This page treats the Anand Karaj, the Sikh solemnisation, specifically: the ceremony conducted in the presence of the Guru Granth Sahib, its text, its history and its law. It is one of three treatments. The nikah and the Hindu vivāh as practised in Punjab are forthcoming and will be given the same shape.
A Sikh marriage is not conducted by anyone. The couple sit before the Guru Granth Sahib — the Sikh scripture, which Sikhs regard as a living Guru rather than a book about one — a scarf is placed from one hand into the other, and four stanzas composed by the fourth Guru are read aloud and then sung while the couple walk four times around it. There are no vows and no ring. The standing of the couple and their parents is the consent; the four circuits are the marriage.
The stanzas are called the , and they are not, on their face, about marriage. They describe four stages by which a soul comes to rest in the divine. The ceremony borrows a wedding to teach that, rather than the other way round — and the Sikh code of conduct instructs whoever is officiating to say so, out loud, in the room, before the walking begins.
The name
ਅਨੰਦ ਕਾਰਜ · anand kāraj · ISO anaṁda kāraja · pronounced roughly uh-NUND KAA-ruj — the first vowel a short u as in but, not the a of and.
is bliss, joy, deep contentment — not merely happiness, but the settled kind that is left when wanting stops. is a work, a task, an affair, an undertaking; in Punjabi it also carries the specific domestic sense of a function — the big family event a household spends a year preparing for. So, literally: the blissful undertaking, or the work of bliss. Widely rendered “blissful union.”
The pairing runs deeper than the gloss. Anand Sāhib is the composition of Guru Amar Das, the third Guru, and it is from the hymn that the ceremony takes its name — not the other way round. A Sikh wedding is named after a poem about the joy of finding God.
The Sikh Rehat Maryada — the code of conduct published by the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee, the elected body that administers the historic gurdwaras of Indian Punjab — gives the chapter its own formal heading: Anand Sanskār (ਅਨੰਦ ਸੰਸਕਾਰ), sanskār being a rite of passage. In everyday Punjabi speech, and on every gurdwara notice board in the world, it is Anand Kāraj. Both are correct. This page uses Anand Karaj and notes Anand Sanskār as the code's term — a small, clean example of the distinction the rest of the page is built on.
EstablishedPrescribed
Confidence: high. The authorship of Anand Sāhib and of the lāvāṅ is recorded in the Guru Granth Sahib itself. That the ceremony is named after the hymn is not disputed.
In a sentence: ਉਨ੍ਹਾਂ ਦਾ ਅਨੰਦ ਕਾਰਜ ਗੁਰਦੁਆਰੇ ਵਿੱਚ ਹੋਇਆ। — unhāṅ dā anand kāraj gurduāre vich hoiā — “Their Anand Karaj took place in the gurdwara.”
The order of service
Two things are described below and they are not the same thing. The Sikh Rehat Maryada sets out what a Sikh marriage requires. What happens in a gurdwara on a Saturday morning is that, plus a great deal else, minus the occasional thing.
The gap is not hypocrisy. A — a code of conduct — is evidence of two things at once: what a community has decided, and what it found itself needing to decide about. Both columns below are true.
| Step# | Element | Prescribed — Sikh Rehat Maryada | Common practice |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Arrival, milnī | Not required. The code asks only that the two sides greet each other with sacred hymns and the Sikh greeting. | Near-universal. Male relatives from each side are formally introduced and garlanded, often with gifts. Frequently the longest and most social part of the morning. |
| 2 | The congregation assembles | Required: a congregational gathering in the presence of the Guru Granth Sahib. | Universal. Men and women commonly sit on separate sides of the central aisle; families with children often sit together. A convention, not a requirement. |
| 3 | The couple are seated | Required. The code specifies that the bride sits to the left of the groom. | Followed almost everywhere. |
| 4 | Opening kīrtan | Required: hymn-singing, by rāgīs or by the whole congregation. The code does not say which hymn. | Universal. Kītā Loṛī-ai Kamm is the conventional choice — by custom, not by rule. |
| 5 | Ardās to begin | Required. The couple and their parents or guardians stand; everyone else stays seated; the officiant offers ardās for the beginning of the ceremony. | Universal. The standing of the four parents is the visible moment of consent. |
| 6 | The address | Required, and specified in unusual detail: the officiant explains conjugal duty, expounds the lāvāṅ as the model for the soul's relation to the divine, and explains “one soul in two bodies.” | Universal, but length and content vary enormously — three minutes to forty. In practice the content is at the officiant's discretion. |
| 7 | Assent | Required: the couple bow before the Guru Granth Sahib to signify acceptance. | Universal. |
| 8 | The pallā | Required: the bride's father or principal relative places in the bride's hand the end of the sash the groom wears over his shoulder. | Universal, and emotionally the most charged moment for the bride's family. Pallai Taiḍai Lāgī is sung here by convention — again, the code does not name it. |
| 9 | The four lāvāṅ | Required, and precisely specified. The attendant of the Guru Granth Sahib recites each stanza; then the groom, followed by the bride holding the sash, circles the scripture while the rāgīs or the congregation sing the stanza just recited. Four stanzas, four circuits. | Universal. This is the ceremony. |
| 10 | Between circuits | Required: after each circumambulation the couple bow, foreheads to the ground, then stand to hear the next stanza recited. | Universal — though whether the couple stand or sit to listen is where the code and the common summaries part company. See the note below. |
| 11 | Anand Sāhib | Required, and the extent is specified: the first five stanzas and the last. | Followed. Sung or recited. |
| 12 | Closing ardās | Required, to mark the conclusion. | Universal. |
| 13 | Hukamnāmā | Not specified in the marriage chapter, but standard in the code's general order of service. | Universal. |
| 14 | Kaṛāh prashād | Required by the code at the conclusion. | Universal. |
| 15 | Closing shabads | Not specified at all. | Vīāhu Hoā Mere Bābulā and Pūrī Āsā Jī Mansā are the conventional pair — sometimes before Anand Sāhib, sometimes after, sometimes only one of them. Convention, not rule. |
| 16 | Langar | Not part of the ceremony. | Universal. |
A divergence worth printing. The Rehat Maryada says that after bowing, the couple should stand up to listen to the recitation of the next stanza. Several widely circulated English-language summaries say the couple sits to listen. In practice both are seen. This is a small thing, and exactly the kind of small thing this page should get right: state what the code says, note what is commonly done, and do not pretend the gap is not there.
PrescribedCommon practice
One structural point, because it is the most commonly misstated fact about the ceremony. Of the five shabads that make up what this page calls the ceremony's scriptural spine, the Rehat Maryada names only two: the lāvāṅ and Anand Sāhib. The opening kīrtan, the shabad sung at the pallā, and the two closing shabads are convention — near-universal, deeply felt, and not required by any code. Everything in the musical programme except the lāvāṅ and Anand Sāhib is customary.
PrescribedCommon practice
Confidence: high on what the code's text says. The “common practice” column throughout this page is descriptive rather than measured — it rests on published accounts of what is observed, not on survey data. No figure for how common anything is appears anywhere on this page, because no reliable one exists.
What happens, and why
The room itself
The Guru Granth Sahib sits on a raised platform — the , literally “the honoured cot,” the same word as the string bed in every Punjabi house — beneath a canopy, the . Someone stands over it waving a , a whisk of fine fibres, continuously, throughout. In the courts of the subcontinent the chaur was waved over a sovereign.
Every physical courtesy in the room is addressed to the scripture: the covered heads, the removed shoes, the bowing, the fact that nobody turns their back to it and nobody's feet point towards it. The couple do not face an officiant. They face the Guru, and they are married in its presence rather than by anyone's authority. This one fact explains most of what a first-time visitor finds unfamiliar, and it is worth having before anything else.
Religious tradition
Who officiates
There is no priesthood. The Rehat Maryada allows the ceremony to be conducted by any Sikh, and says explicitly that the person may be a man or a woman. In practice it is almost always a — the person who reads and attends the scripture, a gurdwara employee rather than a cleric, and the one who is there.
PrescribedCommon practice
The “may be a man or a woman” clause is worth printing. It surprises people, and it is in the text. Confidence: high.
The opening kīrtan
— musicians trained to sing scripture in its assigned rāg — open with the whose first line asks that any work one wishes to accomplish be placed before God. It frames the marriage as an undertaking begun with the divine rather than merely blessed by it. It is a general-purpose beginning-of-a-task verse, used across Sikh life at the start of ventures — not a marriage text at all.
The ardās, and the standing parents
The couple and both sets of parents stand while everyone else remains seated, and the officiant offers for the beginning of the ceremony. There is no exchange of vows, no “I do,” no ring, no register signed in the room. This standing is the consent.
For readers from traditions organised around a spoken vow this is the most important thing on the page, and it should not be hurried. Nothing is promised aloud. Four people stand up, and that is the agreement.
Prescribed
The address
The code specifies this in unusual detail. The officiant explains the duties of married life, expounds the lāvāṅ as the model for the relation of the individual soul to the divine, and explains the idea of the couple as “one soul in two bodies.” In practice the length and content vary enormously — three minutes to forty — and what is said is at the officiant's discretion.
The pallā
The bride's father — or whoever stands in his place — takes the end of the sash the groom wears over his shoulder and places it in the bride's hand. The couple are now physically joined by cloth, and will remain so through the four circuits. It is, for the bride's family, the most charged moment of the morning.
