Jaijawanti

Jaijawanti is the last of the rag sections and the only one added after Guru Arjan's compilation of 1604. It contains the work of a single hand: Guru Tegh Bahadur, the ninth Guru, executed at Delhi in 1675.

His compositions were incorporated into the volume at the final recension, and they went in the way the scheme required, inserted at their place in the order of the succession within each rag section where a section already existed. Where they were set in a measure the volume had no section for, a new heading was created, and it stands here at the end of the rag sequence.

That is the whole visible trace of the second stage of the canon: a thirty-first heading, at the end, in one voice. The rest of the ninth Guru's work is distributed invisibly through the volume, indistinguishable in arrangement from what was there before, marked only by the number in its headings.

The character of the compositions is consistent and distinct. They are compressed, unillusioned, and preoccupied with the shortness of a life and the emptiness of what people spend it on, written by a man who had reason to think about both. His couplets, gathered elsewhere in the volume, are among the most widely quoted lines in the tradition.

The final fact about the Guru Granth Sahib is the one that governs every other. In 1708, Guru Gobind Singh ended the succession of human Gurus and invested the scripture itself with that authority. The volume is the Guru, and has been for more than three centuries.

What follows is not a set of respectful customs added to a book. It is the treatment appropriate to a living Guru: installed on a raised seat under a canopy rather than shelved, attended, fanned with a whisk as a sovereign is attended, taken at night to a room of its own and brought out in the morning. Those in its presence uncover their feet and cover their heads. Its pages are called limbs. Marriages are conducted by circling it. Community decisions are taken before it.

For a reference work this sets an obligation and a boundary, and both are worth stating for the reader rather than being quietly observed. The obligation is accuracy, because errors of fact about the structure, the compilation and the history of the volume are errors about a Guru. The boundary is that the atlas describes and does not perform: it does not reproduce the text, does not paraphrase hymns closely enough to substitute for them, and does not set out the tradition's practices as procedures a reader can follow.

The thirty-one rag sections recorded here are a description of how a volume is arranged. They are not the volume, and no catalogue entry is.