We shall now notice works called Janamsakhis, which profess to be biographies of Guru Nanak. These compositions were obviously written at very different epochs after the demise of the Guru, and give very different and contradictory details of his life. In all of them miraculous acts and supernatural conversations are recorded. The question of these Janamsakhis is of such supreme importance, as showing the extent to which pious fiction can proceed in fabricating details of the lives of religious teachers,[1] that we must devote some space to a consideration of them.
One of the most popular Janamsakhis is a large volume of 588 folio pages lithographed at Lahore. It is plentifully embellished with woodcuts, and its editor states that in its compilation he has expended vast pains, having collated books which he had brought from great distances at vast trouble and expense. He boasts that no one can produce such a book. If any one dare reprint it without his permission, he shall be sued and mulcted in damages in a court of justice. The work is apparently based on Bhai Santokh Singh's Nanak Parkash.
To gain credence for a biography it is of course necessary to have a narrator, and to be assured that the narrator is no fictitious person. In the present, and indeed in all the popular Janamsakhis, which no doubt have been compiled by altering some one original volume, a person called Bhai Bala is made the narrator. He is represented as having been three years younger than Guru Nanak, and as having accompanied him in the capacity of faithful and confidential
- ↑ Compare the manner in which Janamsakhis or gospels were multiplied in the early Christian Church. 'Vast numbers of spurious writings bearing the names of apostles and their followers, and claiming more or less direct apostolic authority, were in circulation in the early Church—Gospels according to Peter, to Thomas, to James, to Judas, according to the Apostles, or according to the Twelve, to Barnabas, to Matthias, to Nicodemus, &c.; and ecclesiastical writers bear abundant testimony to the early and rapid growth of apocryphal literature.' Supernatural Religion, vol. i, p. 292. It may be incidentally mentioned that it was the Gospel according to Barnabas which Muhammad used in the composition of the Quran.