What the moment means is layered, and both layers are real.
The theological reading. is the hem or end of a garment. To “catch someone's pallā” in Punjabi idiom is to attach oneself to them, to place oneself in their keeping. The shabad sung at this moment uses exactly that idiom about the divine — tau palai taiḍai lāgī, “then to your hem I attached myself.” The cloth in the hand is a physical enactment of the metaphor. Religious tradition
The social reading, stated without euphemism. A father transferring his daughter to another household is a transfer of guardianship, and in a patrilocal society that is what it has historically meant. The tenderness of the moment and its patriarchal structure are both real, and this page does not choose between them. Established
The four circuits
Each lāv is read aloud first, from the Guru Granth Sahib, and then sung by the rāgīs while the couple walk. The groom leads; the bride follows, holding the sash. They move clockwise, keeping their right side towards the scripture. Most Punjabis, whatever their religion, call a circuit like this a — the same ordinary word used for the circuits walked around a fire at a Hindu vivāh. Same word, same motion, different centre, and the change of centre is the whole nineteenth-century argument below. Between circuits both bow, foreheads to the ground.
Three things about this reward a sentence each.
The couple is joined, not led. Nobody gives the bride away at the point of walking. She walks behind, holding cloth that is held by a man who is himself walking. Staying in step is frequently described, in the address, as the first practical negotiation of the marriage.
The reading precedes the singing, and the order is prescribed. The word is spoken as instruction, then sung as celebration. Each stanza therefore happens twice, in two different registers, before the couple have finished one circuit.
The circling itself carries an argument, about where the rite came from and what it replaced. That is the subject of the history.
Prescribed
Anand Sāhib, and the close
Five stanzas and the fortieth, sung. The hymn is not about marriage at all — it is about the bliss of union with the divine, and its presence closes the loop the lāvāṅ opened. A closing ardās, a — the verse read at random from the scripture, taken as the day's instruction — and , distributed to everyone present from the same bowl into cupped hands.
Two are conventionally sung at the close. Vīāhu Hoā Mere Bābulā — “my marriage has been performed, O my father” — is sung in the voice of a bride addressing her father, and is about the soul finding the imperishable Being as its spouse. Pūrī Āsā Jī Mansā — “my hopes and my longing are fulfilled.” Both are excerpts: a single stanza lifted out of a longer composition. What is sung at the close of an Anand Karaj is not a whole poem, and this page does not present it as one.
Then , which is not part of the ceremony and is never missing from it.
The text
Five compositions make up the ceremony's scriptural spine. Two are required by the code; three are convention. All five are in the Guru Granth Sahib, and every one is cited below by — the Sikh word for a page of the scripture, which literally means limb, because the book is regarded as a body.
-
1Opening kīrtan
kītā loṛīai kammu; su hari pahi ākhīai ॥
Convention, not prescribed
-
2The pallā
ustati nindā nānak jī, mai habh vañāī; chhoṛiā. habhu kijhu tiāgī ॥
Convention, not prescribed
-
3The four lāvāṅ
hari pahilaṛī lāv; parvirtī karam driṛāiā, bali rām jīu ॥
Required by the Rehat Maryada
-
4Closing bāṇī
anandu bhaiā merī māe; satgurū. mai pāiā ॥
Required by the Rehat Maryada
-
5Closing shabad
vīāhu hoā mere bābulā; gurmukhe hari pāiā ॥
Convention, not prescribed
-
6Closing shabad
pūrī āsā jī; manasā mere rām ॥
Convention, not prescribed
Every line of all six was extracted from its address in the source corpus and checksummed. That is not the same as the second, independent check described in the sources drawer, which has not yet been run.
Three things about these citations belong on the page rather than in a footnote.
Rows 5 and 6 are single stanzas lifted out of longer compositions, as noted above. Row 4 is an abridgement, and a prescribed one — the Rehat Maryada specifies the first five stanzas of Anand Sāhib and the last, out of forty. That short form is known as Chhoṭā Anand Sāhib and is used across Sikh life, at ceremonies of joy and of mourning alike; the authority for using six stanzas of forty at a wedding is the code itself. And row 1 is a pauṛī while row 2 is a — both units within a , a ballad of alternating sloks and pauṛīs. Neither is a free-standing shabad. A granthī will notice if the citation says otherwise.
How this text got here
Nobody typed it. Every character below was extracted programmatically from a versioned, openly published digital corpus of the Guru Granth Sahib, checksummed line by line, and frozen; the build refuses to run if a single character has changed since. That is a deliberately heavy process for a page of a website, and the reason is simple: a person retyping scripture has a diacritic-level failure mode with no signal when it happens, and this text may one day be projected on a screen at somebody's wedding.
Where a line could not be verified it appears as a marked gap rather than as a plausible line. There are none on this page at present. The full verification record, including what has and has not yet been checked, is in the sources drawer.
Why the punctuation looks odd. The Gurmukhi below carries vishrām marks — the semicolons and full stops set inside the line. They are not punctuation in the English sense and they are not part of the scripture. They are an editor's guide to where a reader should pause when saying the line aloud, and they are printed here because that is how the source prints them and because they are genuinely useful to anyone trying to follow along. A different edition would place them differently.
Two romanisations, and why they differ. The reading lane shows how the line is said. The ISO 15919 lane, behind the toggle below, shows every character that is written — including the short inherent vowels that Punjabi does not pronounce. So ਲਾਵ is lāv to a reader and lāva in ISO, and neither is wrong. The reading lane is Punjabia's own and is a first pass awaiting a native reader; the ISO lane is generated mechanically and can be re-derived from the Gurmukhi at any time.
The opening kīrtan
What happens. The rāgīs sing while the congregation settles and the couple are seated. Who does it. The rāgī jathā, or the whole sangat. What it means here. The verse asks that any work one wishes to accomplish be placed before God first. It frames the marriage as an undertaking begun with the divine rather than merely blessed by it — and it is not a marriage text at all, but the verse Sikhs reach for at the start of any venture.
It is a pauṛī of Guru Ram Das, from the Sirīrāg vār. It is frequently misattributed to Guru Nanak, including by sites that reproduce the ceremony in full; the pauṛīs of that vār are Guru Ram Das's, and the corpus this page draws from marks them so.
Pauṛī 20 · Sirīrāg · ang 91
Gurmukhireadingliteral, word by wordtranslation
ਕੀਤਾ ਲੋੜੀਐ ਕੰਮੁ; ਸੁ ਹਰਿ ਪਹਿ ਆਖੀਐ ॥
kītā loṛīai kammu; su hari pahi ākhīai ॥
ISO · kītā lōṛīai kaṁmu; su hari pahi ākhīai ॥
The work one wants done — that, before Har, let it be spoken.
Whatever work you wish to accomplish-tell it to the Lord.
ਕਾਰਜੁ ਦੇਇ ਸਵਾਰਿ; ਸਤਿਗੁਰ ਸਚੁ ਸਾਖੀਐ ॥
kāraju dei savāri; satgur sachu sākhīai ॥
ISO · kāraju dēi savāri; satigura sacu sākhīai ॥
The undertaking he gives back set right; the True Guru is the true witness.
He will resolve your affairs; the True Guru gives His Guarantee of Truth.
ਸੰਤਾ ਸੰਗਿ ਨਿਧਾਨੁ; ਅੰਮ੍ਰਿਤੁ ਚਾਖੀਐ ॥
santā saṅgi nidhānu; amritu chākhīai ॥
ISO · saṁtā saṁgi nidhānu; aṁmritu cākhīai ॥
In the company of the holy, the treasure; the nectar, let it be tasted.
In the Society of the Saints, you shall taste the treasure of the Ambrosial Nectar.
ਭੈ ਭੰਜਨ ਮਿਹਰਵਾਨ; ਦਾਸ ਕੀ ਰਾਖੀਐ ॥
bhai bhanjan mihrvān; dās kī rākhīai ॥
ISO · bhai bhaṁjana miharavāna; dāsa kī rākhīai ॥
Shatterer of fear, the merciful one; of his servant, let the honour be kept.
The Lord is the Merciful Destroyer of fear; He preserves and protects His slaves.
ਨਾਨਕ. ਹਰਿ ਗੁਣ ਗਾਇ; ਅਲਖੁ ਪ੍ਰਭੁ ਲਾਖੀਐ ॥੨੦॥
nānak. hari guṇ gāi; alakhu prabhu lākhīai ॥20॥
ISO · nānaka. hari guṇa gāi; alakhu prabhu lākhīai ॥20॥
Nanak: sing the qualities of Har; the Lord who cannot be seen is seen.
O Nanak, sing the Glorious Praises of the Lord, and see the Unseen Lord God. ||20||
At the pallā
What happens. The bride's father places the end of the groom's sash into her hand. Who does it. Her father, or whoever stands in his place. What it means here. The slok uses the exact idiom the cloth enacts: to catch someone's pallā is to attach yourself to them, to put yourself in their keeping. Guru Arjan says it of the divine, having found every other tie false. The cloth being passed from one hand to another is the metaphor made physical.
