English: Folio of a Sarbloh Granth manuscript that bears the year 1698 as its date of writing.
G. S. Mann had the following to say in 'Sources for the Study of Guru Gobind Singh's Life and Times':
The Bachitar Natak Granth and the Charitaro Pakhian Granth were not the only anthologies of this type to have been produced during this period. Another large text entitled Sri Sarab Loh Granth ("Book of Sri Sarab Loh [All Steel]") sings about the annihilation of the demons by an incarnation of a deity named Mahakal/Shiva and closely echoes the spirit that pervades compositions collected in the Bachitar Natak Granth.Harnam Das Udasi, a serious scholar of early Sikh manuscripts, prepared an excellent annotated edition of Sri Sarab Loh Granth in the late 1980s but its circulation has remained restricted. Consequently little is known about the nature of this text's contents and the circumstances of its compilation.Alhough Udasi dates Sri Sarab Loh Granth to Guru Gobind Singh's period, others feel more comfortable in placing it in the late eighteenth century.
I was fortunate to come across two dated manuscripts of Sri Sarab Loh Granth that are presently available in private collections in the Punjab. Both the manuscripts mention the date of 1698 (Samat 1755, miti Bisakh sudi 5, folio 1, and 2b, respectively) as the time they were written. Reference to another manuscript with the same date appears in Udasi's detailed discussion of twenty-four manuscripts of the text that he examined during the preparation of his annotated edition.
The first manuscript above begins with the text of Bachitar Natak Granth (folios 1 to 350), and then goes on to include Sri Sarab Loh Granth (folios 351 to 702). The second manuscript contains only the text of Sri Sarab Loh Granth, though its pagination begins with folio number 351 and closes with 747.
Besides the details of the activity of Sri Sarab Loh, the text contains short compositions regarding the history of the ten Gurus, the nature of the Khalsa, the importance of the Granth and the Khalsa Panth, and the inscription that appears on the seal of Banda Singh (1710) and Sikh coins. These are the same themes that appear in other texts of the period and Anandpur seems to provide the most appropriate context for the creation of a text such as this. Whether the two manuscripts below were recorded in 1698 or their scribes simply copied the information from the original they used may be open to discussion, but the appearance of this date in three extant manuscripts is in itself significant.
The early manuscripts of Bachitar Natak Granth, Charitaro Pakhian Granth and Sri Sarab Loh Granth thus appear independently as well as joined together in different combinations. The joining of Bachitar Natak Granth and Charitaro Pakhian Granth seemingly became the more popular of these two alternatives and this expanded text came to be seen as representative of the period. In the two early manuscripts in which Bachitar Natak Granth and Charitaro Pakhian Granth appear together, the tables of contents are recorded along with their respective texts. In the later manuscripts, however, a master table of contents is placed at the head of the combined text, named Dasvin Patishahi ka Granth ("Book of the Tenth Master"). During the twentieth century, this title turned into what is now the more popular name, "Dasam Granth," though the previous title, Dasvin Patishahi ka Granth, remained in use. Finally, we should mention that there are several other texts that claim to have been produced at the Sikh court at Anandpur.
