Sri Guru Nanak Dev Ji

Sri Guru Nanak Dev Ji was born in the village of Rai Bhoi di Talwandi, now Nankana Sahib in Pakistan, to Kalu, a Khatri who kept accounts for the local landholder Rai Bular, and his wife Tripta. He had an elder sister, Nanaki, to whom he stayed close all his life. The Janamsakhis, the traditional life-stories written down from the late sixteenth century onward, describe a thoughtful child who learned the scripts and arithmetic available to him and who unsettled his teachers with questions about what their learning was for.

The same stories record that he declined the sacred thread at his investiture, preferring, in his own later words, a thread spun from compassion and contentment. His father tried him at herding, farming and trade. One episode has him spending the money meant for a business deal on feeding wandering ascetics, calling it the true bargain. Whatever the historicity of individual stories, the pattern they draw is consistent: a young man drawn to religious questions and impatient with ritual.

In his late teens he married Sulakhni of Batala and later had two sons, Sri Chand and Lakhmi Das. Through Nanaki's husband he found work at Sultanpur Lodhi as storekeeper for the provincial governor, a job he seems to have done well for several years while gathering a circle of friends who sang with him at night, among them the Muslim musician Mardana.[EoS][EoS][EoS][Macauliffe]

The Janamsakhis say that around 1499, bathing in the Kali Bein stream at Sultanpur, Sri Guru Nanak Dev Ji disappeared for three days and returned with a single message: there is no Hindu and no Muslim. Whatever lies behind the story, from this point he gave up his post and spent roughly twenty years travelling with Mardana.

The traditional accounts group the journeys into four long tours (udasis): east through the Gangetic plain to Bengal and Assam, south to Sri Lanka, north into the Himalaya, and west through Multan to Mecca, Medina and Baghdad before returning through Afghanistan. Historians treat the precise routes with caution, since the stories were written down decades after the events and grew in the telling, but the broad picture of extensive travel and debate with Nath yogis, Sufis, Brahmins and Jains is not doubted.

Sri Guru Nanak Dev Ji's method on these journeys, as the stories and his own hymns show it, was to go to the centres of other traditions and argue in their own terms: that bathing at pilgrimage sites does not wash the mind, that fasting and penance do not reach the divine, that God is not confined to any direction, and that caste has no standing before the creator.[EoS][EoS][McLeod]

Around 1522 Sri Guru Nanak Dev Ji bought land on the right bank of the Ravi and founded Kartarpur, the town of the creator. Here he put on the dress of a householder, farmed his fields, and lived with his family for his last seventeen years. People who came to hear him were expected to work alongside him.

Daily life at Kartarpur set the template for Sikh practice: rising early to recite his compositions, gathering to sing them (kirtan), eating together from a common kitchen (langar) in which rank was ignored, and working for a living. Three principles later summarised this: honest work, sharing what you earn, and keeping the divine name in mind.

It was also at Kartarpur that Sri Guru Nanak Dev Ji composed or finalised many of his longer works, including the Japji that opens Sri Guru Granth Sahib Ji, and gathered his hymns into a collection which his successors preserved and expanded.[EoS][EoS][Mann]

Sri Guru Nanak Dev Ji's hymns describe one formless creator, true before time and after it, who is reached not by ritual or renunciation but by living truthfully within the world and keeping the divine name in mind. He rejected the authority of caste, of priests and of pilgrimage, insisted that women are not to be called inferior since rulers themselves are born of them, and condemned rulers and officials who preyed on the people, including, in the Babur-vani hymns, the invading Mughal army.

He wrote in the language of ordinary Punjabis, set to the folk and classical melodies they knew, and he sang rather than preached. The central practices he left behind, remembrance of the name, singing of hymns, the shared meal and the self-supporting community, all follow from the idea that liberation happens inside ordinary life rather than outside it.[EoS][EoS][EoS][Grewal]

Passing over his two sons, Sri Guru Nanak Dev Ji chose Lehna, a devoted follower from Khadur who had shown himself willing to do whatever was asked, and renamed him Sri Guru Angad Dev Ji, a limb of his own body. The Janamsakhis describe tests of obedience that Sri Guru Angad Dev Ji passed and the sons failed. The decision established the principle that the Guruship was an office passed on merit, not a family inheritance, though in practice it returned to the family line from the fourth Guru on.

Sri Guru Nanak Dev Ji passed away at Kartarpur on 7 September 1539 by the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism's reckoning; 22 September is also widely given. A well-known story tells of Hindu and Muslim followers each claiming his body, and finding only flowers under the sheet. Gurdwaras on both banks of the Ravi, at Kartarpur and Dera Baba Nanak, mark his memory.[EoS][EoS][Macauliffe]

Sri Guru Nanak Dev Ji's 974 compositions, more than any other author except Sri Guru Arjun Dev Ji, form the first and defining voice of Sri Guru Granth Sahib Ji. The Sikh community, the institutions of langar and sangat, and the line of nine successors all descend directly from him. The successors whose hymns are in Sri Guru Granth Sahib Ji signed them with his name.

Outside the Sikh tradition he is honoured by Nanakpanthi Hindus and by Sufi-influenced Muslims in Punjab and Sindh, and his birthday remains a shared festival across the religious divide of the region.[EoS][EoS]