Basant is the rag of spring, sung in the wider tradition only in its season, and the section carries a short var along with its hymns.
The seasonal material in the Granth is worth noticing for what it declines to do. The obvious use of a spring measure is consolation: the year turns, the dead ground greens, and so it will be with you. That is not the move the compositions make. The turn is usually the other way. The season returns to the tree without fail and without effort, and the person who has not turned toward God stays out of season regardless of what the month is doing.
The imagery is agricultural and specific, and it belonged to the daily life of the audience: the field, the crop, the well, the rain, the tree that comes into leaf. None of it is picturesque. A community of cultivators listening to a hymn about a crop is not being offered a metaphor from a distance.
That grounding is one of the characteristic textures of the volume, and it is easily lost in translation, where an agricultural image can read as pastoral decoration. In the original it is the plainest kind of speech available, drawn from what everybody present did all day, which is the same reason the volume reaches for the wedding, the funeral and the alphabet primer.