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A Small Section Near the End

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A Small Section Near the End

Kalyan is a small section drawn from the later Gurus, standing a few pages before the rag sequence closes. In the wider tradition it is an evening measure and it gives its name to one of the principal groups of the classical system.

The tail of the volume runs to shorter sections, and Kalyan is among them. What is striking is that nothing about the arrangement relaxes. The internal ordering is applied as strictly here as in the largest sections: the Gurus in the order of the succession, the forms grouped, the bhagats last where present. A compilation losing interest in its own scheme would show it here first, and it does not.

That consistency is part of what makes the volume usable as evidence. A text whose organisation is rigorous throughout can be interrogated: an irregularity means something, because irregularity is rare. A text whose organisation decays toward the end tells you very little, because any departure might be fatigue.

The Granth's regularity extends to the very last heading of the rag sequence, and the one significant structural addition ever made to it, the thirty-first rag, was made in the same manner, in the same scheme, in the place the scheme required.

The measure itself is worth a note beyond the section. Kalyan is one of the names that a modern Indian musician would recognise instantly and that a reader of the Granth is unlikely to have met, which is the ordinary condition of the volume's musical vocabulary: it belongs to a technical tradition that most readers of the scripture do not share. The headings assume knowledge that the text nowhere supplies, and that gap is filled by the singers rather than by the page.

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