The Many Tongues of Gurbani: Sant Bhasha

A book that speaks in many voices

Open Sri Guru Granth Sahib Ji at almost any page and you are reading more than one language. A line may begin in plain Punjabi, lean on a Persian word for a king or for justice, then turn to a Sanskritic phrase, then settle back into everyday speech. This is not confusion or carelessness. It is a deliberate feature of the text, and learning to hear it is one of the great pleasures of reading Gurbani closely.

The umbrella name for this blended speech is ਸੰਤ ਭਾਸ਼ਾ (Sant Bhasha), the 'language of the saints'. It is important to be precise: Sant Bhasha is not a single, neatly bordered language with its own grammar book. It is better understood as a shared literary medium — a common pool of words and forms that wandering saints, poets, and teachers across north India could all use and be understood across regions (Shackle, An Introduction to the Sacred Language of the Sikhs).

Why a shared speech arose

The Bhakti and Sant poets travelled and addressed mixed audiences. A speech that drew on several languages at once could reach a Punjabi farmer, a Braj-speaking devotee, and a Persian-literate official without belonging narrowly to any one of them. Gurbani inherits and elevates this tradition. The Gurus and the Bhagats whose words are recorded in Sri Guru Granth Sahib Ji wrote in a medium that was, by design, larger than any one regional tongue (Singh and Fenech, The Oxford Handbook of Sikh Studies).

Why this matters for the reader

Prof. Sahib Singh's life work rests on a quiet but radical claim: Gurbani has consistent grammar, and that grammar can be learned (Singh, Gurbani Viakaran). If that is true even across a mix of languages, then reading well is not guesswork. It is a skill. The first step in that skill is simply to expect the mixture and to ask, of any difficult word, 'which language did this come from?'

Five families of speech

It helps to picture Gurbani's languages as a small family living under one roof. They share the roof — the Gurmukhi script and the saintly purpose — but each has its own character. Below are the main members you will meet.

1. Punjabi

The everyday spoken language of the Punjab. It is the home tongue of much of Gurbani, especially many compositions of Guru Nanak Dev Ji and Guru Arjan Dev Ji. When a line feels plain, direct, and close to ordinary speech, you are usually in Punjabi.

2. Braj (Braj Bhasha)

A western form of Hindi that became the great devotional language of the Bhakti poets. A very large amount of the poetry in Sri Guru Granth Sahib Ji uses Braj or a Braj-coloured speech. It is sweet, song-like, and tuned for devotion (Shackle, An Introduction to the Sacred Language of the Sikhs).

3. Persian and Arabic

Persian was the language of administration, courts, and Sufi devotion in the period; it carried Arabic loanwords with it. From this family come many of Gurbani's words for God as sovereign, for justice, for the court of the divine, and for the seeker on a path. The compositions and lines that draw heavily on this family are sometimes grouped as Gurbani's Persianised register.

4. Sahaskriti

ਸਹਸਕ੍ਰਿਤੀ (Sahaskriti) is a heavily Sanskritised, learned register. It uses classical vocabulary and a more formal weight. The Gurus sometimes use it precisely to engage a learned, scholarly idiom — and then, tellingly, restate the same truth in plain words so that no listener is left behind.

5. Regional and other forms

Beyond these, Gurbani touches Sindhi, Lehndi (western Punjabi), Marathi-flavoured speech of certain Bhagats, and other regional colours. These appear especially where a particular Bhagat's own tongue shows through. The presence of these voices is itself part of the message: many regions, one shared truth (Singh and Fenech, The Oxford Handbook of Sikh Studies).

Not an accident, but an argument

It is easy to treat the language-mix as a historical leftover — just how people happened to speak. But read closely, the mixture carries an argument of its own. By speaking in Punjabi, Braj, Persian, Sahaskriti, and regional tongues, Gurbani refuses to hand the divine to any single language, region, or learned class.

Three purposes worth holding together

1. To reach everyone. A farmer, a courtier, a wandering devotee, and a Sanskrit-trained scholar could each find a doorway in. The mix is hospitable; it leaves no listener outside (Singh and Fenech, The Oxford Handbook of Sikh Studies).

2. To honour and absorb traditions. Using the Persian of the Sufis, the Sanskritic register of the pandits, and the Braj of the Bhakts is a way of meeting each tradition on its own ground — and then re-centring the message on the One. The Bhagat Bani recorded in Sri Guru Granth Sahib Ji is part of this generous gathering of voices.

3. To break the monopoly of 'holy languages'. In a world where Sanskrit and Arabic were guarded as sacred and exclusive, writing the divine in everyday and mixed speech is itself a statement of equality. Truth, Gurbani implies, does not require a gatekeeper's language.

