Sorath

Sorath is a large and heavily worked section, with the fourth and fifth Gurus strongly present and a substantial body of work by the bhagats, and it carries a var. Its name is territorial rather than descriptive: Sorath is a region of the Kathiawar peninsula in western India, and the measure carries the name of the place its tradition associates it with.

That is a reminder worth holding on to. The musical vocabulary the Gurus used was not local and it was not new. These measures had been carried across the subcontinent for centuries by musicians, by pilgrims and by the movement of courts, and by the sixteenth century a rag named for Gujarat, a rag named for the Punjab and a rag named for the eastern country could all sit in one repertoire without anyone finding it remarkable.

The Granth inherits that whole geography. A volume compiled in the Punjab, in a script devised for Punjabi, in a composite register with Persian and Braj and Sanskritic vocabulary running through it, sets its hymns to measures named after regions its authors never visited. Nothing about it is parochial, and the compilers made no attempt to make the musical scheme more local than it was.

For a reader tracing the movement of forms across pre-modern India, the rag headings of the Guru Granth Sahib are a substantial and precisely dated body of evidence about what was in use, where, and by whom.

The compilation of 1604 did not begin from nothing. Collections of the Gurus' compositions were already circulating, and the making of the volume was as much an act of selection and authentication as of assembly.

Two things were at stake. One was completeness: the compositions of four predecessors had to be gathered from wherever they were held, and manuscript scholarship has identified early collections that appear to have been available to the compilers. The other was exclusion. Compositions were circulating under the Gurus' names that the compilers did not accept, and the volume as fixed is a judgement about which were genuine.

The Granth records that judgement in its own way. Its arrangement is so regular, and its headings so systematic, that later additions are difficult to make without leaving a trace, and the second stage of the canon, when the ninth Guru's compositions were inserted, is visible precisely because the system is tight.

Manuscript evidence for the earlier stages is a live field rather than a settled one. Early manuscripts survive, their relationships to one another and to the 1604 compilation are argued over, and the arguments are not merely academic, since the standing of particular manuscripts touches on the authority of the text for a living community. The atlas notes the field is active and does not adjudicate it.