Asa Di Varਆਸਾ ਦੀ ਵਾਰ

Asa Di Var is Guru Nanak Dev Ji's great morning ballad, sung by kirtan musicians in gurdwaras before dawn as the centre of the early morning service. Its twenty four stanzas, called pauris, and its fifty nine slokas ask one question from many sides: how does a person escape the bondage of the ego and prepare for union with God? Around that question the Var delivers some of the sharpest social teaching in the Guru Granth Sahib, against hypocrisy, empty ritual and inequality.

What is Asa Di Var?

Asa Di Var, written Asa Ki Var in the index of the Guru Granth Sahib, is an ode in Raag Asa, the musical measure of the predawn hours. Its name is often explained as the Ballad of Hope: var means an ode or ballad, and Asa, the raga's name, also means hope in Punjabi. The composition stands in the Guru Granth Sahib from ang 462 to ang 475, and the custom of singing it in the morning is traced to the days of Guru Nanak Dev Ji himself. Tradition says Bhai Lahina, who later became Guru Angad Dev Ji, was the first to sing it in Guru Nanak Dev Ji's presence. Like Japji Sahib, it belongs to the first light of the Sikh day, but where Japji is recited by the individual, Asa Di Var is sung by the congregation's musicians.

How is Asa Di Var put together?

The core of the Var is its twenty four pauris, every one of them by Guru Nanak Dev Ji. Set before the pauris are slokas, short couplets that introduce and sharpen each stanza's theme. The title Guru Arjan Dev Ji gave the composition when he entered it in the Guru Granth Sahib in 1604 notes that the slokas too were the First Guru's, and in its present form the Var carries fifty nine slokas in all: forty five by Guru Nanak Dev Ji and fourteen by Guru Angad Dev Ji. In performance the shape grows further. The singers prefix each pauri with a quatrain from the chhakkas, the sextettes of Guru Ram Das Ji recorded separately under Raag Asa, and they punctuate the singing with illustrative hymns from the Guru Granth Sahib and with passages of Bhai Gurdas and Bhai Nand Lal, whose writings are approved texts for kirtan.

Why is Asa Di Var sung to the tune of Tunda Asraj?

At the head of the Var, Guru Arjan Dev Ji recorded a musical direction: it is to be sung in the tune of an old folk ballad whose hero was a prince named Asraja, called Tunda Asraj, the maimed handed, because of his damaged hand. The choice is deliberate teaching. A var was normally a heroic ballad, sung to stir warriors with the deeds of a king or a champion. Guru Nanak Dev Ji takes that heroic frame and fills it with a different battle: not the winning of a kingdom, but the soul's fight against its own ego, greed and falsehood, and its advance toward God. The borrowed tune tells every listener, before a word is understood, that what follows is a story of courage, and that the field of battle is the human heart.

What does Asa Di Var teach?

The Var opens with praise of the Guru, the guide who brings light into the world. In a famous sloka, Guru Angad Dev Ji says that if a hundred moons and a thousand suns were to rise, their light would still be utter darkness without the Guru. God, Guru Nanak Dev Ji teaches, created all that exists and manifested his Name in his creation. Those who attach themselves to the Name are the winners in life, and by God's grace alone a person finds the true Guru, is set on the path of righteousness and is freed from ego. Beyond this life, the Var insists, neither caste nor power will count for anything: honour there belongs only to those the Lord favours, and sweetness and humility are the essence of all virtue. Its remedy for the human condition is the same one Simran practises all day: remembrance of the Name, truth, and loving devotion instead of formal acts of piety.

Why does Asa Di Var attack empty ritual and inequality?

No composition in the Guru Granth Sahib looks at its own society more directly. The Var notices cant, hypocrisy and superstition passing under the name of religion, and people aping the dress and language of their foreign rulers. To the Brahman who prizes the sacred thread, Guru Nanak Dev Ji answers that he has little use for a cord that gets soiled and breaks: the thread worth wearing is spun from the cotton of compassion, twisted with contentment and truth and knotted with continence. A woman who has given birth is not impure, the Var declares: impure is the mind filled with covetousness, the tongue that utters falsehood, the eyes that look at another's woman, the ear that hears slander. And it asks the question still quoted wherever women's dignity is defended: why call her evil, from whom great men are born?

How is Asa Di Var sung today?

Asa Di Var is sung in the early morning in gurdwaras across the world, the main item of the dawn diwan, most famously at Harmandir Sahib in Amritsar, where the singing begins in the ambrosial hours and carries the congregation into the day. A full singing takes well over an hour, as the raagis work through the pauris with their chhakkas and illustrative hymns. Printed pothis of the Var began appearing at Lahore in the 1870s, and Max Arthur Macauliffe published a translation in 1901, carrying the morning ballad to English readers. For the Sikh who hears it before work, its work is plain: yesterday's ego, greed and pretence are named and dismissed before the day begins, and hope, the hope inside its very name, is set in their place.