Kedara

Kedara is a small section of the later Gurus with a presence of the bhagats, and an evening measure in the wider Indian tradition. The Granth places it among a run of shorter sections in the second half of the volume.

The ordering of the rags is where the Granth is most silent about itself. The sequence is fixed, identical in every manuscript and every printed copy, and departing from it is not done. But the volume states no principle for it, and the sequence does not follow the classical groupings of measures, does not run by hour or by season, does not order by length and does not order by the Guru who first used each measure.

Reconstructions have been proposed and none has been generally accepted. The honest position is that a fixed order exists, that its fixity is essential to how the volume is used, and that the reason for the particular order is not recorded.

The atlas therefore records the sequence as a fact and declines to explain it. Where a scholarly account offers a principle, it is offering a reading, and a reference work that adopts one reading and prints it as the reason is doing exactly the thing this project exists to avoid: converting an interpretation into a fact by the act of stating it plainly.

It is worth separating two things that are easily run together: that the arrangement of the Guru Granth Sahib is deliberate, and that its logic is known.

The first is beyond doubt. The volume is organised to a scheme applied consistently across thirty-one sections and several thousand compositions, with the ordering of authors, of forms and of lengths holding throughout. Nothing about that is accidental, and the regularity is tight enough that departures from it are used as evidence.

The second does not follow. The scheme within a section is legible because it is systematic and can be read off the pages. The order of the sections themselves is legible only as a fact. The volume gives no preface explaining it, the Gurus left no statement about it, and the early manuscripts do not vary in a way that would expose the reasoning.

Readers meet plenty of confident explanations, and they are inferences. Some are attractive: that the sequence opens grave and closes at dawn, that it moves through moods, that it reflects a musical relationship between measures. Each has been argued and none commands assent.

Recording a gap of this kind, rather than filling it with the most plausible available account, is the harder discipline and the more useful one. Someone may yet close it with manuscript evidence, and a reference work that has already printed an answer makes that work harder rather than easier.