Todi

Todi is one of the principal parent forms of the Hindustani classical system, a morning measure of considerable standing, and its section in the Guru Granth Sahib is short.

The mismatch is worth being explicit about because it corrects a natural assumption. The Granth's selection of rags is not a survey of the available repertoire and does not rank the measures it uses. It records what the Gurus and the bhagats composed in, and the length of a section reflects nothing but that. A measure with enormous prestige in the classical tradition can occupy two pages here, and a regional measure of no classical standing at all can occupy fifty.

This is one of the reasons the volume is useful as evidence about sixteenth and seventeenth century musical practice rather than only about doctrine. It is not a treatise on rags and makes no theoretical claims about them. It is a body of composed work with its measures recorded, which is a much rarer kind of document: the theory of Indian music survives in abundance, and dated, attributed bodies of composition with their measures specified do not.

The section itself carries hymns of the later Gurus. Its brevity is the fact about it, and stating that plainly is better than inflating a short section into an important one because the surrounding sections are long.

The Guru Granth Sahib is ordinarily described as using thirty-one rags, and the atlas follows that count while recording that it is a convention rather than a measurement.

The complication is in the headings. Many of them qualify a measure with a named variant, so that a hymn is set not simply in Gauri but in Gauri Dakhani or Gauri Bairagan, and a musician would treat several of these as measures in their own right. Others name two measures together, as Nat Narayan and Mali Gaura do, and whether that is one heading or two depends on the system of classification applied to it. Counting the variants and the compounds separately produces figures in the sixties.

Nothing about the volume changes under either count. The same headings stand over the same compositions in the same order on the same pages. What differs is how a modern describer chooses to group them, and the disagreement is about musical classification rather than about the text.

Thirty-one is the figure used here because it is the count of principal rag sections, it is the figure the tradition ordinarily gives, and it is the number that makes the structure of the volume legible. Where a source gives a higher number it is not contradicting this; it is counting variants, and a reader who meets both figures has not found an error in either.