The var was the Punjabi bard's form, a ballad of heroes sung with a fixed refrain structure, and Guru Nanak's genius in Asa di Var was to keep the form and change the battlefield. Its twenty four pauris, stanzas of the ballad, praise not a chieftain's victories but the true Lord and the life of truth, and between them are set saloks, couplets and longer verses, by Guru Nanak and his successor Guru Angad, that carry the work's cutting edge.
The saloks are among the sharpest social criticism in scripture. They mock the sacred thread that leaves the wearer's conduct unchanged, expose the hypocrisy of purity laws administered by the impure of heart, weigh ritual bathing against inner truthfulness, and, in the most quoted passage, defend women, of woman we are born, to woman betrothed and wed, why call her inferior, from whom kings are born. Nothing exists without woman, Guru Nanak concludes, except the True One alone. The var's theology matches its ethics, the divine order, hukam, runs through all things, and honour before God belongs to conduct, not to caste, creed or ceremony. Set in Asa raga, the raga of hope, the composition joins the Sikh scripture's most confrontational verses to its most consoling music, argument and praise in alternation.