Sarbloh Granth

The Sarbloh Granth, the volume of all-iron, is a further text attributed by the Nihang and Damdami traditions to Guru Gobind Singh Ji and not accepted as his by mainstream Sikh scholarship or by the SGPC.

It is a long narrative work in Braj on a war between gods and demons, with a substantial section on the qualities of the Khalsa which is where the well-known formulation about the Khalsa as the Guru's own form appears.

It is installed and read in some Nihang deras alongside the Guru Granth Sahib Ji, which the mainstream position does not permit.

Its manuscript history is thin and its authorship has not been established.

It is included here because a project about Punjab that only reports the settled mainstream position is not reporting Punjab. The Nihang dals are three hundred years old and this is their text.

The Nihang deras treat it as a Guru's composition and read it as scripture. The mainstream Sikh institutions do not, and there has been no formal adjudication of the question.

Its language and its subject place it in the same literary world as the Braj works of the Anandpur and Paonta period, which is the strongest argument its supporters make.

There is no critical edition. The printed versions in circulation derive from a small number of manuscripts held in dera custody and have never been collated.

What we don't know

  • Authorship and date, neither established.

Where to check this

Named but not linked. These are real, findable documents. This project has not consulted them for this page.

  • Sarbloh Granth, printed editions.
  • Scholarly and institutional statements on its status.

This page has not yet been read through by the editor. Treat it with more caution than the rest.

How this page was written. The text is compiled from the standard published histories and reference works, not from a document held in hand. Nobody from this project has visited the place or read the archive. The list above is where a reader can go to check it, not a record of what was consulted line by line. Dates and figures are the received account. If you hold something better, write in and it will be corrected.

This is one of 67 accounts in The Khalsa Raj, the chapter of this site covering the eighteenth century, from Banda Singh Bahadur Ji to the misls.