The Ardas is the standing prayer said at the end of every Sikh service, at the start of every undertaking, at births, marriages, deaths and departures. It is not scripture. It is the one Sikh text that has been added to.
Its first section is fixed, from Chandi di Var, invoking the ten Gurus. The middle section is a list of what has been endured: those who were sawn on the wheel, scalped, cut apart at the joints, boiled, those who gave their heads but not their faith, the men and women who went into the wells, those who lost children in front of them.
That middle section is a memorial roll delivered daily by ordinary people in villages who could not name a single one of the individuals in it. It keeps the eighteenth century present in a way no monument does.
The closing lines ask for the welfare of all, sarbat da bhala, which is asked for everybody and not for Sikhs.
Lines have been added at different periods. The reference to the shrines from which the Panth has been separated dates from after 1947, and refers to Nankana Sahib and the others left in Pakistan.
It is said standing, with hands joined, by everybody present. One person speaks it and the rest answer at the fixed points. The congregation is not listening to it, it is saying it, and that is the difference between this and a sermon.
Between the fixed opening and the fixed close there is a space where the particular request goes: a house being moved into, an examination, a journey, a shop opening, somebody ill. The prayer is a frame with the day's business set into the middle of it.
The additions are datable, which is unusual for anything of this kind. The lines about the shrines the Panth was parted from are after 1947. Which recent events may be named in it, and by whom, has itself been argued over, because adding a line is adding to the community's account of itself.
Sikh Rehat Maryada, 1945, on the text of the Ardas.