Devgandhari

Devgandhari is one of the volume's smaller sections, drawn mainly from the later Gurus. There is a temptation to pass over sections like this with a sentence and move on to the substantial ones, and it is worth resisting, because the short sections carry a kind of evidence the long ones cannot.

A compiler constructing a system would not leave a heading standing over a handful of compositions. Symmetry is cheap to impose and the volume shows no interest in it. The presence of a rag with very little in it therefore records something specific: this measure was used, a little, by named Gurus, and the compilation preserved that fact rather than rounding it away.

The alternative approaches were both available and both were declined. The material could have been folded into a neighbouring measure, which would have tidied the volume and destroyed the information. Or the section could have been enlarged from the same Gurus' work in other measures, which would have falsified it. Neither happened.

That restraint is one of the reasons the Guru Granth Sahib is usable as a historical source about its own composition. The proportions in it are real proportions. Anyone studying which forms the third, fourth and fifth Gurus favoured can read the answer off the volume, and can do so because the compilers did not improve their material.

The compositions in the Guru Granth Sahib are not signed with the names of their authors. A heading gives the rag, and then a number, and the number identifies which Guru: the first, the third, the fifth, the ninth. The convention is uniform across the volume and it is not a matter of scribal shorthand.

The Sikh understanding is that the succession of Gurus carried one light in different bodies, and the numbering states that directly. It is not ten authors filed together; it is one voice at ten stages, and the numbering is the notation for it. Guru Nanak's compositions and Guru Arjan's are separated by five successions and a century, and the volume marks the distance with a digit.

Complicating this productively, the compositions of the Gurus frequently use the name Nanak within the verse itself, whichever Guru composed them, which is the internal counterpart of the same claim and one of the ways scholars can identify a Guru's work when a heading is damaged or absent.

The bhagats, by contrast, are named. Their compositions carry the poet's name, and the difference is not a slight but a distinction: they are individual voices gathered into the volume, not stages of a single one.

The system is exact enough to be used as a tool. Manuscript scholars comparing early copies of the Granth track disagreements in these headings closely, because a difference in attribution between two manuscripts is a datable trace of how the text was transmitted.