Asa is a morning measure and its name means hope, and the section is among the most used in the volume because of what it carries. The long var gathered here is sung in congregations in the early part of the day, and its combination of couplets and stanzas, with hymns of the first and third Gurus set into the frame, makes it one of the longest continuous performances in Sikh practice.
The material in it is unusually direct. It takes up ritual purity, the authority of birth, the treatment of women, the conduct of rulers and the behaviour of the religious professionals of its time, and it does so in a register closer to argument than to lyric. Several of the passages most often quoted in discussions of the Gurus' social teaching are here rather than in the more meditative sections.
Asa also supplies compositions that were later gathered into the fixed daily order, which is one reason the section is familiar to people who have never read the volume through. That gathering is worth being precise about: the daily order draws hymns from across the Granth and arranges them for use, so the same composition exists twice over, once in its rag section where it belongs musically and once in the sequence in which it is recited. The volume itself is not rearranged to suit the liturgy, and the liturgy does not replace the volume.