Asa di Var is a var of twenty-four pauris by Guru Nanak Dev Ji with shloks interleaved, sung in raga Asa in the early morning in gurdwaras. Sung in full with the traditional interpolations it takes two to three hours.
Its content is unusually direct. It attacks ritual purity, the sacred thread, caste, hypocrisy in rulers and clergy, and the treatment of women.
One shlok in it, so kion manda akhiye jit jamme rajan, why call her inferior when kings are born of her, is the most quoted line in Punjabi on the subject and was written in the early sixteenth century.
It is also a picture of the society it was written in: the officials, the accountants, the qazis, the yogis, the food, the money, all named.
The morning Asa di Var at the Golden Temple is one of the fixed points of Sikh practice and it has been sung there, with interruptions, for four hundred years.
It is sung at dawn in every gurdwara, in raga Asa, and the performance runs about two hours with the pauris and shloks interleaved as the volume sets them.
The text is Guru Nanak Sahib Ji's with shloks by Guru Angad Dev Ji added, and the argument in it runs against ritual purity, against caste and against the authority claimed for birth.
The passage about being born of a woman, and the question of how she can then be called impure, is the one most often quoted from it.