Gauri

Gauri is the biggest of the rag sections and the most internally various. Its hymn headings do not simply say Gauri; they name a whole family of related measures, Gauri Guareri, Gauri Dakhani, Gauri Cheti, Gauri Bairagan, Gauri Purbi, Gauri Majh and others, each a recognised shading of the same underlying form, with the second word specifying which. No other section carries that many named variants.

Its contents include the composition of Guru Arjan on inner peace that is among the most widely read texts in the Sikh tradition, twenty-four sections of eight verses each with a preceding couplet, structured with unusual regularity for this volume. It also holds an acrostic built on the letters of the alphabet, and Kabir has a substantial presence.

Size is worth reading as evidence. The Granth does not distribute its material evenly across the measures, and Gauri's bulk records a real preference: this family of forms was heavily used by the Gurus and by the bhagats whose work they collected. A section of this length also complicates any simple statement about how the volume is arranged, because within Gauri the ordering has to do more work, sorting by variant, then by Guru, then by form, then by length, and a reader navigating it is using four levels of organisation at once.

Every rag section in the Guru Granth Sahib is arranged by the same internal rules, and knowing them is the difference between finding a composition and leafing through fourteen hundred pages.

First come the Gurus, in the order of the succession. Authorship is marked by a number rather than a name: a heading of Mahala 1 indicates the first Guru, Mahala 3 the third, and so on, with the compositions of Guru Tegh Bahadur, the ninth, inserted at their proper place in the sequence when the final recension was made. The Gurus did not sign their work with their own names, and the convention of the numbered heading is part of a deliberate presentation of the succession as a single voice in different bodies.

Then, within each Guru's portion, the material is grouped by form: the shorter hymns first, then the longer eight-stanza compositions, then the extended lyric pieces, and finally, where the section has one, the var, a ballad form in stanzas with couplets set before each.

Last come the bhagats, the devotional poets from outside the Sikh succession whose work Guru Arjan gathered into the volume.

The scheme is applied consistently enough that its exceptions are studied. Where a composition sits out of order, or where a section departs from the pattern, the departure is itself evidence about how the compilation was assembled, and manuscript scholars have used exactly those irregularities to argue about the stages of the canon.