Authenticity of Kartarpuri Bir - Global Sikh Studies

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Pritam Singh when faced with the actual Banno Bir could not
fail to realise that it was a Granth written in 1699. But, he,
instead of accepting the natural inference, as had been done
by Mahan Singh who concluded that the Banno story was
unreliable and that the date of the Banno Bir, in view of the
absence of the mention of the Nishan of the 5th Guru in the
Tatkara, was really 1,699, and that the custodians of the Bir
who could go to the length of spinning a yarn, and altering the
date of completion of the Bir could hardly be depended upon
to supply any credible information, went to the extreme of
raising the illusion of another Banno Bir of which the Kanpur
Banno Bir is a copy. The suggestion of Pritam Singh is patently
impossible. There is no basis whatsoever for the story of the
loss of Banno Bir. And in the circumstances of the case it
appears a suggestive wrong statement to tend to convert the,
story of the loss of the cover of the Bir into the loss of the Bir
itself. If the suggestion of Pritam Singh that the real Banno Bir
was lost and the Banno family has concealed that fact, were
assumed for the sake of argument, then the present Bir would
be a copy of some other Granth and not the so called original
Banno Bir since the same was lost and could not be available
for being copied out. Another allied question would be whether
it is a true copy or a false copy. If it is a true copy the original
too was produced in 1699; and if it is a false copy who
prevented the copyist from writing the date of production as
1661 instead of 1699, and why did the copyist allow the
mention of the Nishan of the 6th Guru to be in the Tatkara
when his purpose would have been served far better by a
reference to it as the Nishan of the 5th Guru, especially when
he had extraneously introduced it by pasting the Nishans. Pritam
Singh’s suggestion is, thus, apart from having no factual basis,
very irrational and self-Contradictory.
However, in line with his suggestion of another Banno
Bir. Pritam Singh has raised another phantom as well.