Guru Nanak Dev Ji

Guru Nanak Dev Ji was the first Guru of the Sikhs and the founder of the Sikh faith. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism calls him the source of a powerful current of spiritual and social renewal, and his own hymns in the Guru Granth Sahib are the root of Sikh teaching.

Birth and early life. Modern research, says the Encyclopaedia, places his birth on 15 April 1469, although his birthday is celebrated worldwide on the full-moon day of Kartik (October to November). He was born at Rai Bhoi Ki Talvandi, now Nankana Sahib, about 65 km southwest of Lahore. His father, Kalian Chand, called Mehta Kalu, a Bedi, was the village accountant for the local chief Rai Bular; his mother was Tripta. His sister Nanaki and her husband Jai Ram invited him to Sultanpur, where he kept the government storehouse for Nawab Daulat Khan Lodhi. There the Muslim minstrel Mardana joined him, and they sang hymns, shared a common meal and urged people to a life of simplicity and righteousness. He was married to Sulakkhani of Batala and had two sons, Sri Chand (born 1494) and Lakhmi Das (born 1497).

Key moments

• About 1499: after bathing in the Bein at Sultanpur he was missing for three days and nights and was feared drowned. On his return, at about thirty years old, his first words were "There is no Hindu, there is no Musalman."
• He then left Sultanpur with Mardana for about twenty years of travel. The journeys are customarily grouped into four, east, south, north and west, and are said to have reached Kurukshetra, Haridwar, Banaras, Gaya, Bengal, Assam, Ceylon, Pak Pattan and Multan, and beyond India Mecca, Medina and Baghdad. The Encyclopaedia says an exact itinerary is hard to establish.
• 1520: he and Mardana were taken prisoner by Babur at the sack of Saidpur and released.
• About 1521: he founded Kartarpur on the right bank of the Ravi, on land given by a wealthy follower, and it became the centre of the new community. Morning and evening hymns, the langar and the sangat, open to men and women regardless of caste and creed, were established there, with the teaching summed up as kirat karni, vand chhakna and nam japna: honest labour, sharing, and remembering the Name.
• He installed his most deserving disciple, Bhai Lahina, renamed Angad, as his successor, and died on Assu vadi 10, 1596 Bk, which the Encyclopaedia gives as 7 September 1539.

What he taught. His hymns proclaim one God beyond the names and forms of any community. The Encyclopaedia notes that he censured rulers and officials, the formalism of Brahmans and Mullas, idolatry, empty ritual and caste, and condemned the pusillanimity of the rulers of India before Babur's invasion. He held that the body is the house of God and that the man of faith should not retreat from the world. In the Japu he writes of a God whose limits no one can fix.

Remembered for: founding a community on the Name, honest work and common sharing, and for choosing as his successor the disciple he judged most deserving. The Sikh understanding, the Encyclopaedia says, is that the voice that spoke through Guru Nanak spoke through the later Gurus and continues in the Guru Granth Sahib.