Part IV: The Sikh Musical Tradition: Kirtan, Raga and the Rababi Lineage in Hindustani Sacred Music

How performance, scripture, and a four-century Muslim–Sikh musical partnership shaped a living sacred tradition.

• Sikhism is almost unique among world religions in having been founded through performance, its liturgy, kirtan, is raga music.
• The Guru Granth Sahib is organised by raga rather than by author, subject or chronology: 31 principal ragas, 60+ raga-forms in performance.
• Bhai Mardana, a Muslim rabab player, accompanied Guru Nanak for two decades; his compositions sit inside Sikh scripture.
• His descendants, the rababis, performed kirtan at the Sikh shrines for nearly 400 years. an institution with no parallel in world religious history.
• Reform movements and the 1947 Partition ended that institution; Gurmat Sangeet revival efforts are now restoring the ragas and the string instruments.

Among the world’s great religions, Sikhism is almost unique in having been founded, in the most literal sense, through performance. Its scripture is essentially a songbook; its founding partnership united a preacher with his accompanist; and its liturgy, kirtan is raga music.

For this reason, the Sikh musical tradition deserves to be treated not as a mere footnote to the story of court patronage but as a chapter of Hindustani music, and as the most thoroughly institutionalized experiment of its age in transmitting sacred music across religious boundaries.

Guru Nanak and Bhai Mardana: A Partnership at the Birth of Sikh Music

The story begins with Guru Nanak (1469–1539), who spent roughly two decades on his udasis, the missionary journeys that carried him across the subcontinent and beyond. Throughout these travels he was accompanied by Bhai Mardana (c. 1459–1534), a Muslim born into the hereditary Mirasi community of musicians at Talwandi (today Nankana Sahib) and a master of the rabab.

The janamsakhis; the traditional life-narratives of the Guru capture the working method of this partnership in a single phrase that recurs repeatedly, attributed to Nanak himself:

‘Mardaneya, chhed rabab — bani aayi hai’ 

(‘Mardana, touch the rabab — the revelation has come’)

Why the partnership matters

In the founding narrative of Sikhism, in other words, revelation arrives as song. The Guru’s shabads were composed in ragas and given to the world through the strings of a Muslim musician.

The symbolism could hardly be more striking, and it deserves to be stated plainly: the founder of a new faith, a Muslim hereditary musician, and a mode of sacred transmission rooted in raga were bound together at the very moment of Sikhism’s birth.

Nor should Mardana be dismissed as a mere accompanist. Compositions attributed to him, the shlokas in Bihagre ki Var stand within the Guru Granth Sahib itself. By tradition this makes him the only instrumentalist companion in the whole of world religious history to be canonized inside the very scripture he helped bring into being.

The Guru Granth Sahib: A Scripture Organized as Music

How the Guru Granth Sahib is arranged

What follows from this founding moment is a scripture unlike almost any other in world history. The Guru Granth Sahib compiled as the Adi Granth by Guru Arjan in 1604 and sealed in its final form in 1708 is arranged musically rather than by author, subject, or chronology.

Its architecture is built from raga: thirty-one principal ragas, which, once regional and mixed variants are counted, yield a performing total of sixty or more raga-forms, running from Sri Raga to Jaijaivanti. Each hymn is located within the section of its assigned raga, and many carry further performance directions in the form of ghar indications, understood as musical instructions.

Feature	Detail	Why it matters
Compiled	Adi Granth, 1604 (Guru Arjan); sealed 1708	Fixes the raga architecture in final form
Organising principle	Raga; not author, subject or chronology	Music is the structure of the book itself
Principal ragas	31	The scripture’s top-level sections
Raga-forms in performance	60+ with regional and mixed variants	Range from Sri Raga to Jaijaivanti
Performance directions	Ghar indications	Read as musical instructions
Voices included	Sikh Gurus, Hindu bhagats (Kabir, Namdev, Ravidas), Sufi Sheikh Farid	A raga ordered archive of the sant and sufi world

Raga as theology, not ornament

This point cannot be overstated, and it is best put in exactly the terms the tradition itself insists upon: the ragas are not ornamental but structural. A hymn’s raga forms part of its meaning, the prescribed emotional register through which its words are meant to be received, and Sikh exegesis has consistently read the assignment of a raga as a deliberate act of theology.

The scripture’s inclusiveness deepens its significance still further. Within this raga based framework sit the hymns of Hindu bhagats such as Kabir, Namdev, and Ravidas, alongside those of the Muslim Sufi Sheikh Farid. The Granth is therefore at once the largest anthology of medieval devotional song in any Indian language and a raga ordered archive of the entire sant and sufi musical world.