The slok · Rāmkalī · ang 963
Gurmukhireadingliteral, word by wordtranslation
ਉਸਤਤਿ ਨਿੰਦਾ ਨਾਨਕ ਜੀ, ਮੈ ਹਭ ਵਞਾਈ; ਛੋੜਿਆ. ਹਭੁ ਕਿਝੁ ਤਿਆਗੀ ॥
ustati nindā nānak jī, mai habh vañāī; chhoṛiā. habhu kijhu tiāgī ॥
ISO · usatati niṁdā nānaka jī, mai habha vañāī; chōṛiā. habhu kijhu tiāgī ॥
Praise, blame — Nanak ji, I have sent them all away; I have let go, I have renounced the whole of it.
I have totally discarded praise and slander, O Nanak; I have forsaken and abandoned everything.
ਹਭੇ ਸਾਕ ਕੂੜਾਵੇ ਡਿਠੇ; ਤਉ ਤੈਡੈ ਲਾਗੀ ॥੧॥
habhe sāk kūṛāve ḍiṭhe; tau palai taiḍai lāgī ॥1॥
ISO · habhē sāka kūṛāvē ḍiṭhē; tau palai taiḍai lāgī ॥1॥
All the ties I looked at and saw false; then to your hem I attached myself.
I have seen that all relationships are false, and so I have grasped hold of the hem of Your robe, Lord. ||1||
A west-Punjab voice in the middle of the ceremony
Look at the words: habh, habhe, habhu for “all,” taiḍai for “your,” ḍiṭhe for “seen.” These are not the forms of the eastern Punjabi most Anand Karaj are conducted in. They belong to the Lahnda dialects of the western plains — Multani and its neighbours, the speech of what is now southern Pakistani Punjab. Guru Arjan wrote a number of compositions in them.
So at the most charged moment of a Sikh wedding in Ludhiana or Leamington Spa or Surrey, what is sung is a verse in a west-Punjab dialect that most of the room could not produce a sentence in. The ceremony carries a piece of the other Punjab inside it without anyone remarking on it.
Established
The four lāvāṅ
What happens. Each stanza is read aloud from the Guru Granth Sahib; then the couple walk one circuit around it while the same stanza is sung. Four stanzas, four circuits. Between each, both bow to the ground. Who does it. The attendant of the scripture reads; the rāgīs or the congregation sing; the groom leads and the bride follows, holding the sash. What it means. Four stages by which a soul comes to rest in the divine — beginning in the duties of an engaged worldly life, and ending in sahaj, the settled ease of a mind that has stopped struggling.
The order matters and is prescribed: the word is spoken as instruction, then sung as celebration. Each stanza therefore happens twice before one circuit is finished.
The first lāv · Sūhī · ang 773
Gurmukhireadingliteral, word by wordtranslation
ਹਰਿ ਪਹਿਲੜੀ ; ਪਰਵਿਰਤੀ ਕਰਮ ਦ੍ਰਿੜਾਇਆ, ਬਲਿ ਰਾਮ ਜੀਉ ॥
hari pahilaṛī lāv; parvirtī karam driṛāiā, bali rām jīu ॥
ISO · hari pahilaṛī lāva; paraviratī karama driṛāiā, bali rāma jīu ॥
Har — in the very first round, the works of the world-engaged life he has made firm. I am a sacrifice, O dear Ram.
In the first round of the marriage ceremony, the Lord sets out His Instructions for performing the daily duties of married life.
ਬ੍ਰਹਮਾ ਵੇਦੁ, ਧਰਮੁ ਦ੍ਰਿੜਹੁ; ਪਾਪ ਤਜਾਇਆ, ਬਲਿ ਰਾਮ ਜੀਉ ॥
bāṇī brahmā vedu, dharmu driṛahu; pāp tajāiā, bali rām jīu ॥
ISO · bāṇī brahamā vēdu, dharamu driṛahu; pāpa tajāiā, bali rāma jīu ॥
The bāṇī, Brahma's Veda — hold dharam firm; sin is made to be let go. I am a sacrifice, O dear Ram.
Instead of the hymns of the Vedas to Brahma, embrace the righteous conduct of Dharma, and renounce sinful actions.
A note on this lineTranslators divide here, and the difference is theological. One tradition of rendering reads the line as setting the Guru's word against the Vedic corpus — hold to righteous conduct instead of the hymns of the Vedas. Another reads it as saying that the Guru's word is the Veda, the Brahma-Veda, for the Sikh. One is a rejection of the Vedic frame; the other is an appropriation of it. The Gurmukhi supports both, and the choice between them is made by the translator before the reader ever sees it.
ਦ੍ਰਿੜਹੁ. ਹਰਿ ਨਾਮੁ ਧਿਆਵਹੁ; ਸਿਮ੍ਰਿਤਿ ਨਾਮੁ ਦ੍ਰਿੜਾਇਆ ॥
dharmu driṛahu. hari nāmu dhiāvahu; simriti nāmu driṛāiā ॥
ISO · dharamu driṛahu. hari nāmu dhiāvahu; simriti nāmu driṛāiā ॥
Hold dharam firm, meditate on the Name of Har; the remembering of the Name has been made firm.
Meditate on the Lord's Name; embrace and enshrine the contemplative remembrance of the Naam.
ਸਤਿਗੁਰੁ ਗੁਰੁ ਪੂਰਾ ਆਰਾਧਹੁ; ਸਭਿ ਕਿਲਵਿਖ ਪਾਪ ਗਵਾਇਆ ॥
satguru guru pūrā ārādhahu; sabhi kilvikh pāp gavāiā ॥
ISO · satiguru guru pūrā ārādhahu; sabhi kilavikha pāpa gavāiā ॥
Adore the True Guru, the Guru who is complete; every stain and sin is driven off.
Worship and adore the Guru, the Perfect True Guru, and all your sins shall be dispelled.
ਸਹਜ ਅਨੰਦੁ ਹੋਆ ਵਡਭਾਗੀ; ਮਨਿ ਹਰਿ ਹਰਿ ਮੀਠਾ ਲਾਇਆ ॥
sahaj anandu hoā vaḍbhāgī; mani hari hari mīṭhā lāiā ॥
ISO · sahaja anaṁdu hōā vaḍabhāgī; mani hari hari mīṭhā lāiā ॥
Equipoise-bliss has come to the greatly fortunate; in the mind, Har, Har has begun to taste sweet.
By great good fortune, celestial bliss is attained, and the Lord, Har, Har, seems sweet to the mind.
ਜਨੁ ਕਹੈ ਨਾਨਕੁ. ਲਾਵ ਪਹਿਲੀ; ਆਰੰਭੁ ਕਾਜੁ ਰਚਾਇਆ ॥੧॥
janu kahai nānaku. lāv pahilī; ārambhu kāju rachāiā ॥1॥
ISO · janu kahai nānaku. lāva pahilī; āraṁbhu kāju racāiā ॥1॥
The servant Nanak says: in the first round, the beginning of the undertaking has been set going.
Servant Nanak proclaims that, in this, the first round of the marriage ceremony, the marriage ceremony has begun. ||1||
The second lāv · Sūhī · ang 774
Gurmukhireadingliteral, word by wordtranslation
ਹਰਿ ਦੂਜੜੀ ਲਾਵ; ਸਤਿਗੁਰੁ ਪੁਰਖੁ ਮਿਲਾਇਆ. ਬਲਿ ਰਾਮ ਜੀਉ ॥
hari dūjaṛī lāv; satguru purkhu milāiā. bali rām jīu ॥
ISO · hari dūjaṛī lāva; satiguru purakhu milāiā. bali rāma jīu ॥
Har — in the second round, he has caused the True Guru, the Being, to be met. I am a sacrifice, O dear Ram.
In the second round of the marriage ceremony, the Lord leads you to meet the True Guru, the Primal Being.
ਨਿਰਭਉ. ਭੈ ਮਨੁ ਹੋਇ; ਹਉਮੈ ਮੈਲੁ ਗਵਾਇਆ. ਬਲਿ ਰਾਮ ਜੀਉ ॥
nirabhau. bhai manu hoi; haumai mailu gavāiā. bali rām jīu ॥
ISO · nirabhau. bhai manu hōi; haumai mailu gavāiā. bali rāma jīu ॥
Fearless the mind becomes, through fear; the filth of I-am-ness is driven off. I am a sacrifice, O dear Ram.
With the Fear of God, the Fearless Lord in the mind, the filth of egotism is eradicated.
ਨਿਰਮਲੁ ਭਉ ਪਾਇਆ. ਹਰਿ ਗੁਣ ਗਾਇਆ; ਹਰਿ ਵੇਖੈ ਰਾਮੁ ਹਦੂਰੇ ॥
nirmalu bhau pāiā. hari guṇ gāiā; hari vekhai rāmu hadūre ॥
ISO · niramalu bhau pāiā. hari guṇa gāiā; hari vēkhai rāmu hadūrē ॥
The stainless fear is found, the qualities of Har are sung; one sees Har, Ram, standing present.
In the Fear of God, the Immaculate Lord, sing the Glorious Praises of the Lord, and behold the Lord's Presence before you.
ਹਰਿ ਆਤਮ ਰਾਮੁ ਪਸਾਰਿਆ ਸੁਆਮੀ; ਸਰਬ ਰਹਿਆ ਭਰਪੂਰੇ ॥
hari ātam rāmu pasāriā suāmī; sarab rahiā bharpūre ॥
ISO · hari ātama rāmu pasāriā suāmī; saraba rahiā bharapūrē ॥
Har, the soul-Ram, the master, has spread himself out; in everything he stays brim-full.
