Guru Nanak Dev Ji: The River, the Road and the Village Where Sikhism Began

Sultanpur Lodhi, around 1496. Before first light, the keeper of the governor’s grain stores walks down to the Bein, a slow, reedy stream that curls past the town, as he does every morning. He leaves his clothes with a servant on the bank, wades into the cold water and goes under.

He does not come up.

By noon, the tradition says, half the town is on the bank. The governor, Nawab Daulat Khan Lodi, has the river searched. Nothing. The town decides he has drowned.

On the third day (some accounts say the fourth) he walks back into Sultanpur. He gives away what he owns and for a day says nothing. When he speaks, the janamsakhis, the old stories of his life, record six words that Punjab has repeated for five hundred years.

There is no Hindu, there is no Musalman.Guru Nanak, as the janamsakhis record his first words after the Bein

Sikhs believe that in the river he was taken into the presence of God and sent back with a message. A storekeeper named Nanak went into the Bein. The man who came out is remembered as Guru Nanak Dev Ji, the first Guru of the Sikhs.

This is his story: the friend who carried his music, the roads he walked, the invader he called out, the farm where he built a new kind of community and the night his followers quarrelled over his body. It is also a story about stories, and how we know anything about a man who died nearly five centuries ago.

Rai Bhoi di Talwandi was a small village west of Lahore, held by a Muslim chief, Rai Bular Bhatti. Its patwari, the keeper of land records, was a Hindu Khatri of the Bedi clan, Mehta Kalu. In 1469 his wife, Mata Tripta, gave birth to a son, Nanak, younger brother to a girl named Nanaki. Talwandi is now Nankana Sahib, in Pakistan.

Even the birthday has two versions. Most early janamsakhis say the month of Vaisakh, in April. A later tradition, made popular by the janamsakhi of Bhai Bala, says the full moon of Kattak, in November, and that is when Sikhs celebrate; the earliest recorded November celebration at Nankana Sahib is from 1868.

The sakhis fill his childhood with signs. Rai Bular finds the boy asleep in a field while a cobra shades his face with its hood. At the ceremony of the sacred thread, the janeu, the boy refuses to wear it; a hymn he later wrote in Asa di Var asks instead for a thread spun from compassion and contentment, which never breaks or burns.

And every Punjabi child knows this one. Mehta Kalu gave his son twenty rupees to make a profitable deal at the market. On the way the boy met hungry holy men and spent it all feeding them. He told his furious father he had made a sacha sauda, a true bargain. Gurdwara Sacha Sauda, near Sheikhupura, marks the spot.

Now a confession every honest book on Guru Nanak must make. Almost everything above comes from the janamsakhis, and none of them was written in his lifetime.

What survives from the Guru himself is his poetry: 974 hymns, placed by the fifth Guru, Guru Arjan, in the Adi Granth in 1604, now the Guru Granth Sahib. They tell us in his own voice what he believed. They rarely tell us what he did, or when.

For that, Sikhs have the janamsakhis, ‘birth stories’, written down from the late sixteenth century in rival traditions. The Puratan, or ‘old’, survives in a manuscript of about 1635 kept in London. The most popular, Bhai Bala’s, claims to be the dictation of a companion of the Guru; its oldest manuscript dates from 1658, and most scholars doubt the claim. Beside them stand the ballads of Bhai Gurdas (about 1551 to 1636), scribe of the Adi Granth, whose first var tells the Guru’s life in verse.

In 1968 a New Zealander, W.H. McLeod, set off a storm. He had come to Punjab as a Presbyterian missionary and taught at Baring Union Christian College in Batala. In Guru Nanak and the Sikh Religion he took the janamsakhis apart the way Western scholars had treated the Gospels, sorting 124 sakhis into five boxes from ‘established’ to ‘impossible’. Only 37 made the top two. What could firmly be said of the Guru’s life, he concluded, filled about three paragraphs.

The historian J.S. Grewal summed up the split: the book was accepted uncritically in the West and ‘categorically rejected by the Sikh intelligentsia’.

In this story we follow a simple rule. Where we tell a sakhi, we say it is the tradition. Where something can be checked against the Guru’s hymns or a source outside the tradition, we say so too.

Nanaki married Jai Ram, who served Daulat Khan Lodi, the Lodi governor, at Sultanpur Lodhi, between the Beas and the Sutlej. Jai Ram found his brother-in-law a job as modi, keeper of the stores.

