Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
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The Section With the Marriage Verses

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The Section With the Marriage Verses

Suhi is a substantial section and its name is a colour, the deep red of a bride's dress, which fits what the section is best known for. The four stanzas of Guru Ram Das that are used in the Sikh marriage stand here, and the rite takes its shape from them: the couple circles the installed volume once as each is read and then sung.

The section also carries two compositions of Guru Nanak contrasting a woman of ill grace with one of good grace, working the same conventional figure of the bride in a different direction, and a var.

What is worth noticing is the relation between the composition and the rite. The stanzas were not written as a marriage liturgy in the sense of instructions for a ceremony; they describe stages of a union with God in the language of a wedding. The rite grew around them, and its present form was regularised comparatively recently, in the codification of Sikh practice through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and in legislation that gave the ceremony civil standing.

The atlas describes the rite as a fact about the tradition and does not set out how to perform it. That is not squeamishness. A marriage rite in a living community is conducted by that community according to a code it maintains, and a reference work that renders it as a procedure invites exactly the misuse of turning a living observance into a template.

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