ਮਿਹਰਬਾਨ ਜਨਮਸਾਖੀਮਿਹਰਬਾਨ ਜਨਮਸਾਖੀ

The Miharban Janamsakhi is one of the four janamsakhi traditions that tell the life of ਗੁਰੂ ਨਾਨਕ ਦੇਵ ਜੀ, and it is the most unusual of them. Instead of retelling stories, it pauses after each episode to explain the hymn of Guru Nanak that belongs to it, turning a life story into a long conversation about what the hymns mean.

What is the Miharban Janamsakhi?

A janamsakhi is a birth story, a life of Guru Nanak Dev Ji told in episodes called sakhis. The stories began as oral tradition among the Guru's family and followers, and they were first written down in the early seventeenth century. Four traditions have survived into the modern age: the ਬਲਾ, the Miharban, the Adi and the Puratan. The Miharban Janamsakhi takes its name from Sodhi Miharban, and it is also called the gosht of Miharban, because a gosht is a discourse, a conversation in which a teaching is drawn out question by question. The work follows the familiar shape of the janamsakhi: the Guru's birth and childhood, his travels across India and beyond, and his settled years at Kartarpur. What sets it apart is what happens between the stories. After each sakhi, the text turns to a hymn of Guru Nanak and explains it, line by line, in the form of a dialogue. The life and the teaching are never separated.

Who was Sodhi Miharban?

Sodhi Miharban, whose full name was Manohar Das Miharban, was born in 1581 and died in 1640. He was the son of Prithi Chand and the grandson of Guru Ram Das Ji, which made him the nephew of Guru Arjan Dev Ji. His father Prithi Chand was the eldest son of Guru Ram Das Ji, and when the Guruship passed to his younger brother Guru Arjan Dev Ji, Prithi Chand set himself up as a rival claimant. His followers came to be known as the Minas, a name their opponents used for them. Miharban was educated under the care of Guru Arjan Dev Ji himself, and he grew into a gifted writer and a musician of the Gurus' verses, a kirtania in his own right. When his father died in 1619, Miharban took over the leadership of his community and guided it until his own death in 1640. The community declined after him and is now extinct, but the book that carries his name outlived it.

The six pothis: what survives and what is lost

According to the colophon of the surviving manuscript, the complete Miharban Janamsakhi ran to six volumes, called pothis. The first three have survived: Pothi Sachkhand, Pothi Hariji and Pothi Chaturbhuj. The last three are lost, and only their names are known: Keso Rai Pothi, Abhai Pad Pothi and Prem Pad Pothi. The only part of the second half of the work that still exists is its account of the death of Guru Nanak, which was later copied into a recension of the Bala Janamsakhi tradition.

The surviving volumes open with three sakhis about Raja Janak, the wise king who is told by God to return to the world and spread the Name. The fourth sakhi gives the birth of Guru Nanak: his father was Mehta Kalu, a Bedi, and his mother was ਮਾਤਾ ਤ੍ਰਿਪਤਾ ਜੀ. The account then follows the Guru to Mount Sumeru, where he meets the nine Siddhas, Gorakhnath, Mechhendranath, Isarnath, Charapatnath, Barangnath, Ghoracholi, Balgundai, Bharathari and Gopichand, and talks with them at length. When the Siddhas ask what is happening in the dark age of Kaliyug, the Guru answers with three short verses: that truth is scarce and falsehood rules, that the age is a knife and kings are butchers, and that men give as charity money they gained by sin.

What makes the Miharban Janamsakhi different?

The Miharban Janamsakhi is, in the words of the scholar Kirpal Singh, perhaps the first attempt to explain the hymns of Guru Nanak in dialogue form. Other janamsakhis use the hymns to illustrate the stories. Miharban reverses the order: the story opens the door, and the hymn is the teaching that is then unfolded. The work is also the first janamsakhi to give a realistic and detailed account of the Guru's travels, his udasis. Where other traditions send the Guru out in four neat journeys, north, south, east and west, Miharban suggests that he went south from Jagannath Puri on his way back from the eastern tour, which Kirpal Singh calls the more likely route, since a traveller bound for the south would not first return to Punjab. The text says the Guru spent five years in the south, then came north to Mathura on the bank of the Jamuna and visited the temple of Keshav. Its description of Ujjain, of the cave of Bharthari and the shrine of Gorakh Nath, is precise enough to match the place as it stands.

The work is rich in meetings with Muslim divines. It records a discussion with Mian Daud, the Pir of Shergarh, and a long discourse with Sayyad Abdul Qadir Gilani of Lahore, both of them men who lived in Guru Nanak's own time. It also carries an anecdote found nowhere else: how Bhai Lehna, who later became Guru Angad Dev Ji, gathered stanzas of Guru Nanak into the Japu, recited it to the Guru, and had it confirmed by him. And it is the only janamsakhi to give full details of the Guru's settled years at Kartarpur, including the verses he composed there and the long companionship of Bhai Lehna, who travelled with him to Achal near Batala and to other places.

The lost manuscript and its rediscovery

For centuries the Miharban Janamsakhi was known only by reputation, and the reputation was poor. The prologue to the Gyan Ratnavali, the janamsakhi attributed to ਭਾਈ ਮਨੀ ਸਿੰਘ ਜੀ, declared that the Minas had corrupted the true record of Guru Nanak's life, and the Miharban text was branded spurious and heretical. Until well into the twentieth century, no copy of it had come to light. Then in 1940 a manuscript was found at Damdama Sahib and acquired by Khalsa College, Amritsar. On examination it turned out to contain only the first half of the work, the first three pothis. In 1961 the college acquired a second, much smaller manuscript, which supplied the text of folios missing from the first. It offered nothing from the three lost volumes. The copies held at Khalsa College are dated 1763 to 1769. Kirpal Singh edited the surviving text and published it in Amritsar in 1962 as Janam Sakhi Sri Guru Nanak Dev Ji. Only two manuscripts could be traced by then, and the original could not be found. Like other janamsakhis, the text contains later additions, so Kirpal Singh called his edition the Janamsakhi by Miharban rather than the Janamsakhi of Miharban.

When the work was written is still debated. Tradition holds that it came before the first Var of ਭਾਈ ਗੁਰਦਾਸ ਜੀ।, since the Gyan Ratnavali says the gosht of Miharban already existed when that Var was composed. On that reading it belongs to the early seventeenth century, close to the lifetime of Miharban himself. The scholar W. H. McLeod argued the other way, that the surviving collection dates later than the year 1828 given in one manuscript, perhaps to the late nineteenth century. The honest answer is that the tradition is old, the surviving copies are much later, and the text as we have it was shaped by many hands over a long time.

Why does the Miharban Janamsakhi still matter?

The rediscovery changed the judgement on the work. Scholars who read the surviving volumes concluded that it can scarcely be called heretical: objections can be raised at a few points of doctrine, but the same can be said of other early texts, and the teaching it carries is the teaching of Guru Nanak. Tradition also says that the Miharban Janamsakhi provoked an answer. ਭਾਈ ਗੁਰਦਾਸ ਜੀ।'s first Var and the Gyan Ratnavali of Bhai Mani Singh Ji are both said to have been written to correct the record it gave, which makes it, in a sense, the text that set the whole janamsakhi tradition in motion. For readers today it offers two things no other janamsakhi offers: the earliest sustained commentary on Guru Nanak's hymns, and the most geographically careful account of his travels, with details of Kartarpur found nowhere else. It survives in Kirpal Singh's 1962 edition and in the Janamsakhi Parampara of 1969, where the Sachkhand and Hariji pothis appear alongside the other great traditions.