Guru Nanak

Life

Nanak was born in 1469 at Talwandi, now Nankana Sahib in Pakistan, into a Khatri family, and worked for a time as a storekeeper at Sultanpur. The tradition places his decisive experience there: he disappeared while bathing in a stream and returned after three days with the statement that there is neither Hindu nor Muslim, and began to teach.

He then travelled for some two decades. The janamsakhis, traditional life accounts, describe journeys through the subcontinent and beyond, to Mecca, Baghdad and Sri Lanka, accompanied by the Muslim musician Mardana. The historicity of individual journeys is doubtful; that he travelled widely and taught by discussion in many places is not seriously questioned. He settled at Kartarpur on the Ravi, where he farmed, established a community, and died in 1539, having appointed a successor.

Teaching

Nanak taught one formless, eternal creator, without image or incarnation, accessible to anyone through remembrance of the divine name. He rejected caste, ritual formalism, idol worship, ascetic withdrawal and the authority of both brahmins and mullahs, and insisted that the religious life is lived in the world — through honest work, sharing with others, and constant remembrance.

The three principles later summarised as kirat karo, vand chhako, naam japo — work honestly, share what you have, remember the Name — come from this. So does the langar, the common kitchen in which people of any caste eat together, which he instituted at Kartarpur as a deliberate breach of commensality rules.

Compositions

Nanak's hymns, in Punjabi and other regional idioms, were collected by his successors and form the largest single body of work in the Guru Granth Sahib. The Japji, recited daily by Sikhs, opens the scripture, and the Mul Mantar that begins it states his theology in a few lines.

His poetry is direct, argumentative and often satirical, taking on ritual practice and social hierarchy by name. This makes him unusual among founders: the primary evidence for what he taught is his own verse, preserved by a community that fixed it in writing within a century of his death.

Sources and assessment

The janamsakhis are devotional literature composed from the seventeenth century, and treat him as a figure surrounded by miracle. Historians work primarily from his own compositions, from the vars of Bhai Gurdas, and from the structure of the community he left. What is clear is that he founded not a school of thought but an institution with a successor, a settlement, a common kitchen and a corpus — which is why the tradition outlasted the many contemporaneous devotional movements it resembles.