Guru Nanak

Guru Nanak (15 April 1469 – 22 September 1539) was an Indian spiritual teacher, mystic and poet, regarded as the founder of Sikhism and the first of the ten Sikh Gurus. ¹ The Encyclopaedia Britannica biography states the same standing in its own words: he "is revered as the founder and the first Guru of Sikhism". ² He taught Ik Onkar, the one God who dwells in every one of his creations, on a platform of equality, fraternal love, goodness and virtue, and his words survive as 974 hymns in the Guru Granth Sahib. ¹ He is recorded in this museum not as a Muslim figure but as an honoured contemporary of the Muslim world he lived inside and interacted with all his life.

Nanak was born at Rai Bhoi di Talwandi, present-day Nankana Sahib in the Punjab, into a Hindu Khatri family of merchants; most janamsakhis give the Vaisakh date corresponding to 15 April 1469, while the Bala janamsakhi's Kattak full-moon date, corresponding to 20 October 1469, was later adopted for his Gurpurab festival. ^{1 2} His earliest world was already intertwined with Islam: the Muslim midwife Daultan delivered him, the local landlord Rai Bullar was a recent convert to Islam who first recognised his gifts, and at nine his father sent him to a maktab under a Muslim teacher, Saiyid Hassan, where he learnt Persian and Arabic and studied Indo-Islamic literature. ¹ His childhood friend, who remained his companion for life, was Mardana, a Muslim rababi musician. ¹

Through his brother-in-law Nanak found work in Sultanpur in the modikhana, the government storehouse, of Daulat Khan Lodi, the Pathan governor of Lahore province, and there his spiritual crisis came: after disappearing into the Bein river for three days, in the janamsakhi account, he emerged with the declaration "There is no Hindu, there is no Muslim" — a negation of the period's religious divisions that a local qazi protested to Daulat Khan, and the beginning of his teaching career. ^{1 2} Britannica is careful with the frame: what is known of his life has come down mainly through legend, anecdote and tradition, and neither the route nor the places of his travels can be positively identified. ²

The janamsakhis send Nanak on four great journeys, or udasis, across Asia, accompanied on the eastern and western tours by Mardana playing the rabab to his hymns. The fourth and westernmost tour takes him, in the tradition, to Mecca, Medina and Baghdad: at Mecca he is said to have slept with his feet toward the Kaaba and to have answered the outraged qazi that God is in every direction, and a stone inscription at Baghdad is read by some as recording his presence in 1511–1512. ¹ These accounts are presented here as what they are — hagiographical tradition whose details modern scholarship disputes: early Sikh texts do not contain the travel stories, they grow more elaborate over the centuries in ways that parallel the miracle tales of Sufi pirs, and Western scholars argue the Baghdad stone is a 19th-century inscription, with no Middle Eastern record of the visit found. ^{1 2} Within the Punjab his journeys to the Sufi centres of Pakpattan and Multan belong to the same tradition, while one part of his story is anchored in datable history: the Babur Vani, his four hymns on Babur's invasion, make him an eyewitness of the Mughal conqueror's sack of Saidpur. ¹

Nanak's teaching, as his hymns give it, centres on remembrance of the divine name (naam japo), honest work (kirat karo) and sharing (vand chhako), with a rejection of caste and of the ritual orthodoxies of both the religions around him, learned in part in argument with Hindu siddhas and in the Sufi and sadhu company of his youth. ¹ The scripture his movement produced carries a Muslim voice inside it: the Guru Granth Sahib preserves verses attributed to Fariduddin Ganjshakar, the thirteenth-century Chishti Sufi of Pakpattan — known as Baba Farid — whose shrine Nanak is said to have visited and whose successor Sheikh Ibrahim he is said to have debated, so that a Muslim saint's poetry stands in the Sikh canon alongside the Guru's own. ¹

Around the age of fifty Nanak founded Kartarpur on the Ravi and settled there as a householder-teacher, building a community ordered by communal singing, communal eating in the langar, and selfless service, and introducing the institutions his successors inherited. ¹ Shortly before his death he passed over his own sons and appointed his disciple Bhai Lehna as Guru Angad, his successor. ^{1 2} He died at Kartarpur on 22 September 1539, the date the Sikh records give and the one consistent with their stated age for him; Britannica notes the tradition divided between 1538 and 1539. ^{1 2 3} Sikh hagiography tells that his Hindu and Muslim followers disputed over his remains and found only flowers beneath the sheet — a legend recorded here as the tradition's own testimony to how both communities claimed him. ¹