Tukhari

Tukhari is a short section, and it carries the second of the volume's two calendar poems, this one by Guru Nanak, in which the passing of the Punjabi year is set against a soul's longing.

Having two such poems, in two measures and by two different Gurus, is characteristic of how the Granth works. A form is not used once and retired. It is taken up again by a later hand, in a different musical setting, addressing the same material from a different angle, and the volume keeps both without cross-referencing them or explaining the relation.

This is one of the places where the arrangement by measure has an unintended cost. The two twelve-month poems sit hundreds of pages apart, in sections separated by twenty rag headings, and nothing on the page connects them. A reader who does not already know both exists will meet one and not the other. An arrangement by form or by subject would have set them side by side; an arrangement by measure cannot.

That trade-off runs throughout the volume. What the rag arrangement gives is a singer's index. What it costs is every connection that is not musical, and the entire commentarial and scholarly apparatus around the Granth exists in part to restore those connections from outside, since the volume itself will not make them.

The Guru Granth Sahib contains several compositions built on units of time: two on the twelve months of the year, one on the days of the lunar month, one on the days of the week. Taken together they amount to a sustained position, made structurally rather than stated.

The surrounding religious culture assigned qualities to times. Certain lunar days were auspicious and others were not; certain months and certain weekdays were fit for particular acts and unfit for others; almanacs existed to tell people which. This was not a fringe practice but a routine part of arranging a life, and it carried a professional class who read the calendars for a fee.

A composition that takes each day in turn and finds the same thing to say about every one of them dismantles the scheme without arguing against it. The form is the argument: by the fifth stanza the reader has understood that the answer will not change, and the frame has been used up.

The seasonal poems work differently and are the more affecting of the two kinds. There the year is real, the seasons do change, the rains do come and the winter does bite, and what stays constant is the condition of a person separated from what they love. The calendar is granted its power over the world and denied any power over that.

Both devices depend on the reader knowing the frame beforehand, which the original audience did.