Guru Nanak
ਗੁਰੂ ਨਾਨਕ
Also Nanak Dev, Baba Nanak, The first Guru.
Sikh
Who this is
Nanak was born at Talwandi in the Punjab in 1469 and is the first of the ten Gurus. What he taught begins with the Mool Mantar, that there is one reality, true, without fear and without enmity, and continues with three practical instructions a household can keep: remember the name, earn an honest living, and share what you earn. He rejected caste, ritual and the authority of both the priest and the mullah, and travelled for twenty years to Mecca, Baghdad, Assam and Sri Lanka arguing it. The langar, where everybody sits in a line on the floor and eats the same food, is his institution and is the clearest thing he left.
How to recognise them
An old man with a long white beard, seated, in a robe and a distinctive flat topped turban, one hand raised. Usually shown with Bhai Mardana, a Muslim musician, playing the rabab beside him, and Bhai Bala with a fan. Sikh practice is against image worship, so the pictures are devotional portraits rather than objects of worship; what is honoured in a gurdwara is the Guru Granth Sahib, the book.
Family and companions
Son of Mehta Kalu and Mata Tripta. Married to Mata Sulakhani, with two sons, Sri Chand and Lakhmi Das, neither of whom succeeded him: he passed the guruship to a disciple, Lehna, who became Guru Angad, which set the pattern that merit and not birth decided it.
How they are worshipped
Guru Nanak Gurpurab on the Kartik Purnima; Vaisakhi; Bandi Chhor Divas.
Not of Nanak, who refused it, but of the teaching: the Guru Granth Sahib is read, carried and seated with the respect given to a living Guru. Kirtan is sung, the Japji Sahib said at dawn, and the langar cooked and served by volunteers. The gurpurab is kept with an Akhand Path, an unbroken reading of the whole book over about forty eight hours, and a nagar kirtan through the streets.
The stories
As they are told, with the disagreements left in
There is no Hindu and no Muslim
At about thirty he went to bathe in the river at Sultanpur and did not come out. He was given up for drowned. Three days later he reappeared and for a day said nothing, and then said: there is no Hindu and no Muslim. It is the sentence the tradition dates itself from. What he meant by it has been argued over ever since, and the reading his own life supports is not that the two are the same but that neither label tells you anything about whether a person is living rightly.
The feet turned to Mecca
At Mecca he lay down to sleep with his feet towards the Kaaba, and was woken and rebuked for pointing them at the house of God. He answered, turn them where God is not. The man dragged his feet around and the Kaaba is said to have moved with them. The miracle is the part the paintings show and the answer is the part the tradition quotes, and the story is told as the shortest statement of his argument against the idea that the sacred has a direction.
Where the regions differ
- Tamil
- Kerala
- Telugu
- Kannada
- North
- Maharashtra
- Bengal
- Punjab
- Assam
- Sri Lanka
- Nepal
- Gujarat
- Odisha
- Mithila
- Kashmir
- Tulu Nadu
- manipur
- rajasthan
- konkani
- sindhi
- jharkhand
- himalayan
- kodava
- Punjab
- The Harmandir Sahib at Amritsar is the centre, the langar there feeds on a scale found nowhere else, and the gurpurab fills every town with the nagar kirtan.
- North India
- Gurdwaras across the north keep the Akhand Path and the langar, and Delhi, Patna and Nanded hold three of the five takhts.
- Maharashtra
- Nanded holds Hazur Sahib, where the tenth Guru ended, and the Sikh presence in the Deccan dates from then.
Their days
Every one of these has a page of its own
What is said
From the mantra library