Prabhati

Prabhati is a measure of the early morning, and its name means simply the dawn. The section gathers work by the Gurus and by the bhagats and stands second to last in the rag sequence.

Its placement has attracted readings. A sequence that opens with a grave evening measure and arrives, thirty sections later, at dawn is a shape that means something if it was intended, and more than one account of the volume has treated it that way.

The atlas notes the observation and declines to endorse it. The sequence is fixed and the Granth states no reason for it; a pattern that can be seen in the order is not thereby the principle of the order, and the same sequence contains a spring measure, a rain measure and a midday measure at points where no comparable narrative reading is available. A reading that works for the first and the penultimate section and not for the twenty-eight between them is an observation rather than an explanation.

What is worth saying about the position is narrower and safe: the rag sequence ends here and at Jaijawanti, and the material that follows the last rag heading is of a different kind, standing outside the arrangement altogether.

One further caution about reading the placement. The compositions gathered for recitation at dawn are not drawn from this section, and a reader who assumes that a dawn measure supplies the morning liturgy will have the relation backwards. The daily sequences are assembled separately and draw chiefly from the opening pages of the volume and from Asa. Prabhati's position at the end of the rag sequence and the tradition's morning observance are two different facts that happen to share a word.

A small number of compositions from across the Guru Granth Sahib are gathered, outside the rag arrangement, into fixed sequences for recitation at set times, and the morning sequence is the most substantial of them.

It opens the volume, before the rag sections begin: the foundational statement of the divine nature, followed by the long composition of Guru Nanak that is recited at dawn. Further sequences stand for the evening and for the close of the day, and further compositions used daily are drawn from the rag sections themselves.

The relation between the two arrangements is worth being exact about. The volume is not reorganised for use. The compositions stay where the rag arrangement puts them, and the daily order is a separate sequence that draws on them, so that a composition can exist in the volume once and be recited in a different position. Where the material stands at the front of the volume, it is gathered there and not filed under any measure.

For a reader, the practical effect is that the best known parts of the Guru Granth Sahib are not distributed evenly through it. A person raised in the tradition may know the opening pages and a handful of compositions from Asa, Ramkali and Suhi extremely well, and have far less familiarity with the long central sections, which is a fact about how the volume is used rather than about its contents.