Bihagra

Bihagra is a measure of the night, and in the wider Indian tradition it carries longing and the pain of absence. The section makes conspicuous use of the extended lyric form the Granth reserves for sustained address, and its material fits the measure closely: a great deal of it speaks in the voice of a bride waiting for a husband who has not come.

That voice runs through the whole volume and it is not decoration. The Gurus adopted, from the devotional poetry of northern India, a convention in which the soul is female and God is the husband, and in which the fundamental religious condition is separation rather than possession. The images that follow from it, the unadorned woman, the empty bed, the message that does not arrive, the rival who is favoured, are worked at length and without embarrassment.

Two things follow. The first is that the emotional register of the Granth is frequently one of ache rather than of assurance, which surprises readers who expect a scripture of a martial community to be uniformly bracing. The second is that the male composers of these hymns speak throughout in a woman's voice, and modern scholarship has taken a considerable interest in what that does to the tradition's account of gender, with readings that range from the metaphorical to the substantive.

The convention is inherited, not invented here, and the Granth uses it more consistently than most of the traditions it was inherited from.

The Indian classical tradition assigns hours to its measures. Some rags belong to dawn, some to midday, some to the night, some to a season, and performing one outside its time is a departure that a trained musician notices immediately. The Guru Granth Sahib uses thirty-one such measures and does not arrange them by hour.

That creates a standing question about how the volume was meant to be used, and it has a practical edge. A continuous reading of the Granth from beginning to end, which is a recognised observance in Sikh practice, moves through the rags in the fixed order of the volume, not in the order of the clock. A congregation singing from the volume in sequence is therefore not observing the traditional hours, and a congregation observing the hours is not reading in sequence.

Both things happen. Practice accommodates the tension rather than resolving it, and different lineages of musicians have taken different views of how binding the traditional timing is on scriptural material.

What the volume itself requires is unambiguous and narrower: the hymn is to be sung in the measure named in its heading. Nothing on the page prescribes an hour. Whether the hours are part of what the Gurus intended, or a convention of the surrounding musical culture that the Granth does not adopt, is a question about performance rather than about text, and it belongs to the living tradition to answer rather than to a reference work.