Guru Nanak

Guru Nanak was a religious teacher and poet from the Punjab who founded Sikhism, today one of the world's major religions with some twenty-five to thirty million followers. Born into a Hindu family in 1469, he taught devotion to a single, formless God, the equality of all people regardless of caste or sex, and a life of honest work and service lived in the world rather than withdrawn from it. Sikhs revere him as the first of ten Gurus, and his hymns form the core of their scripture, the Guru Granth Sahib.

Nanak's own words survive in nearly a thousand hymns preserved in Sikh scripture, but these are devotional poetry and say little directly about his life. The main accounts of his life are the janamsakhis, "birth stories", traditional biographies compiled by his followers from the late sixteenth century onwards and expanded over the following centuries. They are works of devotion full of miracles and teaching tales, and they disagree with each other on many points, including his date of birth. Modern historians therefore distinguish between the few facts that can be established with reasonable confidence, the outline of his life given below, and the much richer body of tradition that Sikhs cherish.

Nanak was born in 1469 at Talwandi, a village about sixty-five kilometres south-west of Lahore, then part of the Delhi Sultanate under the Lodi dynasty. The village is now called Nankana Sahib, in Pakistan. Most early sources give his birth as April, while Sikhs traditionally celebrate it at the full moon of the month of Kartik in October or November. His family were Hindu Khatris, a mercantile caste, and his father, Kalu, was the village accountant, working for a Muslim landlord. Nanak learned to read and keep accounts, and tradition says he also studied Persian.

The janamsakhis describe a thoughtful, unworldly boy who refused as a boy to be invested with the sacred thread worn by high-caste Hindus, and who spent money given to him for trade on feeding wandering holy men. He married Sulakhani, with whom he had two sons, Sri Chand and Lakhmi Das. As a young man he moved to Sultanpur Lodhi, where his elder sister Nanaki lived, and worked as a storekeeper for the local governor, Daulat Khan Lodi. There he met again his childhood friend Mardana, a Muslim musician, who accompanied his singing on the rabab, a stringed instrument.

According to Sikh tradition, around 1500, when Nanak was about thirty, he went to bathe in the river Bein near Sultanpur one morning and disappeared for three days. Sikhs believe that during this time he was taken into the presence of God and charged with spreading the divine Name. When he returned he is said to have declared that there is no Hindu and no Muslim, meaning that what matters before God is not religious labels but truth and conduct. Soon afterwards he left his post and began his life as a travelling teacher. Historians cannot test the experience itself, but agree that around this time he gave up ordinary employment and began to gather followers.

For some twenty years Nanak travelled, often with Mardana, visiting Hindu and Muslim holy places and debating with ascetics, priests and Sufi mystics. Tradition arranges these travels into four great journeys, east to Bengal and Assam, south to Sri Lanka, north into the Himalayas and west to Mecca and Baghdad. How far he actually went is debated. He certainly travelled widely in northern India, and his hymns show close knowledge of both Hindu and Islamic practice, but the more distant journeys are known only from accounts written long after his death and cannot be confirmed from other sources.

One episode connects him firmly with a known historical event. In his hymns Nanak describes the brutality of the invasion of the Punjab by Babur, the future founder of the Mughal Empire, in the 1520s, lamenting the slaughter of ordinary people and the humiliation of women. These verses, known as the Babarvani, are among the few passages in which he speaks of contemporary events.

The central idea of Nanak's teaching, as Sikhs understand it, is the oneness of God, expressed in the opening words of Sikh scripture, Ik Onkar, "there is one God". God is the creator, without form, beyond birth and death, and present in all creation, and can be known through loving devotion and constant remembrance of the divine Name, called nam simran. The obstacle to this is haumai, self-centredness, which keeps people trapped in the cycle of birth and death. Release comes through divine grace and through a disciplined life, not through ritual.

Nanak was sharply critical of empty religious observance, whether pilgrimage, idol worship and caste rules among Hindus or formal piety among Muslims, and he rejected the claims of priests to stand between people and God. He also rejected the renunciation of the world practised by ascetics, teaching instead that spiritual life should be lived as a householder. Later tradition sums up his ethic in three principles: remember God, earn an honest living and share with others. He drew on ideas shared with the devotional bhakti movement of Hinduism and with Sufi Islam, and the Sikh scriptures include hymns by earlier saints of both backgrounds, such as Kabir. Sikhs, however, regard his message as a distinct revelation, not a blend of the two faiths.

In his later years, probably from the early 1520s, Nanak settled at Kartarpur, a village he founded on the right bank of the river Ravi, today just inside Pakistan near the Indian border. There he lived as a farmer with his family, and a community of followers grew around him, meeting for hymn singing at dawn and in the evening. The practice of langar, a free communal kitchen where people of all castes sat and ate together, began in this period and remains a feature of every Sikh gurdwara. He also composed the Japji, the morning prayer Sikhs still recite daily.

Passing over his own sons, Nanak chose as his successor a devoted disciple, Lehna, whom he renamed Angad. This decision ensured that his movement continued as a community with its own leadership rather than dissolving after his death. Nanak died at Kartarpur in 1539, by tradition on 22 September. A well-known story says that Hindus and Muslims disputed whether to cremate or bury him, and on lifting the sheet found only flowers.

Nine further Gurus led the Sikh community after Nanak. The fifth, Arjan, compiled the first Sikh scripture in 1604, and the tenth, Gobind Singh, founded the Khalsa in 1699 and declared that the scripture itself would be the Guru after him. In 1799 the Sikh leader Ranjit Singh took Lahore and went on to build the Sikh Empire in the Punjab, which the British conquered in the 1840s. The Partition of India in 1947 divided the Punjab, leaving Nanak's birthplace and the site of his death in Pakistan and most Sikhs in India. In 2019, on the 550th anniversary of his birth, a visa-free corridor opened to let pilgrims from India visit the gurdwara at Kartarpur. His birthday, Guru Nanak Gurpurab, is one of the most important Sikh festivals.