The tradition says he was honest to a fault. Weighing out grain one day, counting aloud, he reached thirteen, tera, which in Punjabi also means ‘yours’, and went on saying tera, tera, yours, yours, as the grain poured out.

On 24 September 1487, at Batala, he married Sulakhni, daughter of Mul Chand. Two sons followed. By night, friends came to sing, and from Talwandi came Mardana with his rabab. Then came the morning at the Bein.

After the three days and the six words, the tradition goes on, the town’s qazi complained, and Daulat Khan invited the young man to Friday prayer. He stood still while the others bowed. Asked why, he said the qazi’s mind had been on a newborn foal near a well, and the governor’s in Kabul, buying horses. Both, the story says, admitted it.

What did the six words mean? Readers still differ: that before God there are no labels; that neither Hindus nor Muslims were living up to their own faith; or that a new path was beginning. His hymns support more than one reading. In one he says it is hard to be a true Muslim, and only one who truly lives it deserves the name.

Every picture of Guru Nanak on the road has a second man in it, a little behind, with a stringed instrument on his shoulder.

Bhai Mardana was born in Talwandi in 1459 to Badra and Lakkho, a Muslim couple of the Mirasi community, hereditary musicians and keepers of family histories. When the Guru sang, Mardana played the rabab; the sakhis have the Guru telling him to strike up because the bani was coming.

The stories love him because he is so human. He grumbles, gets hungry, wanders off after food and lands both of them in trouble, and always comes back. One sloka in his name is in the Guru Granth Sahib, in Bihagre ki Var, beside two of the Guru’s verses addressed to him.

He died in 1534, at Kartarpur by the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism’s account; other traditions say on the road in Afghanistan. He wanted no tomb, and the Guru had his body given to the Ravi, with hymns sung. For four centuries afterwards Muslim rababis, many tracing their line to Mardana, sang at the Harmandir Sahib, until 1947 sent them across the new border.

The first Sikh kirtan was sung by a Hindu Khatri and played by a Muslim Mirasi. Punjab has rarely had a better symbol of itself.

Some time after the Bein, the tradition says, Guru Nanak left his job and took to the road with Mardana. The Puratan janamsakhi counts four great journeys, the udasis, up to about 1521: east to Hardwar, Banaras, Assam and Puri; south as far as Sri Lanka; north into the Himalaya; and west to Mecca and Baghdad.

At Hardwar, pilgrims throw water towards the rising sun for their ancestors; the Guru throws it west. He is watering his fields in Punjab, he explains: if their water can reach the dead, his can reach a farm a few hundred miles away. At Puri, the tradition says, he answered the temple’s evening arti with a hymn still sung in gurdwaras every night: the sky is the plate, the sun and moon its lamps, the stars its pearls. In the hills he argues with the Siddhs, yogis who had left the world; their debate is the Siddh Gosht in the Guru Granth Sahib.

How much of it can be documented? Less than the stories suggest, more than sceptics sometimes allow. His hymns show he knew the world of yogis, qazis and pandits closely, and Bhai Gurdas names Mecca, Baghdad and Mount Sumer. But the scholars Winand Callewaert and Rupert Snell note that many travel tales are missing from the earliest texts, and others point out how closely some mirror miracle stories told of Sufi pirs.

The best-loved sakhi is set in Mecca. Bhai Gurdas tells it in his first var: the Guru, in the blue of a pilgrim, falls asleep with his feet towards the Kaaba. A man named Jiwan kicks him for the insult and drags him round by the legs, and the house of God, in the poem, turns with them. The qazis ask him who is greater, the Hindu or the Muslim. Without good deeds, he answers, both will weep.

From Mecca, the tradition says, he went to Baghdad. For centuries Baghdad had a small Sikh shrine beside the tomb of a holy man called Bahlol, with a plaque in Ottoman Turkish naming ‘Baba Nanak Fakir’. Sikh soldiers rediscovered it in the First World War.

Its date has been read as 917 of the Hijri calendar, about 1511–12, and in older photographs as 927, about 1521–22. In 1979 the Ottoman historian V.L. Ménage argued that the words naming Baba Nanak were added later, and most Western scholars doubt the visit. The question may never be settled: the plaque was looted after the 2003 Iraq war, and by 2018 little more than a wall was left.

