The Adi Granth Is Installed in Amritsar

On 1 September 1604, the Adi Granth was formally installed inside the central Sikh sanctuary in Amritsar, an event that marked a defining moment in the institutionalization of the Sikh faith. The fifth guru, Guru Arjan, had completed the compilation of this authoritative volume shortly before. To oversee the recitation and care of the text within the shrine, Guru Arjan appointed the respected elder Baba Buddha as its first granthi, or official reader. The scripture was placed upon a raised platform beneath an attendant canopy, establishing ceremonial protocols that signaled its paramount sanctity to the community.

The initiative to compile the Adi Granth emerged from Guru Arjan's concern over competing and unauthorized collections of devotional verse circulating across northern India. His elder brother, Prithi Chand, who claimed leadership over the community, had begun distributing hymns attributed to earlier gurus alongside his own compositions. Viewing such variants as spurious, Guru Arjan set out to establish a definitive anthology. He dispatched associates throughout the subcontinent to gather legitimate verses, negotiated with custodians of older family manuscripts to acquire early records of the teachings, and employed Bhai Gurdas as his primary scribe to record and organize the canonical selection.