940s and has
specialized in religious literature in Punjabi and English. See the publisher’s web site at:
www.singhbrothers.com.
386
For the technical details of these editions and the controversies they instigated in the Sikh
community, see Mann 2001: 125 ff.
206
Published on www.anpere.net in May 2008