Jaitsri

Jaitsri is a section of middling length carrying a var alongside its hymns, and its position deep in the central stretch of the volume is characteristic of how the Granth reads to anyone going through it in order.

There is no development from one rag to the next. A reader moving from Dhanasri into Jaitsri does not find the argument advancing, because there is no argument being advanced. The same concerns return in a new musical setting: the name of God as the thing to hold to, the futility of an attachment to what will be left behind, the separation of the soul from what it loves, the uselessness of religious display, the necessity of the teacher.

Recognising this changes what kind of reading is possible. The Granth does not reward being read as a treatise and was not compiled to be. It rewards being opened, sung from, and returned to, and the repetition that frustrates a systematic reader is exactly what makes it usable that way: any section is an entry, because no section depends on the one before it.

The observance in which the volume is read continuously from beginning to end, over roughly two days, is therefore doing something other than following an argument. What is being marked is completeness, that the whole of it has been sounded, and the practice makes sense of an arrangement that a study of the text alone would find puzzling.

Two observances shape how the Guru Granth Sahib is actually encountered, and both are readings of the entire volume rather than of any passage.

In one, the volume is read straight through without interruption, a relay of readers taking it in turn so that the recitation never stops, and the reading concludes at an appointed time, usually about forty-eight hours after it began. In the other, the volume is read through over a longer period, with the reading taken up and set down.

Both are held to mark an occasion rather than to instruct: a birth, a marriage, a death, a move into a new house, an anniversary, the founding of something. The reading is the thing done, and the completion is what is observed.

For a reference work, the interesting fact is what these observances imply about the volume's organisation. A book arranged for continuous recitation does not need a beginning that explains itself, and the Granth does not have one. It does not need a conclusion that gathers the argument, and the Granth does not have one of those either. What it needs is to be finite, fixed and complete in a known order, which is exactly what the rag arrangement and the invariable pagination deliver.

The atlas records the observances as facts about the tradition. It does not describe how they are performed, which is not something to be learned from a page of description, and is not this work's to teach.