The instruments of kirtan

The Gurus also cultivated a distinctive set of instruments for kirtan. Foremost among them was the rabab of Mardana’s line, and tradition credits the later Gurus with promoting string instruments such as the sarinda and the taus (mayuri veena). This repertoire and practice are today studied under the name Gurmat Sangeet.

The Rababi Tradition: Four Centuries of Muslim Kirtan at the Sikh Shrines

Who were the rababis?

From Mardana there descended the rababis: hereditary Muslim musicians who served as the principal performers of Sikh sacred music for very nearly four hundred years. A standing institution with no parallel anywhere in the religious history of the world.

The depth of this bond is written into the scripture itself. The Ramkali ki Var of Satta and Balwand, Muslim rababi bards attached to the courts of the early Gurus, forms part of the Guru Granth Sahib: the composition of Muslim musicians, canonized within Sikh scripture.

How the tradition was transmitted

Generation after generation, rababi families held both the right and the duty of performing kirtan at the Sikh centres, among them Darbar Sahib; the Golden Temple at Amritsar.

They handed down the raga assignments, the string idiom, and the shabad repertoire as their family patrimony, in exactly the way the kalawant gharanas transmitted dhrupad, following the same hereditary logic that governed the classical lineages, here in a distinctively Sikh Muslim form. In doing so the tradition gave living, liturgical shape to a central truth: that sacred music could form a bond which the boundary of religion did not break.

Reform, Partition, and the Breaking of the Bond

Why the rababi tradition ended

The rababi institution did not collapse in the medieval past; it collapsed in the twentieth century. The Singh Sabha and the Gurdwara Reform (Akali) movements, seeking to redefine Sikh identity against the boundary-drawing of the colonial era, progressively restricted performance in the great gurdwaras to initiated Sikhs. A reform era narrowing that had already pushed the rababis to the margins by the 1920s to 1940s.

Partition then completed what reform had begun. In 1947 the rababi families, being Muslims, were driven along with the rest of Punjab’s Muslim population across the newly drawn border, out of Amritsar and East Punjab and away from the shrines their ancestors had served since the sixteenth century.

Period	Event	Consequence for Sikh music
1469–1539	Guru Nanak’s udasis with Bhai Mardana	Revelation transmitted as raga-set song
1604	Adi Granth compiled by Guru Arjan	Scripture organised by raga
1708	Guru Granth Sahib sealed	Raga architecture fixed permanently
16th–19th c.	Rababi families serve the Sikh shrines	Hereditary transmission of raga and repertoire
1920s–1940s	Singh Sabha and Gurdwara Reform movements	Rababis pushed to the margins of the gurdwaras
1947	Partition of Punjab	Rababi families exiled to Pakistan; institution ends
Late 20th c.–today	Gurmat Sangeet revival	Ragas, rabab, saranda and taus restored

The two long consequences

Two further consequences followed. Within Indian Punjab, the string tradition comprising rabab, sarinda, and taus withered in the face of the harmonium, and the discipline of singing shabads in their prescribed ragas loosened into more popular styles.

In Pakistan, meanwhile, the rababi families, cut off from the sangat that had sustained them, slipped into obscurity: a sacred profession left without a congregation.

The Gurmat Sangeet revival

Recent decades, however, have brought a deliberate counter movement. It includes the academic institutionalization of Gurmat Sangeet, notably through the Gurmat Sangeet department at Punjabi University, Patiala. The revival of the taus, sarinda, and rabab, the restoration of raga-prescribed kirtan, and documented efforts to record and honour the surviving rababi descendants in Pakistan.

The late Bhai Ghulam Muhammad Chand of Lahore, heir to the Mardana line, became in his final years the celebrated living link, welcomed on visits to India and recorded singing the old shabads to the last. The bond, broken as an institution, has proved impossible to kill as music.

Anecdote: The Last Rababis Leave Amritsar

In the summer of 1947, as Punjab burned, the rababi families of Amritsar, the hereditary Muslim kirtaniyas whose line of service at the Sikh shrines reached back through Satta and Balwand to Bhai Mardana himself locked their houses and crossed to Pakistan with the refugee columns, bringing an institutional relationship of nearly four hundred years to an end in the space of a single season.

No decree abolished it; the border simply passed through it.

The tradition’s own verdict is preserved in what the exiled families did next: for two more generations, in Lahore, with no gurdwara in which to sing, they went on teaching their children the shabads of Guru Nanak in their prescribed ragas. Muslim families keeping Sikh scripture alive in exile, waiting for the sangat to call them once again.

 

Mufaddal Khumri

September 0, 2026