Gujri

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.

Gujri is a section of moderate size in which the devotional poets from outside the Sikh succession take up a conspicuous share of the space, alongside the Gurus and beside var compositions.

Their presence is the single most distinctive editorial fact about the Guru Granth Sahib. When Guru Arjan compiled the volume in 1604 he included the work of poets who were not Sikhs, who belonged to other traditions, and who in several cases came from social positions that the religious establishment of their time placed outside the reach of scripture altogether. A weaver, a cobbler, a butcher, a barber and a calico printer are among them. Their compositions are not appended, not footnoted and not marked as secondary; they sit inside the rag sections under the same headings as the Gurus' own work.

The inclusion was a judgement about content. What was gathered accorded with the teaching, and that was the qualification. Nothing in the volume argues the point or claims credit for it, which is characteristic: the Granth tends to enact its positions rather than assert them.

Later tradition gave the included poets a collective name and a settled standing, and their compositions are sung in congregations exactly as the Gurus' are. The historical questions that remain are about transmission, how these compositions reached the compilers, in what form and through which collections, and manuscript scholarship has been working on them for a century.