The Lord, the Supreme Soul, is the Lord and Master of the Universe; He is pervading and permeating everywhere, fully filling all spaces.
ਅੰਤਰਿ ਬਾਹਰਿ ਹਰਿ ਪ੍ਰਭੁ ਏਕੋ; ਮਿਲਿ ਹਰਿ ਜਨ ਮੰਗਲ ਗਾਏ ॥
antari bāhari hari prabhu eko; mili hari jan maṅgal gāe ॥
ISO · aṁtari bāhari hari prabhu ēkō; mili hari jana maṁgala gāē ॥
Inside, outside — Har the Lord, one only; meeting together, Har's servants sing songs of joy.
Deep within, and outside as well, there is only the One Lord God. Meeting together, the humble servants of the Lord sing the songs of joy.
ਜਨ ਨਾਨਕ. ਦੂਜੀ ਲਾਵ ਚਲਾਈ; ਸਬਦ ਵਜਾਏ ॥੨॥
jan nānak. dūjī lāv chalāī; anhad sabad vajāe ॥2॥
ISO · jana nānaka. dūjī lāva calāī; anahada sabada vajāē ॥2॥
Servant Nanak: the second round set walking; the unstruck Word is made to sound.
Servant Nanak proclaims that, in this, the second round of the marriage ceremony, the unstruck sound current of the Shabad resounds. ||2||
The third lāv · Sūhī · ang 774
Gurmukhireadingliteral, word by wordtranslation
ਹਰਿ ਤੀਜੜੀ ਲਾਵ; ਮਨਿ ਚਾਉ ਭਇਆ ਬੈਰਾਗੀਆ. ਬਲਿ ਰਾਮ ਜੀਉ ॥
hari tījaṛī lāv; mani chāu bhaiā bairāgīā. bali rām jīu ॥
ISO · hari tījaṛī lāva; mani cāu bhaiā bairāgīā. bali rāma jīu ॥
Har — in the third round, in the mind a longing has risen, O you who are detached. I am a sacrifice, O dear Ram.
In the third round of the marriage ceremony, the mind is filled with Divine Love.
ਸੰਤ ਜਨਾ ਹਰਿ ਮੇਲੁ; ਹਰਿ ਪਾਇਆ ਵਡਭਾਗੀਆ. ਬਲਿ ਰਾਮ ਜੀਉ ॥
sant janā hari melu; hari pāiā vaḍbhāgīā. bali rām jīu ॥
ISO · saṁta janā hari mēlu; hari pāiā vaḍabhāgīā. bali rāma jīu ॥
The meeting with Har of the saintly ones; Har is found, O you who are greatly fortunate. I am a sacrifice, O dear Ram.
Meeting with the humble Saints of the Lord, I have found the Lord, by great good fortune.
ਨਿਰਮਲੁ ਹਰਿ ਪਾਇਆ. ਹਰਿ ਗੁਣ ਗਾਇਆ; ਮੁਖਿ ਬੋਲੀ ਹਰਿ ਬਾਣੀ ॥
nirmalu hari pāiā. hari guṇ gāiā; mukhi bolī hari bāṇī ॥
ISO · niramalu hari pāiā. hari guṇa gāiā; mukhi bōlī hari bāṇī ॥
The stainless Har is found, the qualities of Har are sung; with the mouth, the bāṇī of Har is spoken.
I have found the Immaculate Lord, and I sing the Glorious Praises of the Lord. I speak the Word of the Lord's Bani.
ਸੰਤ ਜਨਾ ਵਡਭਾਗੀ ਪਾਇਆ; ਹਰਿ ਕਥੀਐ ਅਕਥ ਕਹਾਣੀ ॥
sant janā vaḍbhāgī pāiā; hari kathīai akath kahāṇī ॥
ISO · saṁta janā vaḍabhāgī pāiā; hari kathīai akatha kahāṇī ॥
By the saintly ones, the greatly fortunate, he is found; the unspeakable telling of Har is told.
By great good fortune, I have found the humble Saints, and I speak the Unspoken Speech of the Lord.
ਹਿਰਦੈ ਹਰਿ ਹਰਿ ਹਰਿ ਧੁਨਿ ਉਪਜੀ; ਹਰਿ ਜਪੀਐ ਮਸਤਕਿ ਭਾਗੁ ਜੀਉ ॥
hirdai hari hari hari dhuni upjī; hari japīai mastaki bhāgu jīu ॥
ISO · hiradai hari hari hari dhuni upajī; hari japīai masataki bhāgu jīu ॥
In the heart, Har, Har, Har — the resonance has sprung up; Har is repeated, on the forehead the destiny.
The Name of the Lord, Har, Har, Har, vibrates and resounds within my heart; meditating on the Lord, I have realized the destiny inscribed upon my forehead.
ਜਨੁ ਨਾਨਕੁ ਬੋਲੇ ਤੀਜੀ ਲਾਵੈ; ਹਰਿ ਉਪਜੈ ਮਨਿ ਬੈਰਾਗੁ ਜੀਉ ॥੩॥
janu nānaku bole tījī lāvai; hari upjai mani bairāgu jīu ॥3॥
ISO · janu nānaku bōlē tījī lāvai; hari upajai mani bairāgu jīu ॥3॥
The servant Nanak speaks in the third round: Har — in the mind, detachment springs up.
Servant Nanak proclaims that, in this, the third round of the marriage ceremony, the mind is filled with Divine Love for the Lord. ||3||
The fourth lāv · Sūhī · ang 774
Gurmukhireadingliteral, word by wordtranslation
ਹਰਿ ਚਉਥੜੀ ਲਾਵ. ਮਨਿ ਭਇਆ; ਹਰਿ ਪਾਇਆ. ਬਲਿ ਰਾਮ ਜੀਉ ॥
hari chauthaṛī lāv. mani sahaju bhaiā; hari pāiā. bali rām jīu ॥
ISO · hari cauthaṛī lāva. mani sahaju bhaiā; hari pāiā. bali rāma jīu ॥
Har — in the fourth round, in the mind sahaj has come; Har is found. I am a sacrifice, O dear Ram.
In the fourth round of the marriage ceremony, my mind has become peaceful; I have found the Lord.
ਗੁਰਮੁਖਿ ਮਿਲਿਆ ਸੁਭਾਇ; ਹਰਿ ਮਨਿ ਤਨਿ ਮੀਠਾ ਲਾਇਆ. ਬਲਿ ਰਾਮ ਜੀਉ ॥
gurmukhi miliā subhāi; hari mani tani mīṭhā lāiā. bali rām jīu ॥
ISO · guramukhi miliā subhāi; hari mani tani mīṭhā lāiā. bali rāma jīu ॥
Through the Guru's face he is met, and without effort; Har in mind and in body has begun to taste sweet. I am a sacrifice, O dear Ram.
As Gurmukh, I have met Him, with intuitive ease; the Lord seems so sweet to my mind and body.
ਹਰਿ ਮੀਠਾ ਲਾਇਆ. ਮੇਰੇ ਪ੍ਰਭ ਭਾਇਆ; ਅਨਦਿਨੁ ਹਰਿ ਲਿਵ ਲਾਈ ॥
hari mīṭhā lāiā. mere prabh bhāiā; andinu hari liv lāī ॥
ISO · hari mīṭhā lāiā. mērē prabha bhāiā; anadinu hari liva lāī ॥
Har has begun to taste sweet, it has pleased my Lord; night and day the mind is held fast on Har.
The Lord seems so sweet; I am pleasing to my God. Night and day, I lovingly focus my consciousness on the Lord.
ਮਨ ਚਿੰਦਿਆ ਫਲੁ ਪਾਇਆ ਸੁਆਮੀ; ਹਰਿ ਨਾਮਿ ਵਜੀ ਵਾਧਾਈ ॥
man chindiā phalu pāiā suāmī; hari nāmi vajī vādhāī ॥
ISO · mana ciṁdiā phalu pāiā suāmī; hari nāmi vajī vādhāī ॥
The fruit the mind was thinking of is obtained, the master; at the Name of Har the congratulation has sounded.
I have obtained my Lord and Master, the fruit of my mind's desires. The Lord's Name resounds and resonates.
ਹਰਿ ਪ੍ਰਭਿ ਠਾਕੁਰਿ ਰਚਾਇਆ; ਧਨ ਹਿਰਦੈ ਨਾਮਿ ਵਿਗਾਸੀ ॥
hari prabhi ṭhākuri kāju rachāiā; dhan hirdai nāmi vigāsī ॥
ISO · hari prabhi ṭhākuri kāju racāiā; dhana hiradai nāmi vigāsī ॥
Har, the Lord, the master, has set the undertaking going; the bride, in her heart, comes into flower at the Name.
The Lord God, my Lord and Master, blends with His bride, and her heart blossoms forth in the Naam.
A note on this lineTwo of the three disputed renderings in the lāvāṅ are in this one line. Kāj rachāiā — “the undertaking has been set going” — is read by some as the divine arranging the marriage and by others as the marriage having been brought about, with no agent named; the Punjabi does not settle it. And dhan is the bride, the woman, the soul — the same word carries all three, so how a translator renders it decides whether the closing image is of a human wife or of the soul as bride. This page does not choose.
