Ragi

A ragi is a musician who sings scripture in the gurdwara, and the office is bound up with the central Sikh practice of devotional singing as a form of worship.

Kirtan

Ragis perform kirtan, the singing of the hymns of the Guru Granth Sahib, ordinarily in a group of three, with a lead singer and a second on harmonium and a player of the tabla drums, and they render the scripture in the musical measures, the ragas, to which much of it was composed, so that the singing follows the musical settings the tradition preserves. Kirtan is not an ornament of Sikh worship but one of its central acts, the hymns of the Gurus sung and heard as a means of devotion and of dwelling on the divine name, so the ragi carries a function at the heart of the gurdwara service.

A recognised skill

The ragi must be skilled both as a musician and in the scripture and its musical tradition, and the office is a recognised and often professional one, ragi groups being attached to gurdwaras or travelling to perform, but it is not a priesthood, since Sikhism has no priestly caste, and its standing rests on skill and devotion. The preservation of the ragas to which the scripture was set is itself a concern of the tradition, and the ragi is the keeper of that musical inheritance. The office reflects the particular Sikh emphasis on sung scripture, and the ragi, singing the words of the Gurus in their appointed measures, occupies a central place in the worship of the community.

The Guru Granth Sahib is structured internally by raga: its hymns are grouped under thirty-one classical musical measures, each assigned by the Gurus to specific compositions, so the text is organised as much by the music it was meant to be sung in as by author or subject, a feature with no real parallel among major world scriptures, making musical performance, not silent reading, the form in which the scripture's own arrangement makes full sense.

Many of the original raga settings the Gurus used were gradually displaced by simpler tunes easier for ordinary ragis to learn, a drift Sikh musicologists document and increasingly treat as a loss rather than a harmless simplification; a modern Gurmat Sangeet revival, centred on institutions researching and re-teaching the original settings, has worked since the twentieth century to recover and reintroduce older musical forms into gurdwara practice, treating accurate raga as inseparable from correct performance of the scripture rather than a musicological curiosity.

A related instrumental dispute runs alongside the revival: the harmonium standard in most gurdwara kirtan is a nineteenth century European import, adopted for convenience and volume, and critics within Gurmat Sangeet argue it cannot properly render the microtonal ornamentation the classical ragas require, unlike the stringed instruments historically tied to the Sikh court musicians, the rebab and the taus, a peacock-shaped bowed instrument said to have been designed by the Gurus. Some reform-minded ragi ensembles have accordingly reintroduced these older instruments in place of the harmonium, part of the wider project of recovering the original settings.