Bhairo is among the oldest named measures in the Indian system, associated in the wider tradition with dawn, and with an austere and awe-filled character rather than a tender one. The section is substantial and carries a strong body of work by Kabir and Namdev alongside the Gurus.
The character of the measure and the character of the material match. The compositions gathered here tend to the direct: less of the bride waiting, more of the plain address to a listener about what they are doing with their life. Kabir's voice in particular, blunt, aphoristic and given to jolting images, sits naturally in this register.
Measures like Bhairo also connect the Granth to a very long history. The name is attested in Indian musical writing centuries before the Gurus, and its associations were already settled when they used it. A volume compiled in the seventeenth century, setting its compositions in measures that had carried their character since the early medieval period, is participating in a continuity that its own contents rarely mention.
That continuity is one of the reasons the Granth is studied by musicologists who have no interest in its theology. It is a dated, attributed, internally consistent body of composition, specifying measures, from a period for which such bodies are scarce.