ਬਾਵਨ ਅੱਖਰੀਬਾਵਨ ਅੱਖਰੀ

Bawan Akhri is the name given to two compositions in the Guru Granth Sahib, one by Guru Arjan Dev Ji and one by Bhagat Kabir Ji, both built on the fifty-two letters of the alphabet. Each stanza opens with a letter and turns it into a spiritual lesson about the Guru, grace, the Name, and the limits of words.

What Bawan Akhri means

The name says what the form is. Bawan means fifty-two, and akhri comes from akhar, a letter. Bawan Akhri is a poem built on letters: each stanza begins with a letter of the alphabet and uses it as the starting point for a teaching. The form is called an acrostic, and it is an old one from Sanskrit literature, where the Devanagari alphabet counted fifty-two letters: thirty-three consonants, sixteen vowels and three compounds. A composition that worked through those letters came to be called a bavan akhari.

The name is a promise the poems do not keep exactly. Neither composition in the Guru Granth Sahib has precisely fifty-two stanzas, because not every letter of the old alphabet fits the Gurmukhi script, and some letters are used more than once while others are left out. The number in the title points to the idea behind the form, not to a strict count. What matters is the device: the alphabet becomes a ladder, and each rung is a lesson.

Two compositions under one name

There are two Bawan Akhris in the Guru Granth Sahib, and both sit under Raag Gauri, the musical measure that runs from ang 151 to ang 346. The first is by Guru Arjan Dev Ji, the fifth Guru. It begins on ang 250 and runs to ang 262. The second is by Bhagat Kabir Ji, and it sits in Raag Gauri Purbi, from ang 340 to ang 343. They share a title and a form, but they are different compositions by different authors, written in different voices.

Guru Arjan Dev Ji's Bawan Akhri is the longer of the two. It has fifty-five pauris, or stanzas, of eight lines each, preceded by slokas, short couplets that set the theme. A nine-line sloka opens the composition and returns at the end, and an extra couplet follows the first pauri. Scholars note that it is perhaps the earliest bavan akhari in Punjabi literature. Bhagat Kabir Ji's version is one of his longer compositions, with forty-five stanzas. Its first five stanzas introduce it, and the acrostic begins in the sixth, with Oankar. Kabir Ji's composition is older than Guru Arjan Dev Ji's, though it was written in Sadh Bhasha, the shared devotional language of the Bhagats, and set down in Gurmukhi characters.

How the fifty-two letters shape the poems

In an acrostic, the alphabet does the planning. Each stanza takes the next letter and builds its lines around it. In Guru Arjan Dev Ji's composition, the opening stanza begins with Oang, the primal sound, and the stanzas that follow take up the consonants in turn. In Bhagat Kabir Ji's, the sixth stanza begins with Oankar, and the stanzas after it work through the consonants, mostly in their Punjabi forms. The fit is deliberately loose: only twenty-nine consonants in Gurmukhi, from k to v, match those in Devanagari, so the letter m opens two stanzas in Guru Arjan Dev Ji's poem, some letters repeat, and a few redundant in Gurmukhi are missing. The alphabet is a frame, not a cage. Letters can carry a teaching from one person to another, but the thing they point to is beyond them, and both poems say so plainly.

What Guru Arjan Dev Ji teaches

The heart of Guru Arjan Dev Ji's Bawan Akhri is given in the couplet marked rahau, the pause, which the singer returns to: “O God, Merciful to the meek, please be kind to me, that my mind might become the dust of the feet of Your Saints.” Everything else in the composition circles that prayer. Grace is what the seeker must ask for, humility is the posture in which it is asked, and the company of the holy is where it is found.

The opening sloka, repeated at the end, praises the Guru in every relation a person knows: mother, father, friend, brother, and God himself. The Guru washes away sins, teaches the Lord's Name, and helps the seeker swim across the worldly ocean. God is self-existent, the subtle essence and the form at once, the Giver whose treasures never fail. Words can describe everything in creation, the poem says, but not him.

