INSIDE THE GURU'S GATE - Anpere

Guru Granth Sahib, devoid of scribal elements, and simultaneously facilitate a largescale
production of standardized copies to make the scripture accessible to common
people and congregations at distant locations. 393 The new print culture offered modern
Sikhs effective means to protect the scriptural corpus by confining gurbani verses
to well-arranged printed spaces and control that scriptures intended for religious use
were duplicated in conformity with the manuscripts sanctioned and sealed by the
Sikh Gurus.
Unlike hesitant responses to print culture among other religious communities in
India, the Sikhs did not believe that the process of committing their Guru-scripture to
print would eliminate its religious status and efficacy. Quite on the contrary, they
welcomed the opportunity to once and for all set a final physical “completeness” of
Guru Granth Sahib and remove utterances of human editors, but without reducing
the text to merely a “thing”. The effect of print culture in Sikhism provides a challenging
case to theories which claim that access to printed texts and higher rates of
literacy developed at the expense of oral dimensions. Since it was possible to produce
Guru Granth Sahib at a reasonable cost and thereby make copies accessible to the
literate masses, the printing technology preconditioned both democratization and
increase of Sikh worship. Families with sufficient means and motivation could easily
obtain printed editions to establish domestic gurdwaras according to individual
choosing. Although Sikh worship was to be centred on a printed text, the Sikhs preserved
a feeling for the book as utterances of the Gurus ‒ gurbani ‒ which continue to
be orally transmitted through recitations and songs. Public Sikh discourses during the
twentieth century do therefore not question the raison d'être of having the sacred
words committed to print, but display a deep concern with the preservation of the
content and form of sanctioned manuscripts and the ritual handling of printed texts
during the processes of production and distribution.
STANDARDIZING CONTENT AND FORM
In the initial phase of SGPCs press history one crucial matter to decide upon was the
selection of manuscripts to be used for a standardized printed edition. In the manuscript
culture prior to the nineteenth century there had been several versions of the
scripture in existence which displayed differences in terms of form and content. Some
of the handwritten copies were also held apocryphal by the larger Sikh community. 394
393
Emphasizing the political effects of print technology in the nineteenth century colonial context,
Oberoi suggests that the print culture in the Punjab enabled a communication across different
geographical and social groups and initially promoted homogenization in modes of thinking.
Printed words became carriers of social relationships and sources of ideas, and endowed
authors with the power to circulate messages anonymously and without any direct public contact.
As Oberoi strongly argues, the print culture became a powerful weapon for a new group of
intellectuals who began to dominate and monopolize the representation of history, ideas, texts,
and symbols of Sikhism in order to mould a modern Sikh identity (Oberoi 1995: 272 ff).
394
The so-called Banno version of the Sikh scripture belongs to this category. This manuscript is
named after a disciple to Guru Arjan, Bhai Banno, who according to Sikh history made the first
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Published on www.anpere.net in May 2008