Tilang

Tilang is the section where the Granth's composite language is most visible. The measure itself carries a West Asian colouring, and the hymns gathered under it work in a vocabulary heavy with Persian and Arabic words, addressing God in terms that a Muslim listener of the sixteenth century would have recognised without translation.

The Granth's register is composite throughout. Its base is the Punjabi of its time, its script is Gurmukhi, and running through it are Braj Bhasha, Sanskritic vocabulary, the language of the Nath yogis, western Punjabi forms and, in places like this section, a substantial Persianate layer. Scholars call the whole a devotional lingua franca of northern India rather than a single language, and reading the volume requires access to several registers at once.

In Tilang the register is doing work. A composition that addresses God with the words a Muslim audience uses is not translating a Sikh idea into Persian; it is speaking in the idiom in which the audience already prays, and the compositions in this section are among the most cited in discussions of how the Gurus engaged with Islam.

The atlas does not summarise that discussion here, because it is a live scholarly and inter-religious argument in which the sources disagree about emphasis rather than about facts. What the section demonstrates plainly is that the vocabulary was available, was used, and was not marked as foreign.

The Guru Granth Sahib is written throughout in Gurmukhi, and the script's development is bound up with the volume it carries. Its letters descend from the same family as the other north Indian scripts, and its arrangement and standardisation are associated in Sikh tradition with the second Guru.

The practical problem it solves is specific. The Gurus were composing in a register that drew on several languages, to be sung by people who read none of the prestige scripts of the region. Persian and Arabic were written in a script tied to a learned and largely Muslim readership; Sanskrit and its descendants in a script tied to another. A body of composition addressed to everyone needed an orthography that belonged to none of these and could carry all of them.

Gurmukhi does that, and the volume's spelling records sounds and forms with a consistency that has made it a substantial source for the history of Punjabi. The archaic orthography of the Granth, with its final vowels and its particular conventions, is itself an object of study, and reading the volume accurately requires knowing those conventions rather than applying modern Punjabi spelling to it.

That exactness is why this atlas has not entered the Gurmukhi headings of the rag sections. A plausible spelling would look correct to almost every reader and be wrong, and in the script of a living scripture that is not an acceptable trade.