Janamsakhi literature: stories, manuscripts and illustrated interpretation

Begin with a family of narratives

Janamsakhis are narratives about Guru Nanak’s life rather than one uniformly transmitted book. Gurinder Singh Mann’s scholarly guide describes prose episodes arranged around selections of Nanak’s poetry. It distinguishes traditions now commonly labelled Bala, Puratan and Miharvan, while showing that titles used in printed editions do not always reproduce those of early manuscripts. A title alone therefore cannot identify the particular narrative sequence or physical copy being consulted.[1]

Mann also describes substantial disagreement over authorship, dating and historical use. His proposed method begins with evidence contemporary to a text and the circumstances in which that text was produced. A present-day shrine or a popular later edition does not by itself establish an episode in Nanak’s lifetime. This approach allows stories to be studied both for their accounts of the Guru and for the later communities that preserved and reshaped them.[1]

An illustrated witness

The Rijksmuseum’s library records Nikky-Guninder Kaur Singh’s Janamsakhi: Paintings of Guru Nanak in Early Sikh Art, published by Roli Books in 2023. Its description focuses on B 40, a manuscript held at the British Library, and identifies fifty-seven combinations of image and narrative. Alam Chand Raj’s illustrations take the account from Nanak’s schooling to his final moments. This provides a specific illustrated witness to pursue, rather than a generic image search.[2]

An attributed interpretation

The same record identifies the modern book as English-language scholarship, ISBN 9789392130809, with Singh’s explanations addressing questions from a twenty-first-century perspective. That commentary is a further layer alongside manuscript text and painting. Cite the modern author and publication when using her interpretation, and identify the underlying manuscript separately when it has actually been examined. The museum catalogue offers a route to the book and its subject; it does not make every manuscript page or the complete modern discussion available within the record.[2]