The Raags of Sri Guru Granth Sahib: How the Scripture Sings

Most scriptures are read. Sri Guru Granth Sahib Ji is different: it is built to be sung. After its opening prayers, the main body of the scripture is organized not by author or by theme, but by raag — the melodic frameworks of Indian classical music.

This is one of the most striking facts about the text. The Gurus did not simply write hymns and leave them in a pile. They assigned each hymn a raag, and then the compositions were gathered raag by raag. Scholars consistently note that this musical arrangement is the organizing backbone of the scripture (Singh and Fenech 2014). Within each raag, the hymns are then grouped by author and by poetic form.

Why arrange a holy book this way? Because in this tradition, the melody is not decoration added on top of the words. The melody is part of the message. A raag sets a mood, and that mood is meant to match what the words are saying. Gurnam Singh, who has studied this system closely, describes Gurbani as a marriage of poetry and music in which neither part can be removed without loss (Singh 2011).

The result is that the very table of contents of Sri Guru Granth Sahib Ji is, in effect, a sequence of musical chapters. You can think of it as a songbook of immense depth, where the order of the songs follows the order of the raags.

In this course we will take that idea apart, gently and in plain English. We will ask: what is a raag? How many raags structure the scripture, and which are the main ones? How does a raag carry a feeling? How did the Gurus match a hymn's meaning to a raag's mood? And what does all this mean when musicians, called ragis, sit down to perform kirtan today?

Throughout, we lean on the living tradition of Gurmat Sangeet — the practice of singing Gurbani in its proper raags — which devoted musicians like Bhai Avtar Singh worked to document and keep alive for later generations.

The word raag is sometimes translated as 'mode' or 'melody type,' but neither word quite captures it. A raag is best understood as a framework of rules for making music. It tells a musician which notes to use, which notes to lean on, how to move up and down the scale, and which little phrases give the raag its recognizable character.

Crucially, a raag is not a fixed tune. Two performances of the same raag can sound very different in their melodies while still being the same raag, because the musician is improvising within the framework. What stays constant is the feeling the framework produces. Indian musical tradition holds that each raag is tied to a particular mood, often even to a time of day or a season (Mansukhani 1982).

This is the key idea for our course: a raag carries bhav, an inner emotional flavor. One raag may feel tender and longing. Another may feel steady and serene. Another may feel bright and joyful, or solemn and weighty. When a singer performs in a given raag, the listener is gently guided into that emotional state, often before paying close attention to the words at all.

How does this work? Partly through the choice of notes — some intervals naturally feel restful, others feel yearning. Partly through emphasis — lingering on a particular note can color the whole mood. And partly through cultural memory: because a raag has been used for certain feelings over centuries, it carries that association with it.

For Sri Guru Granth Sahib Ji, this means the scripture has, in effect, an emotional palette. By assigning hymns to raags, the Gurus could place each teaching in a precise emotional setting. Gurnam Singh emphasizes that this pairing of meaning and mood is deliberate and central to how the scripture communicates (Singh 2011).

One more plain-English point: you do not need to be a trained musician to feel a raag. The whole design assumes ordinary listeners. The raag does the emotional work; the listener simply receives it. That is why kirtan can move a congregation that has never studied music theory.

In the next lesson we turn to the specific raags used in the scripture, and to the well-known figure of the 31 main raags that give the text its structure.

The central body of Sri Guru Granth Sahib Ji is organized under 31 main raags. These main raags provide the high-level structure: the hymns are gathered raag by raag, and the sequence of raags gives the scripture its order (Singh and Fenech 2014). Alongside these main raags, the tradition also recognizes a number of associated and mixed raag forms that appear within the same sections, but the figure of 31 main raags is the standard count cited in Sikh studies.

It helps to see the main raags laid out. The table below lists the 31 main raags in the order in which their sections appear in the scripture. The note on general mood is a broad, plain-English characterization drawn from how these raags are described in the musicological literature (Singh 2011; Mansukhani 1982); moods are tendencies, not rigid rules, and a single raag can hold a range of feeling.

Notice that the moods are spread widely — from joy to longing to solemn awe. This range is part of the point. Human life moves through many states, and the scripture meets people in each of them. The arrangement does not push everything into a single emotional register; it offers a whole spectrum.

Each raag section also carries internal headings — markers for the author and for the rhythmic or structural setting, including the ghar. These headings function like signposts inside the text, telling a musician how a given hymn is to be set. We will not memorize ang numbers or specific headings here; what matters for this course is the principle that the raag is the top-level organizing unit.

If a raag carries a mood, then choosing a raag for a hymn is a meaningful act. This is exactly what the Gurus did. The assignment of a shabad to a raag is not random; it places the teaching inside an emotional setting that supports what the words are saying (Singh 2011).

Consider the logic in plain terms. A hymn about the soul's longing for the Divine fits naturally into a raag whose mood is yearning and tender. A hymn celebrating spiritual joy fits a bright, uplifting raag. A composition meant to be sung at the time of parting from life sits well in a raag with a reflective, elegiac character. The mood of the music and the meaning of the words reinforce each other, so that the listener feels the teaching, not only hears it.