ਜਨੁ ਨਾਨਕੁ ਬੋਲੇ ਚਉਥੀ ਲਾਵੈ; ਹਰਿ ਪਾਇਆ ਪ੍ਰਭੁ ਅਵਿਨਾਸੀ ॥੪॥੨॥
janu nānaku bole chauthī lāvai; hari pāiā prabhu avināsī ॥4॥2॥
ISO · janu nānaku bōlē cauthī lāvai; hari pāiā prabhu avināsī ॥4॥2॥
The servant Nanak speaks in the fourth round: Har is found, the Lord who does not perish.
Servant Nanak proclaims that, in this, the fourth round of the marriage ceremony, we have found the Eternal Lord God. ||4||2||
Anand Sāhib — the first stanza and the fortieth
What happens. The first five stanzas and the last are sung or recited near the close. What it means here. The hymn is not about marriage at all. It is about the bliss of union with the divine, and its presence closes the loop the lāvāṅ opened. The ceremony takes its name from this composition.
The abridgement to six stanzas out of forty is not a shortcut: it is the short form known as Chhoṭā Anand Sāhib, and it is what the Rehat Maryada prescribes. The first stanza and the fortieth are printed here; stanzas two to five are in the page's data file and are sung in full at the ceremony.
Stanza 1 of forty · Rāmkalī · ang 917
Gurmukhireadingliteral, word by wordtranslation
ਭਇਆ ਮੇਰੀ ਮਾਏ; ਸਤਿਗੁਰੂ. ਮੈ ਪਾਇਆ ॥
anandu bhaiā merī māe; satgurū. mai pāiā ॥
ISO · anaṁdu bhaiā mērī māē; satigurū. mai pāiā ॥
Bliss has come, O my mother; the True Guru — I have found him.
I am in ecstasy, O my mother, for I have found my True Guru.
ਸਤਿਗੁਰੁ. ਤ ਪਾਇਆ ਸਹਜ ਸੇਤੀ; ਮਨਿ ਵਜੀਆ ਵਾਧਾਈਆ ॥
satguru. ta pāiā sahaj setī; mani vajīā vādhāīā ॥
ISO · satiguru. ta pāiā sahaja sētī; mani vajīā vādhāīā ॥
The True Guru — found, and found with equipoise; in the mind the congratulations have sounded.
I have found the True Guru, with intuitive ease, and my mind vibrates with the music of bliss.
ਰਾਗ ਰਤਨ ਪਰਵਾਰ ਪਰੀਆ; ਸਬਦ ਗਾਵਣ ਆਈਆ ॥
rāg ratan parvār parīā; sabad gāvaṇ āīā ॥
ISO · rāga ratana paravāra parīā; sabada gāvaṇa āīā ॥
The jewel-rāgs, with their families and their attendant melodies, have come to sing the Word.
The jewelled melodies and their related celestial harmonies have come to sing the Word of the Shabad.
ਸਬਦੋ ਤ ਗਾਵਹੁ ਹਰੀ ਕੇਰਾ; ਮਨਿ ਜਿਨੀ ਵਸਾਇਆ ॥
sabado ta gāvahu harī kerā; mani jinī vasāiā ॥
ISO · sabadō ta gāvahu harī kērā; mani jinī vasāiā ॥
Sing then the Word that is Hari's — you in whose mind he has been made to dwell.
The Lord dwells within the minds of those who sing the Shabad.
ਕਹੈ ਨਾਨਕੁ. ਅਨੰਦੁ ਹੋਆ; ਸਤਿਗੁਰੂ ਮੈ ਪਾਇਆ ॥੧॥
kahai nānaku. anandu hoā; satgurū mai pāiā ॥1॥
ISO · kahai nānaku. anaṁdu hōā; satigurū mai pāiā ॥1॥
Says Nanak: bliss has come; the True Guru — I have found him.
Says Nanak, I am in ecstasy, for I have found my True Guru. ||1||
Stanza 40 of forty · Rāmkalī · ang 922
Gurmukhireadingliteral, word by wordtranslation
ਅਨਦੁ ਸੁਣਹੁ ਵਡਭਾਗੀਹੋ; ਸਗਲ ਮਨੋਰਥ ਪੂਰੇ ॥
anad suṇahu vaḍbhāgīho; sagal manorath pūre ॥
ISO · anadu suṇahu vaḍabhāgīhō; sagala manōratha pūrē ॥
Hear the bliss, O greatly fortunate ones; every aim of the heart is fulfilled.
Listen to the song of bliss, O most fortunate ones; all your longings shall be fulfilled.
ਪਾਰਬ੍ਰਹਮੁ ਪ੍ਰਭੁ ਪਾਇਆ; ਉਤਰੇ ਸਗਲ ਵਿਸੂਰੇ ॥
pārbrahmu prabhu pāiā; utre sagal visūre ॥
ISO · pārabrahamu prabhu pāiā; utarē sagala visūrē ॥
The Supreme Lord has been found; every grief has come down off me.
I have obtained the Supreme Lord God, and all sorrows have been forgotten.
ਦੂਖ ਰੋਗ ਸੰਤਾਪ ਉਤਰੇ; ਸੁਣੀ ਸਚੀ ਬਾਣੀ ॥
dūkh rog santāp utre; suṇī sachī bāṇī ॥
ISO · dūkha rōga saṁtāpa utarē; suṇī sacī bāṇī ॥
Pain, sickness, torment have come down; the true bāṇī has been heard.
Pain, illness and suffering have departed, listening to the True Bani.
ਸੰਤ ਸਾਜਨ ਭਏ ਸਰਸੇ; ਪੂਰੇ ਗੁਰ ਤੇ ਜਾਣੀ ॥
sant sājan bhae sarse; pūre gur te jāṇī ॥
ISO · saṁta sājana bhaē sarasē; pūrē gura tē jāṇī ॥
The saints and the friends have grown glad; from the complete Guru it is known.
The Saints and their friends are in ecstasy, knowing the Perfect Guru.
ਸੁਣਤੇ ਪੁਨੀਤ. ਕਹਤੇ ਪਵਿਤੁ; ਸਤਿਗੁਰੁ ਰਹਿਆ ਭਰਪੂਰੇ ॥
suṇte punīt. kahte pavitu; satguru rahiā bharpūre ॥
ISO · suṇatē punīta. kahatē pavitu; satiguru rahiā bharapūrē ॥
Those who hear are made pure, those who speak are made holy; the True Guru stays brim-full.
Pure are the listeners, and pure are the speakers; the True Guru is all-pervading and permeating.
ਬਿਨਵੰਤਿ ਨਾਨਕੁ. ਗੁਰ ਚਰਣ ਲਾਗੇ; ਵਾਜੇ ਅਨਹਦ ਤੂਰੇ ॥੪੦॥੧॥
binvanti nānaku. gur charaṇ lāge; vāje anhad tūre ॥40॥1॥
ISO · binavaṁti nānaku. gura caraṇa lāgē; vājē anahada tūrē ॥40॥1॥
Nanak submits: for those attached to the Guru's feet, the unstruck trumpets sound.
Prays Nanak, touching the Guru's Feet, the unstruck sound current of the celestial bugles vibrates and resounds. ||40||1||
21 further lines of this composition are sung at the ceremony and are held, verified and checksummed, in the page's data file. They are not printed here because the article is an explanation rather than a service book.
At the close — Vīāhu Hoā Mere Bābulā
What happens. Sung after the lāvāṅ, by convention rather than by any rule. What it means here. It is in the voice of a bride addressing her father — the same voice, and very nearly the same address, as the folk suhāg her aunts were singing in the house a week earlier. But the bridegroom it announces she has found is the Timeless Form, who never died and was never born.
This is one stanza lifted out of a five-stanza chhant. What is sung at a wedding is an excerpt.
Stanza 2 · Sirīrāg · ang 78
Gurmukhireadingliteral, word by wordtranslation
ਵੀਆਹੁ ਹੋਆ ਮੇਰੇ ਬਾਬੁਲਾ; ਗੁਰਮੁਖੇ ਹਰਿ ਪਾਇਆ ॥
vīāhu hoā mere bābulā; gurmukhe hari pāiā ॥
ISO · vīāhu hōā mērē bābulā; guramukhē hari pāiā ॥
The marriage has taken place, O my father; through the Guru's face, Har has been found.
My marriage has been performed, O my father. As Gurmukh, I have found the Lord.
ਅਗਿਆਨੁ ਅੰਧੇਰਾ ਕਟਿਆ; ਗੁਰ ਗਿਆਨੁ ਪ੍ਰਚੰਡੁ ਬਲਾਇਆ ॥
agiānu andherā kaṭiā; gur giānu prachaṇḍu balāiā ॥
ISO · agiānu aṁdhērā kaṭiā; gura giānu pracaṁḍu balāiā ॥
The dark of not-knowing is cut away; the Guru's knowing, blazing, has been lit.
The darkness of ignorance has been dispelled. The Guru has revealed the blazing light of spiritual wisdom.
ਬਲਿਆ ਗੁਰ ਗਿਆਨੁ. ਅੰਧੇਰਾ ਬਿਨਸਿਆ; ਹਰਿ ਰਤਨੁ ਪਦਾਰਥੁ ਲਾਧਾ ॥
baliā gur giānu. andherā binasiā; hari ratanu padārthu lādhā ॥
ISO · baliā gura giānu. aṁdhērā binasiā; hari ratanu padārathu lādhā ॥
The Guru's knowing burned, the dark perished; Har the jewel, the treasure, was found.
