Guru Gobind Singh died in 1708 and the volume was assembled after his death, traditionally by Bhai Mani Singh at the instruction of Mata Sundri, from manuscripts held in different hands. Whether everything in it is the Guru's own composition has been argued ever since, and the argument became formal in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries during the Singh Sabha reform movement. It has never been resolved and it is not the atlas's place to resolve it.
The positions, stated plainly. One holds that the entire volume is the Guru's, that its variety reflects the range of a poet-king who kept fifty-two court poets, and that the retellings of Hindu narrative are literary material turned to Sikh ends rather than endorsement of what they describe. Another holds that only some compositions (typically Jaap Sahib, Akal Ustat, Bachitar Natak, Zafarnama and the banis of the Nitnem), are the Guru's, and that others, above all the Charitropakhyan, belong to court poets. The manuscript evidence is genuinely difficult: recensions differ, the earliest are not autograph, and the standard printed text dates from a nineteenth-century committee.
The Charitropakhyan is where the dispute is hottest, because its tales of women's stratagems sit oddly in a scripture and because Benti Chaupai, which is in the Nitnem, sits at the end of it. Positions on the section range from reading it as moral instruction in the ways of the world, through reading it as court literature wrongly bound in, to reading it as a later interpolation. Robin Rinehart's Debating the Dasam Granth is the fullest English account of the controversy and takes care to present it as a live argument among Sikhs rather than a problem for outsiders to adjudicate. This entry follows that posture: the text is recorded, its liturgical use is recorded, and the dispute is recorded as a dispute.