Guru Nanak

Guru Nanak, the founder of Sikhism, was born to Hindu parents in a village west of Lahore in 1469. For knowledge of his life we are almost entirely dependent upon the much later prose hagiographies (janamsakhi) which were composed in the Sikh community during the seventeenth century.

In very broad outline, however, the picture given by the hagiographies may be accepted, not least their frequent references to the great diversity of religious life in sixteenth-century Punjab. As one of the first areas of India to be conquered by Muslim invaders, the Punjab had for some four centuries been subject to strong Islamic influences. Ultimately subordi­nate to the authority of the sultans in neighbouring Delhi, Muslims had long been politically dominant, and the state authority supported the institutions of orthodox Islam and the clerics who serviced them.

By this period Islam had long since ceased to be exclusively an alien import or just the religion of a foreign ruling class. Intense missionary activity, largely the initiative of Sufi preachers with their more tolerant interpretation of Islam and often charismatic personalities, had brought about mass conversions of substantial groups of the local popula­tion. The shrines of such great Sufi saints as Shaykh Farid (1173-1265) of Pakpatan, administered by their spiritual successors, were firmly established as major centres of popular devotion.

Amongst the Hindus, too, a variety of religious traditions was to be found. While perhaps less rigidly enforced in this border region than in its heartland in the Gangetic plains, the dominant orthodoxy was that of Brahminical Hinduism, upholding the necessity for the strict observance of caste distinctions.

More recently, as all over northern India, various devotional movements had come to exercise an increasing appeal. The most prominent of these movements of devotion had as their object a personalised God (saguna bhakti), and the most popular cults focused upon incarnations of Vishnu, especially Krishna. In these cults, which may in one sense be seen as the response of a revitalised Hinduism to the spiritual challenge presented by the political dominance of Islam, the emotional togetherness of the congrega­tions of the faithful listening to hymns of adoration composed in easily understood contemporary language stood in sharp contrast to the hier­archical separation of castes encouraged in the traditional Sanskritic rituals performed by the Brahmins.

Finally, there were also devotional movements directed towards the worship of an impersonal God (nirguna bhakti), which derived from the teachings of a loosely associated group of reformers known as the Sants. Almost all of very humble caste, these Sants included the cotton-printer Namdev (1270-1350) from Maharashtra, the weaver Kabir (1440-1518) from Benares and his younger contemporary, the leather­worker Ravides. Though naturally varying in their expression, the teachings of the Sants tended to be more radical than those propounded by the personal­ised cults. Not only were traditional learning, rituals and caste-observances pronounced useless, but devotion to images too was regarded as an obstacle to the salvation which could only be attained by heeding the voice of God in the human heart. In their expression of this central doctrine in their vernacu­lar verses and hymns, the Sants relied not just on vivid local imagery, but on terminology drawn both from the personal cults and from the system of yogic terms earlier developed by the Nath yogis to describe the workings of the inner spiritual process.

The fact that Guru Nanak was able to achieve such an integration in his teachings may be attributed in some measure to his back­ground. Whereas the Sants had come from low castes, Guru Nanak was a member of the Khattri caste, traditionally involved in business and adminis­tration. His father was a village accountant (patvari), the lowest rank in the revenue administration, and when Guru Nanak himself left home, it was to be employed as the steward of a local Muslim magnate. Both the imagery and organisation of his compositions and the coherence of his teachings reflect this early professional background.

The traditional accounts provide no certain clues as to the nature of Guru Nanak’s early spiritual development. As a boy and youth, he is said to have been a dreamer, little interested in worldly affairs, and even after his marriage, which resulted in the birth of two sons, and his employment as an administrator, he continued to be absorbed in matters of the spirit. His great moment of transformation is said to have occurred when he was about thirty years old and went, as was his practice each morning, to bathe in the river. On this occasion he was taken before God, and did not emerge for three days, when he came out uttering the famous words, ‘There is neither Hindu nor Muslim’, which are taken as the charter of Sikhism’s character as a separate, third religious tradition. (They should also serve to give the lie to the common misconception that Sikhism is some sort of syncretic synthesis of Hinduism and Islam.)

This profound experience caused Guru Nanak to abandon his job and his family for an extended series of travels, traditionally depicted as a series of triumphs over all rival religious leaders, during which he was accompanied by his devoted follower, the Muslim minstrel Mardana, who would accompany the Guru’s hymns.

This long period of wandering, during which the first Sikhs would have been drawn to give their allegiance to him, came to an end in about 1520, when Guru Nanak settled down on land given him by a wealthy follower at Kartarpur, where he was to be based for the rest of his life. It was during this final phase, when he resumed domestic life as the head of a religious settlement, that his teachings were ultimately refined and future guide-lines for the Sikh community’s subsequent development were estab­lished. After selecting one of his disciples as his successor, Guru Nanak died at Kartarpur in 1539.