Dhanasri

Dhanasri holds the composition known as the aarti, one of the most frequently sung passages in the Guru Granth Sahib, and one of the clearest examples of what the Gurus did with the religious material around them.

An aarti is a lamp ceremony. A tray is prepared with lamps, incense and flowers, and it is circled before an image while a hymn is sung. The composition in this section takes the whole apparatus and relocates it: the sky becomes the tray, the sun and moon the lamps, the stars the scattered pearls, the wind the fan, the forests the flowers. Nothing is denounced. The ceremony is not called false; it is called too small, and the imagery of the rite is used to describe a rite already being performed continuously by everything that exists.

The move is more effective than a prohibition would have been, and it is repeated throughout the volume: the sacred thread, the pilgrimage, the fast and the ritual bath are each taken up in the same way, granted their meaning and then relocated into conduct.

The section is also notable for the presence of Ravidas, a poet of the leather-working community whose social position placed him outside the reach of the religious institutions of his time, and whose compositions the Granth carries without qualification. His voice in this rag, addressing God directly and without an intermediary, is part of why the section is read the way it is.

A reader who arrives at the Guru Granth Sahib expecting either a defence or a rejection of ritual will find neither, and the pattern is consistent enough across the rag sections to be worth stating on its own.

The volume treats existing observance as a real thing pointing in a real direction and then declines to stop where the observance stops. Pilgrimage is met with the observation that the pilgrimage that matters is interior. Ritual bathing is met with the question of what is actually being washed. The sacred thread is met with a description of a thread made of compassion and contentment that cannot break or be soiled. The fast, the sacred site, the ashes of the ascetic and the fine distinctions of caste purity are each handled the same way.

Two things follow that are easy to get wrong. The first is that this is not iconoclasm; the compositions do not read as attacks, and their tone is more often patient than scornful. The second is that it did not produce a religion without practice. Sikh observance is substantial and specific, and much of it grew directly from these compositions being sung at the occasions they address.

What the volume declines is the transaction. It does not accept that an act performed correctly obliges any outcome, and the target of its criticism is nearly always the person conducting the observance as a claim rather than the observance itself.