Asa

Asa is a morning measure and its name means hope, and the section is among the most used in the volume because of what it carries. The long var gathered here is sung in congregations in the early part of the day, and its combination of couplets and stanzas, with hymns of the first and third Gurus set into the frame, makes it one of the longest continuous performances in Sikh practice.

The material in it is unusually direct. It takes up ritual purity, the authority of birth, the treatment of women, the conduct of rulers and the behaviour of the religious professionals of its time, and it does so in a register closer to argument than to lyric. Several of the passages most often quoted in discussions of the Gurus' social teaching are here rather than in the more meditative sections.

Asa also supplies compositions that were later gathered into the fixed daily order, which is one reason the section is familiar to people who have never read the volume through. That gathering is worth being precise about: the daily order draws hymns from across the Granth and arranges them for use, so the same composition exists twice over, once in its rag section where it belongs musically and once in the sequence in which it is recited. The volume itself is not rearranged to suit the liturgy, and the liturgy does not replace the volume.

A var is a ballad. In Punjabi tradition before the Gurus it was a heroic form, sung to celebrate a battle or a fighter, with a driving structure of stanzas built to be performed aloud to a crowd. Twenty-two of them stand in the Guru Granth Sahib, one at the end of most of the larger rag sections, and they are the clearest instance in the volume of a folk form taken over whole.

The Sikh var keeps the structure and changes the subject. The stanzas remain, and before each of them stand one or more couplets, so that the performance alternates between the compressed statement of the couplet and the expansion of the stanza. Several of the vars were assigned a traditional tune, named in the heading by reference to an existing ballad, which means the Granth in these places specifies not only the measure but the melody, by pointing at a song its audience already knew.

That detail is easy to pass over and says a great deal. A scripture that identifies its tunes by naming popular ballads is a scripture composed for people who sing, in a culture where those ballads were common property. The Gurus did not build a separate musical world for religious use. They used what was in the air and expected the audience to arrive already knowing the tune.

One var in the volume was not composed by a Guru at all, but by two musicians of the Gurus' court, and it is the earliest account of the succession written from inside the community.