Bilaval

Bilaval is a morning measure of contented rather than yearning character, and a section of considerable size. It gives its name to the reference scale of the Hindustani classical system, the one against which the other scales are described, which makes its presence here a small piece of musical history in itself.

The section carries a composition ordered on the days of the lunar month, one of several calendrical forms the Granth uses. Each day supplies an occasion for a teaching, and what the form does is quietly polemical: a lunar calendar in the surrounding culture carried a dense freight of auspicious and inauspicious days, and a composition that takes each day in turn and finds the same thing to say about all of them is making an argument without stating one.

The Granth uses this device more than once. Alongside the lunar days there are compositions ordered on the days of the week and on the months of the year, and in every case the frame is a system for distinguishing times and the content refuses the distinction. The teaching is that no day is better than another for the thing that matters.

The section also carries a var. Its size and the range of Gurus represented in it place it among the more heavily worked measures in the second half of the volume.

A striking number of the compositions in the Guru Granth Sahib are built on frames that its audience already knew, and the list is long enough that borrowing has to be understood as a method rather than as an occasional device.

There is the twelve-month poem, of which the volume has two, in different measures and by different Gurus. There is the composition on the lunar days and the one on the days of the week. There is the acrostic on the letters of the alphabet, a form used for teaching children to read, of which the volume has several. There is the ballad of a hero, the wedding song, the funeral lament, the lullaby and the boatman's song. There is the dialogue with ascetics, conducted in the vocabulary the ascetics themselves used.

In every case the shape is familiar and the content is redirected. The audience recognises the form before a word of the teaching has landed, which means no explanation is required and no barrier of unfamiliarity has to be crossed.

The method also carries a claim. A tradition that teaches through an alphabet primer and a calendar poem is addressing people who use alphabet primers and calendar poems, not a class of specialists, and the choice of forms is itself an argument about who religious teaching is for. That argument is made throughout the volume without ever being stated, which is how the Guru Granth Sahib generally prefers to make its arguments.