Journey
Places of the Granth's bhagats
Fifteen bhagats are in the Guru Granth Sāhib alongside the Gurus — a weaver, a cobbler, a calico-printer, a butcher, a Rajput who abdicated, two Sufis. They span Sindh to Bengal and two religions, and their hymns are sung at Amritsar in the same script and the same measures as the Gurus' own.
Stops (10)
- Harmandir Sāhib (Golden Temple) · Amritsar — where the book was made, 1604
Guru Arjan compiled the Ādi Granth here and put the bhagats in it, arranged not by author but by rāga, so a cobbler's hymn sits between two Gurus' in the same musical measure. Nothing in the book's own layout tells you which is which, and that is the argument it makes.
- Kabīr Chaurā, Varanasi · Kabīr — 292 hymns, the largest contribution
The Banāras weaver contributes more than any other bhagat, and his hymns attack Hindu and Islamic ritual with the same contempt. Kabīr Chaurā in the weavers' quarter is where he worked; the tradition that grew around him is claimed by three religions and settled by none.
- Maghar · Maghar — dying where dying was said not to count
Kabīr left Banāras for Maghar precisely because tradition held that dying there forfeited liberation, in order to prove the claim empty. A grave and a samādhi stand a few metres apart, built by the two communities that both claimed the body and neither of which he had patience for.
- Shrī Guru Ravidās Janam Asthān · Ravidās — 41 hymns, and Begampura
The Banāras cobbler's Begampura is a city without sorrow, second or third class, tax or property — the earliest description in an Indian language of a society organised without caste. His birthplace shrine is a kilometre from Kabīr Chaurā, two artisan quarters that produced the two sharpest voices in the book.
- Ghumān · Nāmdev — 61 hymns, carried from Pandharpūr
A Marathi calico-printer of Pandharpūr who spent his later years at Ghumān in the Punjab, which is how sixty-one Marathi hymns entered a Punjabi scripture. He is read daily at Amritsar and walked to annually at Pandharpūr — one man held by two devotional systems that never met.
- Jaydev Kenduli · Jaidev — two hymns, from Bengal
Author of the Gītagovinda, the Sanskrit lyric sequence on Krishna and Rādhā that shaped devotional music from Odisha to Kerala. Two of his hymns are in the Granth, which makes a twelfth-century Bengali court poet the earliest voice in a sixteenth-century Punjabi book.
- Gāgron Fort · Pipā — a Rajput who abdicated
Ruler of Gāgron in Rajasthan who gave up his throne, became a disciple of Rāmānanda and took to the road. His fort still stands, one of the few hill forts surrounded by water on three sides. A king renouncing to join a movement of weavers and cobblers is the pattern running the other way.
- Kākorī · Bhikhan — two hymns, from Kākorī
A small qasba near Lucknow, and the only thing the record fixes about Bhikhan, who is usually identified with a Sufi shaikh. Two hymns and a town: the Granth's inclusiveness reaches people about whom almost nothing else survives, which is itself worth noticing.
- Pākpattan (Ajodhan) · Bābā Farīd — 134 hymns, from Pākpattan
Farīduddīn Ganj-i-Shakar, the Chishti master of Ajodhan, is the largest Muslim presence in the book, and his Punjabi verses are the earliest substantial literature in the language. Guru Nanak is said to have collected them at Pākpattan from Farīd's successor two centuries after his death.
- Sehwan Sharīf · Sadhnā — one hymn, and a butcher from Sindh
Tradition makes Sadhnā a butcher of Sehwan in Sindh, which puts the western end of the Granth's geography on the Indus. Sehwan is now better known for Lāl Shahbāz Qalandar's shrine and its dhamāl; one hymn in a Punjabi book is what remains of its other saint.