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The Second Twelve-Month Poem

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The Second Twelve-Month Poem

Tukhari is a short section, and it carries the second of the volume's two calendar poems, this one by Guru Nanak, in which the passing of the Punjabi year is set against a soul's longing.

Having two such poems, in two measures and by two different Gurus, is characteristic of how the Granth works. A form is not used once and retired. It is taken up again by a later hand, in a different musical setting, addressing the same material from a different angle, and the volume keeps both without cross-referencing them or explaining the relation.

This is one of the places where the arrangement by measure has an unintended cost. The two twelve-month poems sit hundreds of pages apart, in sections separated by twenty rag headings, and nothing on the page connects them. A reader who does not already know both exists will meet one and not the other. An arrangement by form or by subject would have set them side by side; an arrangement by measure cannot.

That trade-off runs throughout the volume. What the rag arrangement gives is a singer's index. What it costs is every connection that is not musical, and the entire commentarial and scholarly apparatus around the Granth exists in part to restore those connections from outside, since the volume itself will not make them.

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