Saidpur, now Eminabad near Gujranwala. Here, the tradition says, the Guru chose to lodge with a poor carpenter, Lalo, and stayed away from a feast thrown by a rich official, Malik Bhago. Summoned, he took Lalo’s coarse bread in one hand and Bhago’s rich food in the other, and squeezed. From Lalo’s bread came milk. From Bhago’s came blood.

It is a parable about honest and dishonest money. Then the real blood came.

Babur, a Central Asian prince who had taken Kabul in 1504, was probing India. In 1520, by the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism’s account, his army took Sialkot without a fight and marched on Saidpur. The town resisted. It was stormed, its garrison put to the sword and its people carried off as slaves.

The Puratan janamsakhi says the Guru and Mardana were among the captives; that Babur heard of a holy man among them, came to see him and freed the prisoners. Babur’s own memoirs, so detailed elsewhere, say nothing of it, and break off around these years.

What is beyond doubt is what the Guru wrote. Four of his hymns, three in Raag Asa and one in Tilang, are known as the Babarvani. In Tilang, addressed to Bhai Lalo, Babur rides from Kabul with a wedding party of sin, demanding the bride by force. In Asa he mourns women, Hindu and Muslim, whose braided hair was shorn and whose husbands lay dead. Then he does what no court poet would dare. He turns on God.

So much beating, they cried out in pain. Did You feel no pity?Guru Nanak, Babarvani, Raag Asa (Guru Granth Sahib, p. 360), in our rendering

Nor did he spare the old rulers. The Lodis, he wrote, had squandered a jewel; when the invader came, the spells of countless pirs could not hold him back. Another verse describes Lahore given over to fury for about four hours, probably the sack of 1524.

On 21 April 1526 Babur beat Sultan Ibrahim Lodi at Panipat and founded the Mughal empire; Daulat Khan Lodi, the Guru’s old employer, had invited him in. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism calls the Babarvani the most forceful protest against the invaders in the writing of that age, from a man with no army and no patron.

After the roads, the Guru came home to the Ravi. On land on its right bank, with help from followers such as Ajitta Randhawa, he founded a village and called it Kartarpur, the town of the Creator. The founding is dated anywhere from 1504 to the early 1520s; all accounts agree he spent his last years there.

Bhai Gurdas describes the change. The Guru took off the robes of a wandering ascetic and put on a householder’s clothes. He ploughed his own fields. In the evening the sangat sang Sodar and Arti; before dawn the Japji was recited.

Here, historians and believers largely agree, the first Sikh community took shape on three rules. Naam japna: remember God. Kirat karni: live by honest work, as the Guru did with a plough. Vand chhakna: share what you have. People came for the sangat and stayed for the langar, the common kitchen, where Brahmin and labourer sat in one line on the floor and ate the same food.

Truth is higher than all, but higher still is truthful living.Guru Nanak, Sri Raag (Guru Granth Sahib, p. 62)

In a society that ranked people by birth, that was radical. So was what he wrote of women, in an age that called them impure.

Why call her inferior, from whom kings are born?Guru Nanak, Asa di Var (Guru Granth Sahib, p. 473)

Kartarpur was no hermitage. Bhai Gurdas tells of the Guru debating yogis at the fair at Achal, near Batala, and tradition holds that he gathered the verses of the Sufi poet Baba Farid, which are in the Guru Granth Sahib today. Every gurdwara since, with its sangat and its kitchen, is in some way a copy of that village.

Among those who came to Kartarpur was Lehna, from Khadur near the Beas, a devotee of the goddess Durga who led pilgrims to her temples in the hills. The tradition says he heard a Sikh reciting the Guru’s hymns, turned aside to Kartarpur and never went on. He stayed about six years, serving.

The sakhis are full of tests. The Guru drops a pitcher into a muddy ditch and asks his sons to fetch it; they refuse such dirty work, and Lehna wades in.

The elder son, Sri Chand, was an ascetic who founded the Udasi order; the younger, Lakhmi Das, had little interest in religion. In 1539, weeks before his death, Guru Nanak passed over both, installed Lehna as Guru and named him Angad, from ang, a limb of his own body.