This spiritual wisdom given by the Guru shines forth, and the darkness has been dispelled. I have found the Priceless Jewel of the Lord.
ਹਉਮੈ ਰੋਗੁ ਗਇਆ. ਦੁਖੁ ਲਾਥਾ; ਆਪੁ ਆਪੈ. ਗੁਰਮਤਿ ਖਾਧਾ ॥
haumai rogu gaiā. dukhu lāthā; āpu āpai. gurmati khādhā ॥
ISO · haumai rōgu gaiā. dukhu lāthā; āpu āpai. guramati khādhā ॥
The sickness of I-am-ness went, the pain came off; the self, by the self, through the Guru's teaching, was eaten.
The sickness of my ego has been dispelled, and my pain is over and done. Through the Guru's Teachings, my identity has consumed my identical identity.
ਅਕਾਲ ਮੂਰਤਿ. ਵਰੁ ਪਾਇਆ ਅਬਿਨਾਸੀ; ਨਾ ਕਦੇ ਮਰੈ. ਨ ਜਾਇਆ ॥
akāl mūrati. varu pāiā abināsī; nā kade marai. na jāiā ॥
ISO · akāla mūrati. varu pāiā abināsī; nā kadē marai. na jāiā ॥
Timeless Form — a bridegroom is found who does not perish; who never dies, and was never born.
I have obtained my Husband Lord, the Akaal Moorat, the Undying Form. He is Imperishable; He shall never die, and He shall never ever leave.
ਵੀਆਹੁ ਹੋਆ ਮੇਰੇ ਬਾਬੋਲਾ; ਗੁਰਮੁਖੇ ਹਰਿ ਪਾਇਆ ॥੨॥
vīāhu hoā mere bābolā; gurmukhe hari pāiā ॥2॥
ISO · vīāhu hōā mērē bābōlā; guramukhē hari pāiā ॥2॥
The marriage has taken place, O my father; through the Guru's face, Har has been found.
My marriage has been performed, O my father. As Gurmukh, I have found the Lord. ||2||
A word spelled two ways, on purpose. The refrain of this chhant addresses the father as bābulā — but the printed scripture alternates between two spellings of it, one with the vowel u and one with o, and the two lines above show both. It is not a misprint here and it is not a misprint in the saroop. Sixteenth-century Punjabi orthography was not standardised, the Guru Granth Sahib preserves that variation rather than tidying it, and every printed copy in the world reproduces it identically.
It is worth knowing because it is a standing trap: sources that reproduce this verse are sometimes accused of inconsistency for showing both forms, when in fact showing both is what fidelity to the text requires. Nobody gets to correct scripture into consistency — which is also the reason this page extracts its text mechanically instead of retyping it.
Established
At the close — Pūrī Āsā Jī Mansā
What happens. The other conventional closing shabad; sometimes both are sung, sometimes only one. What it means here. Hope and longing, both fulfilled — and a final line that turns the whole wedding metaphor inward: I have found the bridegroom in my own house. Nobody travelled anywhere.
Again one stanza, the fourth, out of a longer that opens on the previous ang.
Stanza 4 · Vaḍhans · ang 577
Gurmukhireadingliteral, word by wordtranslation
ਪੂਰੀ ਆਸਾ ਜੀ; ਮਨਸਾ ਮੇਰੇ ਰਾਮ ॥
pūrī āsā jī; manasā mere rām ॥
ISO · pūrī āsā jī; manasā mērē rāma ॥
Fulfilled, the hope, O dear one; and the longing too, my Ram.
My hopes and desires have been fulfilled, O my Lord.
ਮੋਹਿ ਨਿਰਗੁਣ ਜੀਉ; ਸਭਿ ਗੁਣ ਤੇਰੇ ਰਾਮ ॥
mohi nirguṇ jīu; sabhi guṇ tere rām ॥
ISO · mōhi niraguṇa jīu; sabhi guṇa tērē rāma ॥
I am the one without qualities, O dear one; all the qualities are yours, Ram.
I am worthless, without virtue; all virtues are Yours, O Lord.
ਸਭਿ ਗੁਣ ਤੇਰੇ. ਠਾਕੁਰ ਮੇਰੇ; ਕਿਤੁ ਮੁਖਿ ਤੁਧੁ ਸਾਲਾਹੀ ॥
sabhi guṇ tere. ṭhākur mere; kitu mukhi tudhu sālāhī ॥
ISO · sabhi guṇa tērē. ṭhākura mērē; kitu mukhi tudhu sālāhī ॥
All the qualities are yours, my master; with what mouth shall I praise you?
All virtues are Yours, O my Lord and Master; with what mouth should I praise You?
ਗੁਣੁ ਅਵਗੁਣੁ ਮੇਰਾ. ਕਿਛੁ ਨ ਬੀਚਾਰਿਆ; ਬਖਸਿ ਲੀਆ ਖਿਨ ਮਾਹੀ ॥
guṇu avguṇu merā. kichhu na bīchāriā; bakhasi līā khin māhī ॥
ISO · guṇu avaguṇu mērā. kichu na bīcāriā; bakhasi līā khina māhī ॥
My merit, my demerit — not any of it was weighed; forgiveness was given inside an instant.
You did not consider my merits and demerits; you forgave me in an instant.
ਨਉ ਨਿਧਿ ਪਾਈ ਵਜੀ ਵਾਧਾਈ; ਵਾਜੇ ਅਨਹਦ ਤੂਰੇ ॥
nau nidhi pāī vajī vādhāī; vāje anhad tūre ॥
ISO · nau nidhi pāī vajī vādhāī; vājē anahada tūrē ॥
The nine treasures are obtained, the congratulation has sounded; the unstruck trumpets play.
I have obtained the nine treasures, congratulations are pouring in, and the unstruck melody resounds.
ਕਹੁ ਨਾਨਕ. ਮੈ ਵਰੁ ਘਰਿ ਪਾਇਆ; ਮੇਰੇ ਲਾਥੇ ਜੀ ਸਗਲ ਵਿਸੂਰੇ ॥੪॥੧॥
kahu nānak. mai varu ghari pāiā; mere lāthe jī sagal visūre ॥4॥1॥
ISO · kahu nānaka. mai varu ghari pāiā; mērē lāthē jī sagala visūrē ॥4॥1॥
Says Nanak: I have found the bridegroom in my own house; all my griefs, O dear one, have come off me.
Says Nanak, I have found my Husband Lord within my own home, and all my anxiety is forgotten. ||4||1||
Where the interpretations differ
The four lāvāṅ are universally explained inside the tradition as four stages of the soul's union with the divine, with the human marriage as the vehicle of the teaching rather than its subject. That is not an overlay a commentator has added: the Rehat Maryada itself instructs the officiant to expound the relationship between the individual soul and the Supreme Soul in the light of the contents of the circumambulation stanzas. The allegorical reading is what the code of conduct directs the officiant to teach in the room.
A minority reading — audible in some commentary and in a great deal of popular explanation — treats the four stages as literal advice to a couple. Both readings run through the same text, and the second is not fringe.
ContestedReligious tradition
The majority position is clear; the minority is real. Confidence: medium-high that the split is as described.
The history — and it is shorter than people assume
What the tradition holds. Guru Amar Das composed Anand Sāhib; his successor Guru Ram Das composed the lāvāṅ; the Anand marriage form has been observed since the early days of Sikhism, and the marriage of Guru Arjan to Mata Ganga is often named as the first solemnised by it.
Religious traditionEstablished (the authorship only)
The authorship of both compositions is established and not in doubt — it is recorded in the scripture. The claim of continuous observance from the sixteenth century is where the difficulty starts. The date of Guru Arjan's marriage is given variously as 1579 and 1589 in circulating accounts; this page asserts neither, and the claim that theirs was the first Anand Karaj is religious tradition in any case rather than established history.
What historians say. The dominant scholarly account is that for most of Sikh history most Sikhs married by Brahmanical rites — a Brahmin officiant, a sacred fire, and circumambulation of the fire. The Anand rite as a distinct Sikh marriage liturgy, with the lāvāṅ read and sung and the couple circling the Guru Granth Sahib rather than a fire, is a nineteenth-century formalisation. It is associated first with the Nirankaris under Baba Dayal (1783–1855) and his successor Baba Darbara Singh, and was then carried into the mainstream by the Singh Sabha movement from 1873.
Established (scholarly majority)Contested against the traditional account
The two accounts are closer than they look, and the distinction matters.
The texts are sixteenth-century. Nobody disputes that; the lāvāṅ are Guru Ram Das's and they are in the Guru Granth Sahib with his authorship marked. The liturgy — this text, in this order, with this choreography, as the normative and legally recognised Sikh marriage — is nineteenth-century. That is what the reform movements built.
“The ceremony was formalised in the nineteenth century” is not the same claim as “the ceremony was invented in the nineteenth century,” and a reader will hear the second if the first is put carelessly. Much of the disagreement between the traditional and scholarly accounts is a disagreement about what the word began means.
