Kalyan

Kalyan is a small section drawn from the later Gurus, standing a few pages before the rag sequence closes. In the wider tradition it is an evening measure and it gives its name to one of the principal groups of the classical system.

The tail of the volume runs to shorter sections, and Kalyan is among them. What is striking is that nothing about the arrangement relaxes. The internal ordering is applied as strictly here as in the largest sections: the Gurus in the order of the succession, the forms grouped, the bhagats last where present. A compilation losing interest in its own scheme would show it here first, and it does not.

That consistency is part of what makes the volume usable as evidence. A text whose organisation is rigorous throughout can be interrogated: an irregularity means something, because irregularity is rare. A text whose organisation decays toward the end tells you very little, because any departure might be fatigue.

The Granth's regularity extends to the very last heading of the rag sequence, and the one significant structural addition ever made to it, the thirty-first rag, was made in the same manner, in the same scheme, in the place the scheme required.

The measure itself is worth a note beyond the section. Kalyan is one of the names that a modern Indian musician would recognise instantly and that a reader of the Granth is unlikely to have met, which is the ordinary condition of the volume's musical vocabulary: it belongs to a technical tradition that most readers of the scripture do not share. The headings assume knowledge that the text nowhere supplies, and that gap is filled by the singers rather than by the page.

The Guru Granth Sahib reached its present form in two stages, and both are visible in the volume.

The first was the compilation of 1604 under Guru Arjan, who gathered the compositions of his four predecessors and his own, together with the work of the bhagats, and fixed the arrangement by rag that the volume still follows. That act closed the collection against material circulating under the Gurus' names that the compilers did not accept, which is as much a part of what a canon is as the inclusion.

The second was the recension attributed to Guru Gobind Singh, in which the compositions of the ninth Guru, Tegh Bahadur, were incorporated. They were not appended. They were inserted at their proper place within each rag section, in the order of the succession, exactly where the existing scheme required them to go, and where the measure they were composed in had no section, a new heading was created at the end of the sequence.

The tenth Guru added none of his own compositions to the volume, which is a fact of the first importance. He ended the line of human Gurus and invested the scripture with that authority in 1708, and the volume he invested contains the work of nine Gurus and not ten.

After that the canon is closed in the strongest possible sense: nothing can be added to a Guru, and the volume has not changed since.