Maru

Maru is a large section in a resolute register. In the wider Indian tradition the measure carries associations with the desert, with the battlefield and with steadiness in the face of death, and the section holds the solhe, long compositions built in stanzas of sixteen, together with vars.

The standing of this measure in Sikh usage cannot be separated from the history of the community that used it. The Guru Granth Sahib was compiled in 1604 and completed in its final recension a century later, and between those dates the community was subjected to sustained persecution, lost two Gurus to execution and became an armed body. A measure associated with resolve in the face of death was not an abstraction for the people singing it.

That said, the material in the section is not martial in content. It does not celebrate battle and does not describe one. What it carries is the register: unhesitating, unadorned, addressed to a listener who may not have long. The distinction matters, because the later Sikh tradition does have a substantial body of explicitly martial composition, and almost none of it is in this volume.

Where the two are conflated, the Guru Granth Sahib gets read as a warrior's book, which it is not. It is a devotional volume, sung, that a community under threat found sufficient.

A recurring source of confusion about Sikh scripture is that there is more than one book, and only one of them is the Guru.

The Guru Granth Sahib is the volume compiled by Guru Arjan in 1604 and completed in the recension attributed to Guru Gobind Singh, and it alone holds the standing of Guru. A second collection, associated with the tenth Guru and compiled after his death, contains a large body of composition of a very different character, including narrative and martial material, and its authorship, its composition and its standing are the subject of a long and continuing argument within the tradition. It is not the Guru Granth Sahib, it is not installed in its place, and the atlas holds it as a separate scripture.

There are further bodies of writing that are revered without being scripture: the compositions of the Gurus' contemporaries, the early accounts of the Gurus' lives, and the code of conduct that regularised Sikh observance in the twentieth century. Each has a standing, and none of them is the volume.

The distinction is not pedantry. Statements about what Sikh scripture says are frequently made on the basis of material that is not in the Guru Granth Sahib at all, and the difference between the volume and the surrounding literature is exactly the difference between what a community treats as its Guru and what it treats as its heritage.