The teaching is practical, and it is urgent. This human body has been won after passing through many lower births, and this is the chance to end the cycle of birth and death. The purpose of human life is to realise God, yet people tangle themselves in the world and forget him. There is no need to run to the forests to find him, for he dwells within. What is needed is to give up ego, because abstinence and bodily mortification do not bring enlightenment. The only way is to become worthy of his grace, and grace comes through the Guru, who purifies the devotee's life and sets him on the path. Satsang, the company of the holy, matters most of all, because the mind is detached from maya and stilled only by meditating on the Divine Name. The last stanza closes as the composition began, with an invocation asking God for the gift of his Name.

What Bhagat Kabir Ji teaches

Bhagat Kabir Ji opens with a claim about the letters themselves: “Through these fifty-two letters, the three worlds and all things are described. These letters shall perish; they cannot describe the Imperishable Lord.” It is the thesis of his whole composition. Letters are enough for the world of things, and they fail before the One who made it.

The principal theme is communion with the Supreme Being and the path that leads to it. The letters that express the bliss of communion, Kabir Ji says, are not the fifty-two letters used for everyday affairs: spiritual experience falls outside their range. Within that state, doubts dissolve, and God is realised as the reality that fills everything, the way the great banyan tree is already present in its tiny seed.

The path Kabir Ji describes is simple and severe. A person needs the guidance of the Guru, the spiritual preceptor, and the true follower stays uninvolved in worldly affairs while revelling in the love of the Divine. God is one, eternal, and everywhere, but a thick veil of maya lies over the eyes, and only those who discard evil, overcome attachment and find serenity of mind are freed from delusion. The bliss of a heart lit by the Supreme Light cannot be put into words: speech can point, but only experience arrives.

Kabir Ji's language is Sadhukari, the shared devotional idiom of the Bhagats, mixed with Bhojpuri, Persian and Sanskrit words of the time. His images are the familiar ones of the Guru Granth Sahib: the self as the wife and God as the husband, the world as a temple, the heart as a lotus, and the illumination of the mind as rays of sun.

Is Bawan Akhri by Guru Nanak Dev Ji?

No, and the confusion is easy to understand. Guru Nanak Dev Ji did compose an acrostic, and it uses the same letter-by-letter device, but it is a different composition with a different name: Dakhni Oankar, also called simply Oankar. Its full title is Ramkali Mahala 1 Dakhani Oankaru, and it sits in Raag Ramkali, from ang 929 to ang 938, with fifty-four stanzas.

The name Dakhni points south. According to one tradition, the composition was addressed to the priest of the Oankar temple in the Dakhan, the south, on an island in the Narmada river in Madhya Pradesh. Its opening praises God as the Creator of all that exists, and its rahau verse tells the pandit to stop writing idle letters and write the Name of God alone. Like Bawan Akhri, it takes the alphabet as its frame and fills it with teaching about grace, the Guru and the Name. The two are cousins, not the same poem: Bawan Akhri belongs to Guru Arjan Dev Ji and Bhagat Kabir Ji in Raag Gauri, while Dakhni Oankar belongs to Guru Nanak Dev Ji in Raag Ramkali.

How Bawan Akhri is read today

Bawan Akhri is read as part of the Guru Granth Sahib, so it is heard whenever the scripture is read in full, and it is also studied on its own. Students of Gurbani turn to it for two reasons: it is a clear example of the acrostic form, and it gathers the central teachings about the Guru, grace, the Name and the limits of words into one composition.

In gurdwaras and study circles, the usual way in is through katha, the exposition of the text, where each stanza is explained in turn and the teaching behind the letter is drawn out. The two compositions are often read side by side, so that Guru Arjan Dev Ji's praise of the Guru and Bhagat Kabir Ji's testing of the letters can be heard against each other. Translations are available online, including on Sri Granth.