A teaching habit you can see

Watch how a learned, Sahaskriti-flavoured passage is often followed by a plain restatement. The hard register engages the scholar; the plain words include everyone else. Prof. Sahib Singh's grammatical reading helps us notice this rhythm rather than stumble over it, because once you know which register you are in, the 'difficult' line stops being a wall (Singh, Gurbani Viakaran).

One method for many languages

If Gurbani used five families of speech with no shared logic, reading it would be hopeless. Prof. Sahib Singh's great contribution was to show that there is a shared logic — a consistent grammar running through Gurbani — and to write it down so others could use it (Singh, Gurbani Viakaran). His ten-volume commentary, Sri Guru Granth Sahib Darpan, applies this grammar line by line (Singh, Sri Guru Granth Sahib Darpan).

The endings are instructions

The heart of the method is the ਲਗਾਂ ਮਾਤ੍ਰਾਂ — the small vowel-signs and marks. Sahib Singh argued they are not decoration; they tell you whether a word is singular or plural, subject or object, a noun or a verb. This matters across every register: whether a word came from Braj, Persian, or Sanskrit, once it sits in a Gurbani line its ending tells you its job in that line.

Why this rescues the reader from register-panic

A reader who does not know Persian can still parse a Persianised line if they read its grammar carefully, because the structure is doing visible work. The unfamiliar word may need a dictionary, but the shape of the sentence — who acts, who receives — is readable through the endings. Grammar is the bridge that lets one method carry you across all five language families.

A worked habit

Sahib Singh teaches a slow, patient discipline: read the line; notice each ending; ask what each ending is telling you; only then reach for the meaning of hard words. Register-awareness and grammar-awareness work together — register tells you where a word is from; grammar tells you what it is doing.

Many names, one reality

One of the most beautiful effects of the language-mix is that a single idea can arrive dressed in several tongues. The One Reality is named with words drawn from different traditions — some from the Sanskritic world, some from the Persian and Sufi world, some from plain Punjabi devotion. Far from confusing the reader, this widens the picture: each name lights up a different facet.

Why the Gurus do this

If God could be captured by one word in one language, that word might become a possession of one community. By naming the divine across languages, Gurbani teaches that the reality is larger than any single name and belongs to no one tribe. The same generosity appears with words for the self, for truth, and for the path (Singh and Fenech, The Oxford Handbook of Sikh Studies).

Reading without flattening

A common beginner's mistake is to translate every divine name into one English word and move on. A better practice is to ask why this word, from this language, here. A Persian-flavoured name may carry the colour of a sovereign and a court; a Sanskritic name may carry the colour of the absolute and the formless; a plain Punjabi word may carry intimacy and nearness. Holding these together is part of grasping the verse, and Sahib Singh's grammatical care keeps each word's role clear so the layers do not collapse (Singh, Sri Guru Granth Sahib Darpan).

A note of caution on counting

It is tempting to claim exact numbers — 'so many languages, so many divine names'. Responsible study avoids inventing such figures. What we can say with confidence is qualitative: the range is wide, deliberate, and meaningful (Shackle, An Introduction to the Sacred Language of the Sikhs).

What do we even call it?

Naming the language of Sri Guru Granth Sahib Ji is itself a scholarly puzzle. Some speak of 'the sacred language of the Sikhs'; some use 'Sant Bhasha'; some describe it region by region. Christopher Shackle's studies are a standard entry point for thinking about how to describe and classify this mixed sacred speech (Shackle, An Introduction to the Sacred Language of the Sikhs; Shackle, “The Sikh Sacred Language and Its Scholarship,” in The Oxford Handbook of Sikh Studies).

Why 'Sant Bhasha' is useful but imperfect

'Sant Bhasha' captures something true: a shared saintly medium that crosses regions. But it can mislead if it makes a reader expect one tidy language with one grammar. The honest picture is a spectrum of registers and dialects sitting together. Good scholarship keeps both truths in view: a real shared medium, and real internal variety.

Where the two great approaches meet

Prof. Sahib Singh's contribution is internal and grammatical: he shows that, whatever we name the language, Gurbani's word-forms behave consistently and can be read by rule (Singh, Gurbani Viakaran). Shackle's contribution is descriptive and comparative: he places this speech among the languages of north India and weighs how to label it. The two are complementary. Grammar tells you how the text works from the inside; classification tells you where it sits among the world's languages.

What stays open — and how to be honest about it

Several questions remain genuinely debated: how to weigh Braj against Punjabi in the overall body, how to bound the 'Sahaskriti' register, and which label best fits the whole. A careful student resists the urge to settle these with invented statistics, exact percentages, or made-up dates. The discipline of this course is the discipline of good study: claim what the sources support, and mark the rest as open (Singh and Fenech, The Oxford Handbook of Sikh Studies).