Pashaura Singh, in his study of how the scripture was compiled and given authority, draws attention to the careful editorial work behind the text — including how compositions were placed and ordered (Singh 2000). The raag assignments are part of that deliberate shaping. They reflect choices about how a given message should land emotionally.

This matching also explains something practical. When a trained ragi prepares to sing a shabad, the raag is already given by the scripture itself. The musician is not free to set a longing hymn to a triumphant tune simply because it sounds nice. To do so would work against the meaning. In this tradition, fidelity to the prescribed raag is a form of fidelity to the message (Singh 2011).

We should be careful and honest here: the moods of raags are described in broad terms, and scholars do not claim a rigid one-to-one code where each emotion maps to exactly one raag. The relationship is more like a thoughtful pairing than a locked formula. Still, the central insight holds firmly — the Gurus used the emotional power of raag to deepen the impact of the word.

There is also a teaching dimension. Because the same themes can appear across different raags, a careful listener encounters a teaching in many emotional lights over time. The same truth might be met first in longing, then in serenity, then in joy. The raag system gives the scripture a kind of emotional range of motion, helping its teachings reach people wherever they happen to be.

So far we have looked at the raag system inside the text. Now we step into the practice. Kirtan is the singing of Gurbani, and in its fullest traditional form, kirtan means singing each shabad in the raag the scripture assigns to it. This practice has a name: Gurmat Sangeet, the music of the Guru's teaching (Singh 2011).

Gurmat Sangeet is not a loose style. It is a disciplined tradition passed down through lineages of musicians, often family lines, who learned both the raags and the correct ways of setting Gurbani within them. The knowledge traveled largely by ear and apprenticeship — a teacher would sing, and a student would absorb. This is why preserving the tradition has depended so heavily on dedicated individuals who carried it forward and wrote it down before it could be lost.

Bhai Avtar Singh stands in this tradition. Working within a hereditary lineage of kirtan musicians, he devoted himself to documenting how Gurbani is to be sung in its prescribed raags, so that the settings would not fade with the passing of the older masters. That documenting work matters enormously, because an oral tradition is fragile: when a generation of masters is gone, what they did not pass on or record can vanish.

In practice, performing kirtan in raag asks several things of a ragi. The musician must know the raag's framework — its notes and characteristic phrases. The musician must know the traditional setting of the particular shabad. And the musician must hold to the mood, so that the singing carries the bhav the scripture intends rather than a feeling imported from elsewhere (Singh 2011; Mansukhani 1982).

It is worth being clear-eyed: much kirtan today is sung in popular tunes rather than in the prescribed raags, often because the raag-based settings are demanding and were not always passed on. This is precisely the situation that makes documentation and teaching urgent. Reviving raag-based kirtan is, for many in the tradition, a way of returning the singing to the meaning the Gurus built into it.

The instruments matter too, though they have changed over time. Today the harmonium and tabla are common, but the older tradition also used stringed instruments associated with particular Gurus. What stays essential across these changes is the raag itself — the framework that holds the mood (Mansukhani 1982).

We can now pull the threads together. Sri Guru Granth Sahib Ji is arranged largely by raag, with 31 main raags giving the scripture its structure (Singh and Fenech 2014). A raag is a melodic framework that carries a mood, or bhav. The Gurus assigned hymns to raags so that the emotional character of the music would match and deepen the meaning of the words (Singh 2011). And the living practice of singing those settings — Gurmat Sangeet — has been carried forward by lineage musicians, including Bhai Avtar Singh, who worked to document it.

Why does this matter beyond the world of specialists? Three reasons stand out.

First, it changes how we read the scripture. Once you know the raag headings are musical instructions, the text stops looking like a flat block of poetry and starts looking like a carefully scored work. The structure itself becomes a teaching about how the words are meant to be experienced.

Second, it raises the stakes of how kirtan is performed. If the raag carries part of the meaning, then dropping the raag drops part of the meaning. This is the argument many in the tradition make for reviving raag-based kirtan rather than settling for catchy tunes. It is not nostalgia; it is an argument about fidelity to the message (Singh 2011).

Third, it preserves a remarkable cultural and spiritual achievement. The pairing of a vast body of sacred poetry with a complete system of raags is rare. Documenting and teaching it — the work that figures like Bhai Avtar Singh undertook — keeps that achievement alive for people who will never meet the old masters in person.

A closing note on honesty and limits. This course has stayed at the level of principles. We have not memorized ang numbers, quoted specific lines, or claimed precise dates, because the safe and well-attested point is the framework itself: the arrangement by raag, the count of 31 main raags, the carrying of mood, and the matching of message to mood. Scholars such as Pashaura Singh and Gurnam Singh, and reference works like the Oxford Handbook of Sikh Studies, support exactly this framework (Singh 2000; Singh 2011; Singh and Fenech 2014).

If you take one idea from this course, let it be this: in Sri Guru Granth Sahib Ji, to sing is to interpret. The melody is part of the meaning, and the raag is how the scripture chooses its emotional voice.