A live sub-dispute, worth one sentence: some Sikhs object to the circumambulation itself, on the grounds that circling anything at all is borrowed from the older rite and therefore un-Sikh. It is a minority position and it is sincerely held. Contested
A timeline
c. 1550s–1570s
Anand Sāhib composed
Guru Amar Das composes Anand Sāhib, in Rāg Rāmkalī, forty stanzas. Established
1574–1581
The lāvāṅ composed
Guru Ram Das composes the four lāvāṅ, in Rāg Sūhī. Established
1604
The Adi Granth is compiled
Compiled and installed at Harmandir Sahib. Both compositions are in it — which is why, three centuries later, there is a book to walk around. The Adi Granth → Established
16th–19th c.
Most Sikh marriages are solemnised by Brahmanical rites
A Brahmin officiant, a sacred fire, circumambulation of the fire. Established (scholarly majority)
c. 1840s–1855
The Nirankari reform
Under Baba Dayal, a simple and inexpensive marriage rite centred on the Adi Granth. Established
1855 onwards
Baba Darbara Singh spreads the reformed ceremonies
From Rawalpindi — which is to say, from what is now Pakistan. Established
1873
The Singh Sabha is founded
The Anand form becomes a cardinal point of Sikh reform. The Khalsa → Established
22 October 1909
The Anand Marriage Act, 1909
Act VII of 1909, Imperial Legislative Council. The law → Established
1947
Partition
Rawalpindi — the Nirankari heartland where the reformed rite took shape — is in Pakistan. Partition → Established
7 June 2012
The Anand Marriage (Amendment) Act, 2012
Act 29 of 2012 receives presidential assent in India. Established
March 2018
The Punjab Sikh Anand Karaj Marriage Act 2018
Passed by the Provincial Assembly of the Punjab, Pakistan, on 14 March; assented 19 March. Established
2025
The Supreme Court of India intervenes
States and Union Territories are directed to frame the registration rules the 2012 amendment had asked for. Established
Two Punjabs, two statutes
The Anand Marriage Act was passed in 1909 for the whole of British India. In 1947 the province it was written for was cut in two, and the Act went with both halves. India amended it in 2012 to give Sikh marriages a register of their own. Pakistan's Punjab repealed it in 2018 and replaced it with a statute that defines the ceremony, names the four lāvāṅ in law, and licenses registrars to record it.
One ceremony, one starting point, two legislatures, two roads. This is the sort of thing that is only visible if you look at both Punjabs at once.
The Anand Marriage Act, 1909 — British India
Act VII of 1909, enacted by the Imperial Legislative Council on 22 October 1909. Its long title states its purpose exactly: to remove doubts as to the validity of the marriage ceremony common among the Sikhs called Anand. Four sections; no registration provision; no definition of the ceremony.
Why it was needed is the interesting part. Colonial courts had begun to doubt whether a marriage solemnised by the Anand rite — no fire, no Brahmin, no circumambulation of a fire — was a valid marriage at all. The Act does not create the ceremony. It defends one that reformers had recently established, against a legal system that did not recognise it.
It was a product of the Singh Sabha. The bill was introduced in the Imperial Legislative Council by Tikka Ripudaman Singh of Nabha; Sardar Sunder Singh Majithia is credited with steering it through; and Bhai Kahn Singh Nabha supplied much of the doctrinal groundwork that made the case for a distinct Sikh rite arguable at all. Accounts differ in emphasis on who did what. This page names all three and ranks none.
Established
Confidence: high on the Act, its number and its date; medium on the precise division of labour between the three men, where the scholarly accounts genuinely differ.
Its long weakness was that it had no registration machinery. In practice Sikh marriages in independent India were registered under the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955, which subsumes Sikhs, Jains and Buddhists within its definition of “Hindu.” A Sikh couple's certificate said Hindu. For diaspora Sikhs establishing marital status abroad this was a practical and an identity grievance for decades.
The Anand Marriage (Amendment) Act, 2012 — India
Act 29 of 2012, presidential assent 7 June 2012. It inserts a new section 6 requiring state governments to make rules for the registration of Anand Karaj marriages, providing for a marriage register maintained by a state-appointed officer, certified extracts as proof, and — the operative relief — that a couple registered under this Act need not register under any other law in force.
Two corrections, because press coverage routinely gets both wrong. Registration under the amended Act is not compulsory, and non-registration does not affect the validity of the marriage; widely-read summaries calling it “compulsory registration” are simply wrong. And the amendment did not “legalise” Anand Karaj. It was already legal — that is what 1909 did. The amendment gave it a register.
It then stalled. Rule-making was left to the states and Union Territories and many never notified rules, so the register the amendment promised did not exist in most of the country. In 2025 the Supreme Court of India, in proceedings brought by advocate Amanjot Singh Chadha, directed states and Union Territories to frame and notify rules within a fixed period, ordered that in the meantime registering authorities must accept Anand Karaj applications under existing frameworks rather than refusing them for want of rules, and required the Union to circulate model rules and report back on compliance. Rules have since been notified in further states, past the deadline the Court set. Compliance was still arriving piecemeal when this page was last checked.
Established
Confidence: high on the Act and the fact of the 2025 direction; medium on the current state of compliance, which is a live administrative matter that will keep moving. The date this was last checked is recorded in the sources drawer. This page does not list which states have complied, because that list is out of date the week it is written.
The Punjab Sikh Anand Karaj Marriage Act 2018 — Pakistan
Passed by the Provincial Assembly of the Punjab on 14 March 2018 and assented on 19 March, as a private member's bill moved by Sardar Ramesh Singh Arora, then the only Sikh member of the Assembly. It was reported at the time as the first law anywhere in the world dedicated specifically to the registration of Sikh marriages.
What it does is more than the Indian statute:
- It defines the ceremony in law. Anand Karaj is defined as the lawful union of a Sikh male and a Sikh female solemnised in accordance with Sikh religious practice, “where the four laavaan… are recited.” A statute that names the lāvāṅ.
- It defines granthī in law — a Sikh who recites the Guru Granth Sahib and solemnises a marriage between Sikhs.
- It defines Sikh and Sikh religion — belief in Akalpurakh, the ten Gurus from Guru Nanak to Guru Gobind Singh, and acceptance of the Guru Granth Sahib as the eternal living Guru.
- Minimum age eighteen for both parties, and free and full consent.
- Registration with a licensed Anand Karaj Registrar, within thirty days, with a copy to the Union Council; an Anand Karaj Certificate is issued.
- It repealed the Anand Marriage Act, 1909 in its application to the Province of the Punjab.
Implementation lagged. The Assembly's term ended in May 2018 and the machinery — rules, licensed registrars, a reconciliation council — was not put in place at the time. Two sets of rules were approved by the provincial cabinet in June 2024, taken forward under Arora, by then the province's Minister for Minorities Affairs. Whether registrars have since been licensed and marriages actually registered under the Act could not be established from the sources available when this page was last checked, and the page does not assert either way.
Established
Confidence: high on the Act, its passage and its contents; high that rules were approved in June 2024; low on operational status, which is a genuine gap in the available reporting rather than a finding that the Act is inoperative.
The point, made quietly. The 1909 Act was passed for the whole of British India. In 2018 one half of the partitioned province repealed it and replaced it; the other half amended it. Two Punjabs, two legislatures, the same ceremony, the same starting point, two different roads out of it — and it is the Pakistani statute that writes the four lāvāṅ into law.
Variation, and the live debates
What follows is disputed among Sikhs, sometimes sharply. The positions below are set out as their holders would set them out. This page does not adjudicate between them and does not think it is its place to.
One frame applies to all of it: a code of conduct describes what should happen. It is evidence of what a community has decided, and evidence that the thing it prohibits is happening. The gap between the Rehat Maryada and the room is not hypocrisy — it is the ordinary condition of every religious community everywhere, and treating it as scandal would be both unkind and unscholarly.
Where may the Anand Karaj be held?
Prescribed. The Rehat Maryada requires a congregational gathering in the presence of the Guru Granth Sahib. It does not enumerate venues.
The standing directive. Sri Akal Takht Sahib issued a on 16 March 1998 against carrying a — a physical volume of the Guru Granth Sahib — out to hotels, banquet halls, clubs and marriage palaces. It has been reiterated periodically since and remains the reference point whenever the question is raised.
The reason, which is the part usually left out. The objection is not to hotels as such. It is that a saroop must be housed and attended with a specific discipline, and that a venue serving alcohol, meat or tobacco cannot provide it. Stating the reason makes the directive intelligible instead of arbitrary.
What actually happens. Enforcement is uneven, and hotel and destination ceremonies have been marketed as aspirational for years, particularly in the diaspora.
PrescribedCommon practiceContested
This page treats the venue question as a standing dispute and deliberately reports no particular news cycle. The underlying disagreement is permanent; the news about it is not. Confidence: high on the 1998 sandesh and its substance, which rests on consistent retrospective reporting rather than on a primary document seen by this project; medium on how common departure from it is.
May an Anand Karaj join a Sikh and a non-Sikh?
Prescribed. The Rehat Maryada states that persons professing faiths other than the Sikh faith cannot be joined in wedlock by the Anand Karaj ceremony.
The directive. A sandesh of 16 August 2007 from Sri Akal Takht Sahib restated this, and added that a partner not of Sikh origin must adopt the Sikh faith, including carrying Singh or Kaur on identity documents, before the ceremony.
