Basant

Basant is the rag of spring, sung in the wider tradition only in its season, and the section carries a short var along with its hymns.

The seasonal material in the Granth is worth noticing for what it declines to do. The obvious use of a spring measure is consolation: the year turns, the dead ground greens, and so it will be with you. That is not the move the compositions make. The turn is usually the other way. The season returns to the tree without fail and without effort, and the person who has not turned toward God stays out of season regardless of what the month is doing.

The imagery is agricultural and specific, and it belonged to the daily life of the audience: the field, the crop, the well, the rain, the tree that comes into leaf. None of it is picturesque. A community of cultivators listening to a hymn about a crop is not being offered a metaphor from a distance.

That grounding is one of the characteristic textures of the volume, and it is easily lost in translation, where an agricultural image can read as pastoral decoration. In the original it is the plainest kind of speech available, drawn from what everybody present did all day, which is the same reason the volume reaches for the wedding, the funeral and the alphabet primer.

The Guru Granth Sahib was composed in and for the Punjab, an agricultural region whose year is organised around two harvests and the arrival of the monsoon between them, and the volume's imagery follows that year closely.

Several measures in it are seasonal, and the two twelve-month poems run the whole cycle. Beyond the explicitly calendrical compositions, the recurring images are of soil, seed, irrigation, the crop that comes up and the crop that fails, the merchant with goods to trade and the labourer with a wage to earn. The volume speaks about work more than most scriptures do, and about the particular work its audience was doing.

The theological weight this carries is not incidental. A tradition whose foundational teaching includes earning an honest living and sharing what is earned, and which rejects withdrawal from the world as a spiritual method, requires an idiom in which ordinary work is the right place for the teaching to land. The agricultural imagery supplies it.

It also dates and places the volume with some precision. A reader with no other information could locate this book in a wheat and rice growing region with a monsoon, a well-based irrigation system and a mixed trading economy, and could tell that the intended audience worked in it rather than living off it at a distance.