Wadhans

Wadhans gathers the compositions attached to the two ends of a human life. The alahnian, sung in the presence of death, stand here, and so do the ghorian, the songs of a wedding procession. No other section of the Granth is so directly tied to the occasions of ordinary life.

Both forms existed before the Gurus used them. The alahnia was a lament, sung by women at a death, elaborate and formal and often extravagant in its grief. The ghori was a song for the bridegroom's horse, sung as the marriage party set out. The Gurus took both and turned them, so that the lament becomes a meditation on the ordinariness of dying and on the futility of the display that surrounds it, and the wedding song becomes an address about the union the marriage is a figure for.

The effect is not to abolish the occasion. Sikh practice retained the events these songs belong to and changed what is sung at them, which is a different and more durable operation than prohibition. A community can be told to stop wailing at funerals and will not; a community given something else to sing at funerals will sing it.

That is the pattern by which much of Sikh observance took its present shape. It was not imposed as a code and then filled with content. It grew where existing practice met compositions written to be sung in exactly those places, and the volume records the compositions rather than the rules.

Every printed copy of the Guru Granth Sahib runs to 1430 pages, and the same words fall on the same page in every copy, everywhere. A reference to a page is a reference to the same lines in Amritsar, in Vancouver and in Nairobi.

This is unusual and it is not an accident of printing. The standard pagination was fixed as printing was established in the nineteenth century, following the received manuscript arrangement, and it has been held ever since. No edition renumbers, no edition reformats to a different page size without preserving the division, and no abridgement is treated as the volume.

The consequence is a citation system of a kind that most scriptures do not have. Where other traditions cite by book, chapter and verse, and have to reconcile competing versification, Sikh citation gives a page and the matter is settled. Scholarship, sermon and argument all use the same coordinates.

The Sikh word for a page of the volume is ang, meaning a limb, and the choice of word is not incidental. The Guru Granth Sahib is treated as a living Guru rather than as a book about the Gurus: it is installed, attended, and put to rest at night in a room of its own. A volume that is a person does not have pages, it has limbs, and the vocabulary of the citation system carries that understanding every time anyone uses it.