Person · Sikh Guru · India

Guru Nanak

Date

1469 - 1539 CE

Periods

Islamic Age and Bhakti Traditions

Function

Religious institution & practice

Confidence

Established / referenced

Worth knowing

He undertook four long journeys called Udasis, said to have covered around 28,000 km over roughly two decades, reaching Tibet, Sri Lanka, Mecca, Medina, Baghdad, and much of the Indian subcontinent.

His closest companion on these travels was Bhai Mardana, a Muslim rebab player from his own village, who set his hymns to music. This Hindu-Muslim pairing is often read as embodying the syncretic core of his teaching.

Connections (22)

• Traveller routeRāmeshvara / Rameswaram

  Guru Nanak is said to have visited Rameswaram during his third Udasi, his southern journey, around 1511 to 1513. Sikh tradition holds that he travelled through Tamil country reaching the island, where he discoursed on the futility of ritual bathing without inner purity. A gurdwara marks his reputed halting place there.

• Traveller routeAyodhyā

  Guru Nanak stopped at Ayodhya on his eastern udasi in the early sixteenth century with Bhai Mardana, and Sikh tradition has him discoursing at the Sarayu on inner devotion against ritual bathing — the same argument he made at Hardwar and at Gaya. The gurdwara called Brahma Kund marks the reputed halting place near the ghats. The udasis are structured this way throughout: Nanak goes to the major tirthas of every tradition precisely in order to argue with what is done there.

• Traveller routeHardvār / Haridwar

  Nanak reached Hardwar during a solar eclipse, when pilgrims were throwing Ganga water eastward toward the sun for their ancestors, and began throwing water westward instead. Asked why, he said he was watering his fields in Punjab; told the water could not possibly reach them, he asked how theirs reached the dead. The story is the clearest surviving statement of his method — not a denial of the rite but a demonstration, performed on the spot, of the reasoning behind it.

• Traveller routeKāshī / Vārānasī / Banāras

  Guru Nanak visited Varanasi during his eastern Udasi around 1506, staying near what is now Gurdwara Guru Nanak Bagh in the Guru Bagh locality. He is said to have debated Pandit Chatur Das on the futility of ritualism without inner devotion, converting him and composing hymns preserved in the Guru Granth Sahib.

• Court associationBhai Mardana

  Mardana, a Muslim Mirāsī musician of Talwandi, travelled with Nanak for most of thirty years, playing the rabāb while Nanak sang. Sikh kīrtan begins with the two of them, and the tradition has never tidied away the fact that its founding practice was a partnership across religions. Three couplets attributed to Mardana are in the Guru Granth Sāhib, and his descendants, the rabābīs, sang at the Harmandir until 1947.

• Teaching lineagePākpattan (Ajodhan)

  Sikh tradition has Nanak visit Pākpattan and receive Farīd's verses from Shaikh Ibrahim, his twelfth successor — which is how a thirteenth-century Chishti's Punjabi poetry reached a sixteenth-century Sikh compilation. 134 of Farīd's compositions are in the Granth. Farīd's slokas are the earliest substantial literature in Punjabi, so the language's founding poet is a Chishti Sufi read as scripture by Sikhs, which is a considerable inheritance for one verse tradition.

• Life routeSultānpur Lodhī

  Sultānpur Lodhī is where Nanak worked as a granary steward and where he went into the Bein and came out three days later saying there is no Hindu and no Musalman. Everything after — the four long journeys, the fifth within Punjab, Kartārpur — dates from that morning. He had a wife, two sons and a government post at the time, and left all of them to travel for about twenty-five years, returning only at the end to farm.

• Life routePurī / Jagannātha Purī

  The Sohilā, sung at every Sikh evening service and at funerals, is placed at Purī's lamp ceremony: the sky is the salver, sun and moon the lamps, the stars the pearls. A hymn that dismisses a specific ritual has become the liturgy of a different religion's daily practice. The hymn is in rāga Gaurī Dīpakī and is sung at bedtime and at cremations alike, so a rebuke delivered at a temple has become the Sikh form of words for sleep and for death.

• Life routeKāmākhyā

  Kāmākhyā is the eastern limit of the first udāsi, and the janamsākhis fill it with sorcery — Nūr Shāh and her women trying and failing to enchant the travellers. Assam is where the Punjabi tradition put its magic, and the story's point is that the magic does not take. The janamsākhis are hagiography written a century or more after the fact, and their geography is best read as what later Punjabis imagined the subcontinent to contain.

• Life routeNanak Jhira, Bidar

  Nanak Jhira at Bidar commemorates the southern udāsi with a spring said to have come out of the rock at Nanak's touch. It is one of the largest gurdwaras in the Deccan, built around a water-source story in a region with no Punjabi community to sustain it. Bidar was a Bahmani capital with a Persianate court and its own Sufi shrines, so the southern journey's one great gurdwara stands in a town whose history is almost entirely Islamic.

