Journey
Guru Nanak's first udasi — east
Sultanpur to Assam and back, by way of Banaras and Puri. The eastern places are argued with rather than worshipped at — which is how the janamsakhis tell every one of these stops. The count itself is disputed: this follows the five-udasi scheme of the Puratan janamsakhi, while most reference accounts give four. Dates vary by several years between sources.
Stops (8)
- Nankāna Sāhib · 1469 — Nankāna Sāhib, the birth
Talwandi, now Nankāna Sāhib in Pakistan, where Nanak was born in 1469 to a Khatri revenue accountant. The janamsākhis fill his childhood with refusals — of the sacred thread, of the trade his father set him up in, of the idea that a true bargain could be anything but feeding the hungry.
- Sultānpur Lodhī · 1500 — Sultānpur Lodhī, the disappearance
He worked here as a steward in the Lodi governor's granary for some years, and went to bathe in the Bein and did not come out for three days. What he said on returning — there is no Hindu, there is no Musalman — is where the udāsis begin.
- Hardvār / Haridwar · c.1501 — Hardvār, water thrown the wrong way
The story is that he threw water west toward his fields in the Punjab while the pilgrims threw it east toward the sun, and when they objected asked how their water reached the ancestors if his could not reach Lahore. The eastern journey argues with the places it visits rather than worshipping at them.
- Kāshī / Vārānasī / Banāras · c.1502 — Kāshī, arguing with the pandits
At the city that sells liberation he is said to have debated the pandits on ritual and caste, and the Sirī Rāg hymns associated with the visit take apart the idea that merit can be bought or inherited. Kabīr had worked the same streets a generation or two earlier.
- Nanakmatā · c.1503 — Nanakmatā, the Nāth siddhas
A Terai site that had been a Nāth centre before it was a gurdwara, where Nanak is said to have disputed with the yogis and their claimed powers. The Nāths are the udāsis' recurring interlocutors: renunciants against a teacher who insisted on the householder's life.
- Kāmākhyā · c.1504 — Kāmākhyā, the Śākta east
The goddess on Nīlāchal hill at the far eastern reach of the first journey, where the janamsākhis set an encounter with a sorceress called Nūr Shāh and her women. Assam in the Punjabi imagination was a country of magic; the story ends with the magic failing to work.
- Purī / Jagannātha Purī · c.1505 — Purī, the ārti of lamps
The Sohilā hymn is placed here: watching the temple's lamp ceremony, Nanak is said to have answered that the sky is the salver, the sun and moon the lamps, the stars the pearls, so what ārti is this of yours. It is sung at every Sikh evening service.
- Sagala / Sialkot · 1506 — Sialkot, and the road home
Sagala, identified with Sialkot, on the return into the Punjab. The first udāsi closes where the Punjab begins, having gone to Hardvār, Banāras, the Terai, Assam and Purī and argued at every one — an itinerary of the subcontinent's most confident sacred places, visited to be questioned.