In the diaspora it became a conflict rather than a debate. The Sikh Council UK approved Guidelines of Approach to Inter-Faith Marriages in Gurdwaras on 11 October 2014 to bring British gurdwaras to a consistent position. In August 2015 a resolution of more than 180 British gurdwaras affirmed that Anand Karaj should be conducted only between Sikhs. Protesters disrupted ceremonies at several gurdwaras; in September 2016, 55 men were arrested after a protest at a gurdwara in Leamington Spa, an incident that drew armed police and was widely reported. Two men later prosecuted were acquitted.
A correction worth making, because the error is everywhere. Many accounts cite a “2014 Akal Takht directive” on inter-faith marriage. This project could find no such document. What exists is the Akal Takht sandesh of 16 August 2007 and the Sikh Council UK guidelines of October 2014 — the latter a diaspora organisation's own guidance, which grounds itself explicitly in the 2007 sandesh rather than in any 2014 order. The two appear to have been merged in retelling. This page cites both separately and merges neither.
The positions, fairly stated. Those who hold the line argue that the lāvāṅ are a specifically Sikh spiritual instrument, that a ceremony conducted for someone who does not accept the Guru is not that ceremony, and that civil marriage exists and is not disparaged. Those who object argue that Sikh teaching on caste and lineage is explicitly universalist, that gurdwaras welcome all, that a requirement to change a name on a passport tests paperwork rather than faith, and that the rule falls hardest on couples raised in the diaspora. Both of these are arguments made in good faith by Sikhs. This page states them and stops.
PrescribedContested
Punjabia takes no position. Confidence: high on the 2007 sandesh, on the 2014 guidelines and on the sequence of events in Britain; the framing of those events is itself contested, so the page reports the sequence rather than characterising the participants.
Gurdwara to gurdwara, and across the diaspora
The language of the address is increasingly English, or bilingual, in Britain, Canada and the United States. Some gurdwaras provide a printed English order of service; some project translations on a screen.
Length runs from about forty minutes to well over two hours, depending almost entirely on the address and the amount of . The proportion given to music varies widely — some gurdwaras engage professional rāgī jathās, others rely on the to sing.
Timing. The Rehat Maryada explicitly forbids consulting horoscopes to find an auspicious day. The practice persists in some families.
And everything around it. The , the mehndi nights, the jāgo, the chūṛā, the doli — the cultural day that surrounds the ceremony is largely shared across Punjabi communities regardless of religion, and the Rehat Maryada takes a firm line against a long list of it. That day has its own page and is not duplicated here.
Common practicePrescribed
The words on this page
Sikh liturgical vocabulary is heavily Sanskritic, and this list is honest about that. But notice what sits at the centre of it: , the formal Sikh prayer, is Persian — ʿarz-dāsht, a petition to a superior. is Arabic and Persian welded together. is Persian. , the seat of Sikh temporal authority, is the Persian word for a throne.
The vocabulary of Sikh worship is itself Punjabi in the full sense, drawing on both of the language's inheritances. That sentence is worth more than a balanced word count would be.
Tap any underlined word on this page for its full entry, or open the word archive.
A note on script. This page is in Gurmukhi only, and that is a decision rather than an omission. Punjabia normally sets every Punjabi word in both Gurmukhi and Shahmukhi, because Punjabi is written in both and the site exists partly to keep that true. But there is no authoritative Shahmukhi text of the Guru Granth Sahib to draw on. Rendering scripture into Shahmukhi would be an act of authorship, not a conversion, and this project is not the right body to perform it. Rather than do it for the surrounding vocabulary and not for the verse, the whole page stays in one script and says why. The wedding pages and the folk-song forms carry both scripts as usual.
Keep going
The same wedding, in a different register. In the days before an Anand Karaj the bride's side is singing suhāg and the groom's side ghoṛīāṅ — anonymous folk songs, unfixed, sung by women in courtyards, about leaving home and about setting out. Days later the same families sit in a gurdwara while four stanzas of scripture are read and sung. Folk song and Gurbani, the courtyard and the darbar hall, in one week, for one wedding. Neither is the background to the other. Punjabi culture holds both, and understanding the wedding means hearing them together — which is why music and custom are not separate subjects on this site.
Doors out
The Punjabi Wedding The Adi Granth Guru Nanak at Kartarpur The founding of the Khalsa The wedding songs The word archive
The Nikah forthcoming The Hindu vivāh forthcoming
Where this comes from
The order of service is drawn from the Sikh Rehat Maryada as published by the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee, and is distinguished throughout from what gurdwaras are commonly observed to do. The “common practice” column is descriptive rather than measured: it rests on published accounts of what is observed, not on survey data, and no figure for the prevalence of anything appears on this page. Where translators disagree materially, the page says so rather than letting one rendering stand as settled. Where a date or an attribution could not be established to this project's standard, it has been left out rather than guessed at.
The scripture, and how it was verified
The Gurmukhi was extracted programmatically, not transcribed, from the Shabad OS database — an open, versioned corpus digitised from physical printed saroops with photographic review and a public logbook of corrections. Each unit was selected by its address in the corpus rather than by matching a first line, and the extent of each was asserted against the printed stanza numerals at build time. Every line stores a SHA-256 of its Gurmukhi and the build refuses to run if one has changed.
What has not been done, stated plainly. searchgurbani.com is this page's authority of record and the tiebreak where sources differ. The intended second pull from it — a codepoint-level check that the characters which left the source are the characters that arrived here — has not yet been run, because the site is not reachable from the environment this page was built in. The check is scripted and waiting. Until it has run, and until a reader of Gurmukhi has confirmed the rendered text at projection size, every line on this page carries an under-review marker.
English translation: Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa, Khalsa Consensus Translation, as published on searchgurbani.com. Original Gurmukhi text: Sri Guru Granth Sahib, public domain. One translator is used throughout — no line on this page mixes translators. The literal word-order gloss and the reading romanisation are Punjabia's own first-pass authoring, scheduled for review; the ISO 15919 lane is generated mechanically from the Gurmukhi.
Sources
- Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee, Sikh Reht Maryada: The Code of Sikh Conduct and Conventions, English translation — chapter XI, article XVIII, Anand Sanskār. The source for every “prescribed” claim on this page. sgpc.net
- Shabad OS database (
@shabados/database) — the versioned open corpus the Gurmukhi and the English translation were extracted from. github.com/shabados/database - W. H. McLeod, Sikhs of the Khalsa: A History of the Khalsa Rahit (Oxford University Press, 2003), §7.30 “The Anand marriage ceremony” — the standard statement of the case that the Anand rite as a distinct Sikh liturgy is a nineteenth-century formalisation.
- Harjot Oberoi, The Construction of Religious Boundaries: Culture, Identity, and Diversity in the Sikh Tradition (University of Chicago Press, 1994) — on the Singh Sabha's reconstruction of Sikh ritual, and the place of the Anand rite in it.
- John C. B. Webster, The Nirankari Sikhs (Delhi: Macmillan, 1979) — the standard monograph on Baba Dayal, Baba Darbara Singh and the movement that first centred the marriage rite on the Adi Granth.
- Sheena Pall, “Issues of Sikh Identity: Sanatanist–Sikh Debate,” Journal of Punjab Studies 20:1–2 (2013), 193–216 — for the Anand Marriage Bill's passage through the Imperial Legislative Council and Bhai Kahn Singh Nabha's doctrinal groundwork.
- J. S. Grewal and Indu Banga, A Political Biography of Maharaja Ripudaman Singh of Nabha (Oxford University Press, 2018) — the fullest account of the bill's sponsor. Consulted at the level of its catalogue record only; a direct read is owed before this page makes any finer claim about who did what in 1909.
- Eleanor Nesbitt, Sikhism: A Very Short Introduction, 2nd ed. (Oxford University Press, 2016) — the general-reader starting point for Sikh practice and rites of passage.
- Doris R. Jakobsh, Relocating Gender in Sikh History: Transformation, Meaning and Identity (Oxford University Press, 2003) — for the gendered structure of the rite and its reform.
- Nikky-Guninder Kaur Singh, The Feminine Principle in the Sikh Vision of the Transcendent (Cambridge University Press, 1993), and “A Feminist Interpretation of Sikh Scripture,” ch. 50 in Pashaura Singh and Louis E. Fenech, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Sikh Studies (Oxford University Press, 2014), 606–24 — on the soul-bride imagery the lāvāṅ turn on.
- The statutes themselves: the Anand Marriage Act, 1909 (Act VII of 1909); the Anand Marriage (Amendment) Act, 2012 (Act 29 of 2012); and the Punjab Sikh Anand Karaj Marriage Act 2018 (Act VI of 2018, Punjab, Pakistan). The 2018 Act, full text
- Amanjot Singh Chadha v. Union of India, Supreme Court of India, 2025 — the direction to states and Union Territories to notify registration rules under the 1909 Act as amended.
Sourcing standard, and its limits. Sourcing on this page is encyclopaedic rather than archival: enough to establish what is agreed, what is disputed, and who disputes it — not enough to settle any of it. Items 3 to 10 were identified and their bibliographic details verified, but several were not read directly for this pass, and the page makes no claim that rests on a specific page of a book nobody here has opened. Two matters are live and were checked on 25 July 2026: the implementation status of the Pakistani Punjab Act of 2018, and compliance with the Indian Supreme Court's 2025 direction. Both were incomplete and still moving on that date, and both are described here in terms that should still read correctly in five years. Devotional websites turned up repeatedly in research and are not cited: they pointed at real facts, and the real facts needed real sources. All Gurmukhi on this page awaits native-reader review.