• Life routeSangladīp

  Sangladīp is where the janamsākhis end the second udāsi, with a king called Shivnābh converted. Nothing in Sri Lankan sources corresponds, and the identification is argued about. It is in the repository as what the tradition claims, not as what can be shown. The Shivnābh story also appears in a Sikh text said to have been left on the island, the Pran Sangli, whose authenticity Sikh scholarship has disputed for two centuries.

• Life routeMount Kailāsa

  The Sidh Gosht, a long hymn of question and answer with the Nāth siddhas, is set on Sumer Parbat. Its argument is the Sikh position in miniature: renunciation is not required, the householder's life is the field of practice, and the siddhas' powers are beside the point. Sumer Parbat is identified with Kailāsa, so the debate is staged on the one mountain that already belonged to the renunciants he was arguing with.

• Life routeLhasa

  The third udāsi's northern reach is claimed for Tibet and Lhasa by the janamsākhi lists, with no Tibetan source to set against it. The repository marks the claim; the route over the passes was real and used, but that is an argument from possibility rather than evidence. Some Himalayan Sikh communities maintain the claim and others treat the third udāsi as the least historical of the five, which is an argument conducted entirely within the tradition.

• Life routeMecca

  The Mecca story — feet toward the Kaaba, and the reply that the questioner should point them where God is not — is the most quoted thing in the janamsākhis. No Middle Eastern source records the visit. The story is an argument about omnipresence and works whether or not the journey happened.

• Life routeBaghdad

  The Baghdad inscription outside the old city is the only physical object offered as evidence for the western udāsi. Readings differ on whether it names Bābā Nānak and on its date, and the stone has been re-cut more than once. It proves less than it is usually made to. The shrine is maintained locally as Bābā Nānak's and has been visited by Sikh pilgrims for generations, so the object's evidential weakness has not affected its devotional standing at all.

• Monastic foundationKartārpur Sāhib

  Kartārpur is where the travelling stopped and the institution began: a working farm, a langar in which everyone sat in one line to eat, a daily sangat, and a successor chosen for service rather than birth. The Sikh tradition is what Nanak did in his last fifteen years, not on the roads.

• CampaignSaidpur / Eminābād

  The Bābarvānī hymns answer Babur's sack of Saidpur in 1520, which Nanak is said to have witnessed. They describe the killing and the enslavement without offering anyone consolation and without exempting God from the question — among the earliest eyewitness verse about the Mughal conquest in any Indian language. Babur's own memoir describes the campaign from the other side, so the same weeks are recorded by the conqueror in Turkish prose and by a witness in Punjabi verse.

• Life routeBahāuddin Zakariya & Rukn-e-Ālam

  At Multan the Suhrawardi shaikhs are said to have sent Nanak a bowl of milk filled to the brim, meaning the city already had all the holy men it needed, and he floated a jasmine flower on the surface and returned it. The exchange is told by both traditions. Multan's Suhrawardi shrines are among the oldest in the subcontinent, and the milk-and-flower exchange is told there as readily as in the janamsākhis, which is unusual for a story about an outsider.

• Life routeAchal Batālā

  Achal Batālā is the second of the Nāth debates, at the Śivrātri fair. Across the janamsākhis the siddhas are the recurring opponents, and the answer is always the same: the householder who earns, shares and keeps his mind clear has done the harder thing than the man who left. Achal Batālā still holds a large Śivrātri fair, so the debate is re-staged annually in the sense that both communities gather on the same ground on the same day.

• Life routeNanakmatā

  Nanakmatā in the Terai had been a Nāth centre called Gorakhmatā before it became a gurdwara, and the janamsākhis set a dispute with the yogis there on the first journey. The Nāths are the udāsis' standing opponents, and the site's change of name records who the tradition thinks won. The Nāths held that liberation required leaving the world; Nanak's answer, repeated across five journeys, was that it required staying in it and working, which is the Sikh position entire.

• Life routeTillā Jogiān

  Janamsakhi tradition takes Guru Nanak to Tillā Jogiān to argue with the Nath jogis, and the Siddh Gosht — the long dialogue with the Siddhas in the Guru Granth Sahib — is the literary form that encounter takes. Whether he climbed this particular hill is narrative rather than documented, but the argument is real and central: Nanak's rejection of withdrawal, ash and ear-rings in favour of the householder's life is worked out against exactly the practice that Tillā Jogiān existed to maintain.

• Institutional successionSadh Belo, Sukkur

  The math on the island is Udasi, the renunciate order that traces itself to Bābā Sri Chand, Guru Nanak's elder son, who took to asceticism when his father's teaching was for the householder. The Udasis consequently sat across the line later drawn between Sikh and Hindu: they kept the Granth and the Nanak lineage while running maths with images and ash-smeared celibates, and they held many of the historic gurdwaras until the Akali reform movement took them back in the 1920s. Sadh Belo is the order's principal surviving seat in Sindh.

Sources

Wikipedia, “Guru Nanak”. The subject’s own writings where they survive, and the standard biographical literature.

• Wikipedia — Guru Nanak