Place · Central Asian city · Uzbekistan
Tashkent
The city of Tashkent in Uzbekistan — named in the Guru Nanak Janamsakhi tradition as the furthest north the third udasi (c.1515-1520) reached. Tashkent was in the 16-century a thriving Timurid-Shaybanid commercial centre on the Silk Road, with Persian, Turkic, Arab and Indian merchant communities. The Janamsakhi accounts describe Nanak visiting the city's Sufi khanqah and debating Islamic and Hindu religious questions with the local merchant communities. No Uzbek or Timurid chronicle independently records the visit, which is standard for the Janamsakhi tradition's northern udasi. Modern Tashkent is the capital of Uzbekistan with a 2.5 million population. The 1991 Soviet collapse opened Uzbekistan to independent Sikh scholarship on Guru Nanak's Central Asian journey. The city has a small modern Sikh community serving the Indian merchant diaspora.
- Date
- 1500–1524
- Function
- Travel & migration
- Tradition
- Janamsakhi tradition (Puratan, Bhai Bala, Miharban)
- Confidence
- Mixed / layered — Traditional / narrative attribution — janamsakhi, not independently attested
- Location
- 41.300, 69.240
Disputed. The janamsakhis place Nanak here; no independent record of the visit survives, and scholarship treats the janamsakhi travel accounts as hagiography rather than itinerary. Mapped as what the tradition claims, not as an established fact.
Connections (1)
- Trade routeBalkh
Tashkent and Balkh were on the Central Asian roads that ran into the Punjab through Kabul, carrying horses south and cloth north, and the Mughals came down the same way within Nanak's lifetime. Whatever the third udāsi's historicity, the route it names was a working road. Balkh was also the birthplace of Rumi and a great Buddhist centre before that, so the road north from the Punjab ran through one of the most layered cities in Asia.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Tashkent”. The Janamsākhī tradition; W.H. McLeod, Guru Nanak and the Sikh Religion (1968).
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