Thirty-One, or Sixty, or Some Other Number

The Guru Granth Sahib is ordinarily described as using thirty-one rags, and the atlas follows that count while recording that it is a convention rather than a measurement.

The complication is in the headings. Many of them qualify a measure with a named variant, so that a hymn is set not simply in Gauri but in Gauri Dakhani or Gauri Bairagan, and a musician would treat several of these as measures in their own right. Others name two measures together, as Nat Narayan and Mali Gaura do, and whether that is one heading or two depends on the system of classification applied to it. Counting the variants and the compounds separately produces figures in the sixties.

Nothing about the volume changes under either count. The same headings stand over the same compositions in the same order on the same pages. What differs is how a modern describer chooses to group them, and the disagreement is about musical classification rather than about the text.

Thirty-one is the figure used here because it is the count of principal rag sections, it is the figure the tradition ordinarily gives, and it is the number that makes the structure of the volume legible. Where a source gives a higher number it is not contradicting this; it is counting variants, and a reader who meets both figures has not found an error in either.