The Bhatts and the Swaiyye

Explanation, not scripture — scholar review pending. These pages explain the scripture to engineers and students. Every quoted line is verbatim from the pinned database and cited by Ang; everything else is explanation, written by engineers and awaiting a Granthi’s review. Where this page and the scripture differ, the scripture is right.

The Swaiyye (Angs 1385–1409, 780 lines in the database’s ਸਵਈਏ section) are verses in praise of the first five Gurus. The first of them are Guru Arjan Dev Ji’s own; from Ang 1389 they are the work of the Bhatts, bards who came to the Guru’s court and sang what they saw. Eleven Bhatts are named in the tradition, and the corpus attributes their lines like this:

Bhatt	Angs	Lines
Bhatt Kalsahar	1389–1408	279
Bhatt Nal	1398–1401	84
Bhatt Mathura	1404–1409	69
The Bhatts	1389–1410	54
Bhatt Kirat	1395–1406	40
Bhatt Gayand	1402–1404	38
Bhatt Bal	1405–1405	26
Bhatt Jalap	1394–1395	25
Bhatt Sal	1396–1406	18
Bhatt Bhikha	1395–1396	13
Bhatt Haribans	1409–1409	7
Bhatt Bhal	1396–1396	4

The row The Bhatts is the generic attribution: a verse whose signature names no single bard, or whose attribution the review did not settle, keeps it rather than a guess.

How a Swaiyya is attributed

A Swaiyya usually ends with the bard’s name — the signature. The pipeline’s third post-pass reads bhatt_attribution.json, a table produced by a subject-matter audit and verified against those signatures, and refines only rows that carry the generic Bhatt label (conservative by design: nothing already attributed is changed). The table lives in sggs-data beside the pipeline; the corpus pipeline page shows where the post-pass runs.

Why this matters to an engineer

• Author filters. “Lines by Bhatt Kalsahar” is a query on author; a verse still under the generic label will not appear in it. Say so in any UI that filters by author.
• Sahaskriti spelling. The Swaiyye use Sanskritised forms with subjoined letters, which is where most of the editorial ledger’s applications fall (Angs 1398 to 1409): the source font emitted impossible sequences in exactly these clusters.
• Nothing is inferred at query time. Attribution is a build-time fact of the corpus; the API never re-attributes.

Read next: Gurmukhi and Unicode.