Authenticity of Kartarpuri Bir - Global Sikh Studies

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5. This Bir was written in Sarnat 1792 (1735 A.D.)
It contains no additional Bani and there is a note besides the
two lines of Ramkali Mahla 5 Sabad “Ranjhujnara gao Sakhi”.
That “this Sabad is not in the Adi-Granth, only two verses are
authentic, the rest is removed”. 71
VI
In his paper read at Berkley in 1976, Mcleod’s final
observation was: “The tradition may well be accurate and no
sensible person would dispute it unless he had good reason for
doing so. To date no good reason has been advanced and the
received text remains in-violate”. 72 All the same he cannot help
clouding the issue by raising two considerations or doubts. “One
is the obsecurity which envelops a significant period of the
text’s actual history. The other is the presence within the
manuscript of numerous deletions.” 73 On the issue of deletions
we have already found that these large number of deletions
are a good proof of its originality especially when in no other
Bir there are deletions in such a large number and when at
most of those places Bani has been re-written by the same
scribe showing thereby that the writing rubbed of was not
correct or approved by the Guru. Mcleod’s method both in his
lecture at Cambridge and his paper at Berkley has been, like
the way of a biased journalist, first to impress on the reader
the fact about the existence of deletions and thereby create a
broad suspicion against the genuineness of the Bir and then to
narrate the story of the presence of the puberty hymn in the
Banno Bir and its absence in the Kartarpuri Bir, knowing full
well that there is no deletion in the case either of the puberty
hymn or the hymn of Bhagat Surdas. Actually, it is now
established that not only the Banno Bir was prepared in Samat
1699, but the puberty hymn itself was clearly a later
interpolation