It mattered enormously. Kabir and other saint-poets left verses and admirers but no successor. Guru Nanak left an office, a line and a community, and that, J.S. Grewal argues, is the difference between a saint and the founder of a Panth. Guru Angad moved to Khadur Sahib, where his wife, Mata Khivi, ran the langar, and tradition credits him with shaping the Gurmukhi script.

Guru Nanak died at Kartarpur on 22 September 1539, aged seventy.

The tradition tells of a quarrel that night. His Hindu followers wanted to cremate him; his Muslim followers wanted to bury him. He had told each side to lay flowers beside him: whose flowers stayed fresh till morning could do as they wished. In the morning both were fresh, and when the sheet was lifted there was no body, only flowers. The sheet was cut in two. The Muslims buried their half and the Hindus cremated theirs.

Historians note that almost the same story is told of the death of Kabir. It is a story about the man as much as the night: both communities claimed him and neither would let him go. At Kartarpur both kept their memorial. A samadhi stands inside the main building and a grave lies in the courtyard outside.

The Ravi has washed them away more than once. The present gurdwara was built in 1925 with Rs 1,35,600 given by Maharaja Bhupinder Singh of Patiala.

In August 1947 Cyril Radcliffe’s line put Nankana Sahib and Kartarpur in Pakistan. Gurdwara Darbar Sahib now stood about 4.7 km from the border, across the Ravi from Dera Baba Nanak. For seventy-two years Sikhs in India could only stand on a bluff on their side, some with binoculars, and look at its white dome.

On 9 November 2019, days before Guru Nanak’s 550th birth anniversary, Prime Minister Narendra Modi flagged off the first jatha of more than 550 pilgrims, former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh among them, and Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan opened his side. Up to 5,000 Indians a day could cross without a visa and return by evening, for a 20-dollar fee charged by Pakistan. Families split in 1947 met there, as our long read on the Partition of Punjab tells.

Covid shut it for a year and a half. In October 2024 the two countries renewed the agreement for five years. Then, on 7 May 2025, after the Pahalgam attack and as Operation Sindoor began, India suspended it.

That August the Ravi rose. On 27 August 2025 floodwater filled the courtyard of Darbar Sahib, three to six feet deep by different reports; the Guru Granth Sahib was carried upstairs, and rescuers brought out the people trapped there, about 150 by one report and up to 300 by another. Pakistan’s army chief, Asim Munir, promised full restoration.

In November 2025, after first saying no, the Centre let nearly 1,900 Sikh pilgrims cross at Attari–Wagah for the Gurpurab at Nankana Sahib. The corridor stayed shut. In September 2026 the Ministry of Home Affairs said again it would remain closed, and gave no date.

Every year, as the nights lengthen after Diwali, the lanes of Punjab fill before dawn with prabhat pheris, small processions singing shabads from house to house. An Akhand Path, an unbroken reading of the Guru Granth Sahib, ends on the morning of the full moon of Kattak. Nagar kirtans led by five Sikhs in saffron wind through towns from Amritsar to Surrey, and the langars do not stop.

This year the Prakash Purab falls on 24 November by the lunar calendar. The biggest gatherings are at Nankana Sahib, at Sultanpur Lodhi beside the Bein, and at Dera Baba Nanak, as close to Kartarpur as Indians can now get.

The legacy is easy to list and hard to measure: a scripture that opens with his words, Ik Onkar, One Creator; a faith of some 25 to 30 million people; a free kitchen that feeds strangers every day on six continents. For his 500th birth anniversary in 1969, Punjab founded Guru Nanak Dev University at Amritsar; for the 550th, in 2019, India and Pakistan opened the corridor. His birthplace has known blood too: in February 1921, at Nankana Sahib, the men of the shrine’s mahant killed about 130 Sikh reformers, a massacre that drove the movement to free the gurdwaras.

Strip away every miracle, as McLeod tried to, and something remarkable still stands. A man with no army and no throne told the qazi and the pandit to their faces that labels would not save them, called the most dangerous conqueror of his age a bridegroom of sin, and asked God to explain the slaughter. Then he came home, took up a plough and built a village where the high-born ate beside the low.

Keep every miracle, as the tradition does, and the lesson is the same. The sakhis remember a Muslim minstrel as his closest friend, a Muslim chief as his first admirer, and Hindus and Muslims quarrelling over the right to mourn him. That is not a story of two communities divided. It is the story of one man both of them loved.

And four and a half kilometres from India, his village still waits.