INSIDE THE GURU'S GATE - Anpere

were hard to read and required that large textual portions were committed to memory.
As manuscripts often contained subjective utterances in the form of glosses and
comments in the margins they “were in dialogue with the world outside their own
borders”. 387 The effect of the print culture implied a transfer of subjective utterances
into lettered objects: “In this new world [print culture], the book was less like an
utterance, and more like a thing. Manuscript cultures had preserved a feeling for a
book as a kind of utterance, an occurrence in the course of conversation, rather than
as an object.” 388 Since the new printing technology came to fix written words within
demarcated visual spaces it gave texts a sense of “closure” and “physical completeness”.
389 From a purely typographical viewpoint, the printing technology made it
possible to control words and put them down on exact places on a page and in relation
to other words.
Handwritten copies of the various manuscript versions of the Sikh scripture often
contained similar scribal “dialogues” that were included before or after the actual
reproduction of gurbani compositions, but still within the corpus of the sacred folios.
390 It is quite possible that notes gradually diminished when the scripture was
authorized to the office of the Guru in the eighteenth century and was fully removed
when the Guru Granth Sahib appeared in print from the nineteenth century. 391 A
widely accepted viewpoint in Sikhism purports that the Sikh scripture was forever
sealed subsequent to the inclusion of Guru Tegh Bahadur’s composition in the 1680s
and Guru Gobind Singh’s canonization of the text at Damdama Sahib in 1705 ‒
1706. 392 Although the exact reasons for the Sikh appreciation of the modern printing
technology were probably multiple, the new technique made it possible for Sikh
authorities to more forcefully achieve one homogenized and authoritative version of
387
Ong 2000(1982): 130.
388
Ong 2000(1982): 123.
389
Ong 2000(1982): 130.
390
Typically the scribe would not mention his own name in the folio, probably as a sign of reverence
to the text and the divinely inspired writing process, but instead included the death dates
of the Gurus, time and date for the completion of the recording, the ink formula (shahi vidi), and
sometimes apologies for unintentional flaws. The “ink formula” would give the exact recipe for
making the ink. For instance, in an undated handwritten manuscript preserved in Nichibagh
Gurdwara at Varanasi (probably from the nineteenth century) the scribe writes that the ink was
made of gum from the Acacia tree, 111 mg amethyst, 111 mg gold powder, and lampblack made
of mustard oil.
391
As Mann suggests, those manuscripts copied after the compilation of the scripture at Anandpur
in the 1680s did not contain the date on which the texts were copied. This, he argues, indicates
the exalted status the Sikh scripture had gained within the Sikh community in the Punjab;
it was considered inappropriate to enter scribal notes in a scripture which was attributed the
status of the Guru. In other geographical areas where the authority of the scripture was still
unknown, scribes would continue to incorporate notes and additional texts in the beginning or
the end of the main text according their own likings (Mann 2001: 123 ‒ 124).
392
Support for this traditional account is found in the early nineteenth century text Gurbilas
Chhevin Patshahi (see Pashuara Singh 2000: 222).
207
Published on www.anpere.net in May 2008