Ramkali

Ramkali is one of the largest and most consequential sections in the volume, and it carries several of the compositions best known outside the rag arrangement.

The long composition of Guru Amar Das on the state of bliss stands here, and is sung at the close of Sikh gatherings, so that a person who has attended one has heard the opening of it whether or not they know where it sits. Guru Nanak's dialogue with the Nath yogis is here too, conducted in the ascetics' own vocabulary and answering them on their own ground while declining their premises, which makes it one of the most detailed records of an actual religious argument anywhere in the volume. So is his long alphabetical meditation.

And here stands the var of Satta and Balwand, the musicians of the Gurus' court, which is not by a Guru and is the earliest account of the succession composed from inside the community. Its presence in the scripture is remarkable on its own terms: a work about the Gurus, by employees of the Gurus, admitted into the volume the Gurus compiled.

The measure suits its contents. Ramkali carries an association with ascetics and with the Nath tradition in particular, which makes the choice of it for a dialogue with the Naths a deliberate and slightly pointed one.

The dialogue in this section is worth describing carefully, because it shows the Gurus' method under pressure from an articulate opposing tradition rather than in the open.

The Nath yogis were a serious and well-organised movement with a technical vocabulary, a body of practice and a claim to attainment that could be demonstrated. They were not a straw target. The composition presents them asking direct questions, about lineage, about attainment, about the practices that produce it, and the answers come back in their vocabulary rather than around it.

What the answers refuse is the premise that attainment requires withdrawal. The claim made is that the same thing is available inside ordinary life, among a household and a trade, without the apparatus and without leaving. That is the position the whole volume takes, and here it is argued rather than asserted, against interlocutors who are given real questions to ask.

The wider significance is that this is one of the few places in the Granth where another tradition is present as a voice rather than as a subject. The volume is generally uninterested in polemic; it addresses religious professionals frequently but rarely names a school and almost never stages an exchange. The exception is instructive: when the Gurus did argue, they argued in the terms of the people they were arguing with.