Discover Gurbani

About Discover Gurbani Android App

ਗੁਰਬਾਣੀ ਇਸੁ ਜਗ ਮਹਿ ਚਾਨਣੁ ਕਰਮਿ ਵਸੈ ਮਨਿ ਆਏ ॥੧॥

Gurbani is the light to illuminate this world; By the grace of the King of Kings, it comes to abide within the mind. ||1|| - Siri Guru Amar Das Ji


ABOUT

Discover Gurbani is a mobile search engine for the Sikh Scriptures (called Gurbani), Guru Granth Sahib Ji. They contain the writings of the Sikh Gurus as well as other enlightened saints of different faiths. The Gurus gave these writings the highest status in the Sikh faith as they living embodiment of divinity itself. Moreover, the writings are targeted towards people of all faiths to take wisdom from, Sikhs and non-Sikhs alike. However, language can often become a barrier when studying foreign texts: both for academic research and leisure/curiosity.

This app aims to allow anyone, regardless of their background or belief to discover and experience the Sikh ethos. The user can read the text in their native language’s script through transliterations, listen to the recitation, and understand what they’re read with translations of the same language.

***NOTE: No translation of Gurbani can be considered complete as we are flawed by interpretation and constrained by the limitations of scripts and languages. Furthermore, the poetry of the text is also lost in translation. Therefore, anyone wishing to fully understand Gurbani should aim to learn the Gurmukhi script and correct enunciation.


FEATURES

- Search for particular verses and their corresponding hymns in 52 different languages and 13 transliterations

*The scriptures have a brilliant but subtle indexing system: For every sentence in the text, take the first 'letter' of each 'word' and concatenate it into a query-string and index the sentences in a db with this query string. Developers discovered that due to the uniqueness of the query-strings, running a search against these strings with exact-matching would reduce a total result set of 95000+ data entries to just a few (2-5 results) with only a 3-4 character match required. This app makes use of an API that uses this system for rapid search of hymns.

- Read the scriptures at your own pace (Sehaj Paath)

- Take a Hukamnama (random reading of the scriptures)

- Discover the Raags (musical measures) of Gurbani

*Gurbani is indexed by Raag, an Indian classical musical concept somewhat similar to musical scales. Each hymn has an associated Raag that evokes a unique mood and emotion tied to the meaning of the hymn.


ACKKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The Discover Gurbani team is grateful to the Sikher project, whose GurbaniDB platform was used to power this app, as well as the many other projects out there that have already made gurbani and sikhi widely accessible.