Authenticity of Kartarpuri Bir - Global Sikh Studies

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even in the Banno Bir of 1699. These being the facts, to relate
the question of deletion with the absence of puberty hymn in
the Kartarpuri Bir is evidently an attempt to mislead and
prejudice the lay reader into linking in his mind the ommission
of the puberty hymn with the event of deletion, thereby making
him to believe that though the so called awkward hymn was
present in the Banno Bir its absence in the Kartarpuri Bir has
been secuerd by the fishy method of deletion. The facts speak
out for themselves and are otherwise. We know that neither
are the deletions in the Kartarpuri Bir a fishy matter, nor was
the puberty hymn originally present even in the Banno Bir of
1699, nor was the Banna Bir prepared earlier than Samat 1699
to enable anyone to copy it (a Granth of 464 folios into a
Granth of 974 folios) during the time of the fifth Guru or
even 35 years later.
Both Mcleod and Loehlin have been lamenting their
frustration at not being able to serve academic interests because
they were not allowed access to the Kartarpuri Bir. 74 Mcleod
even went to the extent of recording that non availability of
Kartarpuri Bir to them suggests that there was something to
conceal therein. 75 But one wonders why the acute academic
keeness of these scholars never led them to see the Banno Bir
even though the same was all these years available for the
examination of any serious scholar. Had they cared to see they
would have found out that the year of its production was Samat
1699 and that it had practically been written by one scribe and
that the story of 12 scribes having copied it out on way to
Lahore was not tenable. Again we may ask how is it that these
scholars remained entirely ignorant of the work of Mahan Singh
who wrote in 1952 that the Banno Bir was written in Samat
1699 and the year of its production had been altered into an
earlier date, or the writings of G. B. Singh and Gurdit Singh all
of whom had recorded that the year of its production stood
tampered with, or the work of Sahib Singh that the Banno
story of the