Bhai Banno Jiਭਾਈ ਬੰਨੋ ਜੀ

Bhai Banno Ji (1558 to 1645) was a devoted Sikh of Guru Arjan Dev Ji, the fifth Guru, best remembered for the copy of the Adi Granth that bears his name, the Banno Bir. Born in the village of Mangat in Gujrat district, he served during the building of the Harimandar at Amritsar, and in 1604 the Guru trusted him to carry the newly compiled scripture to Lahore for binding. On the journey he prepared his own copy, which the Guru returned to him, and he spent the rest of his life preaching in the northwestern Punjab.

Who was Bhai Banno Ji?

Bhai Banno was born on 30 April 1558, on Baisakh sudi 13 in the year 1615 Bikrami, the son of Bhai Bishan Dev of Mangat, a village then called Khara, in Phalia tehsil of Gujrat district, in what is now Pakistan. He grew up with a deeply religious nature, and when he heard that the pond of Ramsar was being built at Amritsar and that Guru Arjan Dev Ji was compiling the holy scripture, he left his home and came to Amritsar, where he stayed for four years. He became a Sikh and gave diligent service during the construction of the Harimandar, and Guru Arjan is said to have called him his dearest Sikh. At the first feast held in the new Harimandar, the Guru honoured him by placing the first platter before him.

How did Bhai Banno Ji serve Guru Arjan Dev Ji?

By 1604 Guru Arjan had finished compiling the Adi Granth, with Bhai Gurdas Ji as his scribe, writing the hymns on loose leaves at Ramsar. The volume needed binding, and the binding work could not be done at Amritsar, so the Guru deputed Bhai Banno to carry it to Lahore. Bhai Banno asked the Guru's permission to take the volume through his own village of Mangat on the way, and the Guru agreed, on the condition that he spend only one night there. What happened on that journey is the heart of his story. On the way to Mangat and back to Lahore, Bhai Banno had his own copy of the scripture prepared, employing copyists and dividing the leaves among them, and halting a short distance each day so that the work could go on. He got both volumes bound at Lahore and brought them back to the Guru. The Guru installed the original, the Adi Bir, in the Harimandar, and returned the copy to Bhai Banno. That copy came to be known as the Bhai Banno Vali Bir, or the Khare Vali Bir, because Bhai Banno installed it in his own house at Khara-Mangat.

What is the Banno Bir?

The Banno Bir is a recension, a copy, of the Adi Granth as compiled by Guru Arjan in 1604. Many of the early Sikh manuscripts that still survive, including some kept at the India Office Library and the British Museum, are of the Banno recension, and a manuscript of it dated 1644 was found at Kanpur. The Banno Bir matters to scholars because it is one of the oldest witnesses to the text of the Adi Granth, and because it differs from the canonical copy in ways that have been argued over for a century.

Why is the Banno Bir different from the Adi Granth?

Bhai Banno's copy was not an exact copy. It contained extra works that were not in the canonical edition Guru Arjan finalised in 1604, including compositions of the Bhakti saints Mirabai and Surdas, sectarian Mina compositions, and a work called Hakikat Rah Mukam Raje Shivanabh Ki, appended at the end. According to Sikh tradition, Guru Arjan crossed out these additions and declared the copy unauthentic, which is why the tenth Guru, Guru Gobind Singh Ji, later had the Damdami recension prepared with Bhai Mani Singh Ji as scribe, to settle the text. The differences are also the reason scholars debate which manuscript, the Kartarpur Bir or the Banno Bir, stands closer to the original Adi Granth. One famous point of debate is a hymn in Raag Ramkali: in the Kartarpur manuscript two folios near page 703 are blank and only the opening lines of the hymn appear, while the Banno manuscript found at Kanpur has the complete hymn and no blank pages.

What do scholars say about the Banno story?

The traditional story has been questioned. Dr Sahib Singh, in his book Adi Bir Bare, argued that the accounts are unreliable and self-contradictory: it would have been impossible to copy so large a volume in a few days, the Banno Bir is written in one hand or at most two or three rather than by twelve copyists, and the dates do not fit, since Bhai Gurdas Ji finished writing the text on Bhadon Wadi Ekam in 1661 Bikrami and the completed volume was installed in the Harimandar on Bhadon Sudi Ekam of the same year, leaving no months for the long journey the stories describe. W. H. McLeod offered three possibilities and withheld judgement: that Guru Arjan deliberately left the blank folios to complete later and could not because he was arrested; that the pages existed and were removed from the Kartarpur manuscript during the Singh Sabha movement; or that the complete hymn in the Banno Bir is an interpolation. Pashaura Singh, examining the manuscripts, supported the third view, noting the smaller hand and different writing implement of the added lines. This entry tells the traditional story as Sikh tradition remembers it, and records the scholarly doubt here so readers can weigh it.

How is Bhai Banno Ji remembered today?

Bhai Banno continued to preach the tenets of Sikhism in the northwestern Punjab until his death in January 1645, in the month of Magh 1701 Bikrami. A gurdwara in his memory stands at Mangat, in Mandi Bahauddin district of Punjab, Pakistan, built by Maharaja Ranjit Singh, and havelis for his descendants were built in the settlement, with a jagir bestowed on the family. His name lives on wherever the history of the Sikh scripture is told: without him there would be no Banno Bir, and without the Banno Bir, scholars would have one less witness to the text as it stood in the first years of the seventeenth century.