Bhairo

Bhairo is among the oldest named measures in the Indian system, associated in the wider tradition with dawn, and with an austere and awe-filled character rather than a tender one. The section is substantial and carries a strong body of work by Kabir and Namdev alongside the Gurus.

The character of the measure and the character of the material match. The compositions gathered here tend to the direct: less of the bride waiting, more of the plain address to a listener about what they are doing with their life. Kabir's voice in particular, blunt, aphoristic and given to jolting images, sits naturally in this register.

Measures like Bhairo also connect the Granth to a very long history. The name is attested in Indian musical writing centuries before the Gurus, and its associations were already settled when they used it. A volume compiled in the seventeenth century, setting its compositions in measures that had carried their character since the early medieval period, is participating in a continuity that its own contents rarely mention.

That continuity is one of the reasons the Granth is studied by musicologists who have no interest in its theology. It is a dated, attributed, internally consistent body of composition, specifying measures, from a period for which such bodies are scarce.

The compositions of the Guru Granth Sahib were sung from the beginning, and the carrying of that singing has its own history, distinct from the history of the text.

Hereditary families of musicians served the Gurus, and two of them composed the var in the Ramkali section. Their descendants and successors carried the performance tradition for centuries, and the transmission was oral: the measures, the melodies and the manner of setting a composition passed from teacher to student without notation, because there was no notation to pass.

That transmission was disrupted repeatedly, by persecution, by the collapse and reconstitution of institutions, and severely by the partition of the Punjab in 1947, which cut communities and lineages apart along a new border. What survives today reaches back through those breaks rather than around them.

The consequence for anyone asking how the Gurus' compositions originally sounded is that the question is not answerable with confidence. Sustained efforts through the twentieth century and since have worked to recover and standardise the performance of the rags as the Granth specifies them, and different lineages hold different readings of the same measure.

The text is not affected by any of this. The headings, the order and the pagination are fixed and have been for centuries. What was never written down was the sound, and that is the part that has to be held by people rather than by paper.