Japji Sahib.
The composition that opens the scripture and opens the Sikh day. It begins with the Mool Mantar — one being, true name, creator, without fear, without hatred — and Sikhs are expected to have the whole thing by heart.
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The Guru Granth Sahib.
The scripture that is the Guru: the line of ten teachers closed into a book, seated forever.
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The Dasam Granth.
The second book, attributed to Guru Gobind Singh, and the sharpest textual argument in the tradition. It is never installed as Guru in a mainstream gurdwara, yet three of its banis are recited every morning and are stirred into the amrit itself.
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Sukhmani Sahib.
Guru Arjan's long poem on the settled mind, and the bani a Punjabi family reaches for when someone is ill or has died. Recitation groups of women reading it together are one of the most common forms of Sikh domestic religion.
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Asa ki Var.
The morning kirtan, and the tradition's most direct social argument: caste, ritual purity, the Brahmin's thread and the ascetic's ash are taken apart in sequence. It is sung in a gurdwara at dawn, which means the critique is repeated daily rather than filed away.
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Anand Sahib.
Guru Amar Das wrote it in his seventies and it is what a Sikh ceremony ends with — the wedding, the funeral, the naming, the completion of a reading. The Sikh marriage rite is named after it: Anand Karaj, the act of bliss.
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The Varan of Bhai Gurdas.
Written by the man who physically scribed the Adi Granth for Guru Arjan, and called by the Gurus themselves the key to it. It is the only text outside the scripture that may be sung from the stage of a gurdwara.
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The janamsakhis.
The birth-stories of Guru Nanak: the river, the Kaaba, the meeting with the Siddhas, the bread that bled. Sikh scholarship has known since the nineteenth century that these are devotional narrative rather than chronicle, and Punjabi households go on telling them regardless, which is roughly what they are for.
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The Zafarnama — the letter of victory.
Guru Gobind Singh wrote to Aurangzeb in Persian after losing his fort, his mother and all four sons, and addressed him as an oath-breaker rather than as a conqueror. It contains the couplet Sikhs cite whenever the use of force is argued: when all else has failed, it is lawful to take up the sword.
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The Sikh Rehat Maryada.
The code the Panth spent fourteen years drafting and approved in 1945 — the nearest thing Sikhs have to a constitution. It defines a Sikh, lists the Nitnem banis, sets out marriage and funeral rites, forbids idols, caste, veils and superstition, and names the four breaches that void the amrit vow.
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The rehatnamas.
The eighteenth-century codes written by men who claimed to have known Guru Gobind Singh, and the raw material every later faction quotes. They disagree with each other about meat, caste, tobacco and the standing of women — which is precisely why a modern committee had to sit down and write the Rehat Maryada.
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