Bihagra is a measure of the night, and in the wider Indian tradition it carries longing and the pain of absence. The section makes conspicuous use of the extended lyric form the Granth reserves for sustained address, and its material fits the measure closely: a great deal of it speaks in the voice of a bride waiting for a husband who has not come.
That voice runs through the whole volume and it is not decoration. The Gurus adopted, from the devotional poetry of northern India, a convention in which the soul is female and God is the husband, and in which the fundamental religious condition is separation rather than possession. The images that follow from it, the unadorned woman, the empty bed, the message that does not arrive, the rival who is favoured, are worked at length and without embarrassment.
Two things follow. The first is that the emotional register of the Granth is frequently one of ache rather than of assurance, which surprises readers who expect a scripture of a martial community to be uniformly bracing. The second is that the male composers of these hymns speak throughout in a woman's voice, and modern scholarship has taken a considerable interest in what that does to the tradition's account of gender, with readings that range from the metaphorical to the substantive.
The convention is inherited, not invented here, and the Granth uses it more consistently than most of the traditions it was inherited from.