Varanasi

Varanasi, also called Banaras or Kashi, is the Ganges city in Uttar Pradesh. For Sikhs it is first of all the home ground of Bhagat Ravidas. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism says he was born to Raghu and Ghurbinia near Varanasi, in a low-caste family of leather workers, and that forty of his hymns are in the Guru Granth Sahib. It says he rejected distinctions of caste and creed and held that low birth is no bar to spiritual progress.

Key moments

• February 1507: Guru Nanak is at Varanasi on Shivaratri, and Pandit Chatur Das asks him to study the branches of learning there. The Guru answers that only the Name of God counts. Gurdwara Guru Bagh marks the garden, and its present building was opened on 23 November 1969, for the 500th anniversary of his birth.
• 1666: Guru Tegh Bahadur is received by the sangat led by Bhai Jawahari Mall and stays several months in the house of Bhai Kalyan Mall, now Gurdwara Bari Sangat.
• 1670: the child Gobind Rai, escorted from Patna to the Punjab, visits the shrine.
• Later: Guru Gobind Singh sends five Sikhs to Varanasi to learn Sanskrit, and Nirmala centres of study grow from their stay. One survives as the Shri Guru Nanak Nirmal Sanskrit Vidyalaya.
• 2019: Jeevan Singh Tamil, later a Sikh and president of the Bahujan Dravida Party, says on his own website that he filed to contest against Narendra Modi at Varanasi but his nomination was rejected. The page gives no reason and no other source opened confirms it.

What it means today. The Guru Granth Sahib carries forty hymns of a Varanasi leather worker alongside the Gurus', and Sikh presence in the city runs from Guru Nanak's visit to the Nirmala centres of study that still work there.