Divinity Atlas

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Where the Sections Begin to Vary in Size

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Where the Sections Begin to Vary in Size

Gujri sits at the point where the volume's sections stop being uniformly large. The first four rags carry a great deal of material; from here on the sections vary from the very substantial to a handful of pages, and the variation is not editorial shaping.

The Granth does not pad. If a measure carries four compositions, the section runs to four compositions and the next heading follows. If a measure carries two hundred, the section runs that long. Nothing was added to fill a section out and nothing was moved to balance the volume, so section length is direct evidence of how much the Gurus and the bhagats actually composed in each measure.

That has a consequence for anyone trying to read the arrangement as a design. The sequence of the thirty-one rags is fixed and identical in every copy, but the volume nowhere states why they stand in that order, and the sizes do not decrease or increase in any pattern. Attempts have been made to find a principle in it, of mood, of time of day, of musical relationship, and none has been generally accepted.

What can be said is what the compilation demonstrably did: it fixed an order, and it recorded within each order exactly what existed. The absence of a stated principle is not a gap in the scholarship so much as a fact about the volume, and treating a plausible reconstruction as the answer would be a mistake this atlas is not going to make on the reader's behalf.

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