Guru Angad Dev

Lehna was born in 1504 at Matte di Sarai near Muktsar, the son of a trader, and grew up a devotee of the goddess Durga, leading a band of pilgrims each year to her shrine in the hills. One year, passing Kartarpur, he heard a Sikh reciting the Japji at dawn and asked whose words they were. He went to see Guru Nanak, and never went on to the goddess.

For some seven years he served the Guru at Kartarpur, and the stories of his service are the stories of how a disciple is made. He carried bundles of wet grass on his fine clothes because the Guru asked; he went into a cesspit to retrieve a cup; when the Guru, testing his followers, told them to eat a corpse under a sheet, Lehna alone was ready, and found sacred food. In 1539 Guru Nanak bowed before him, placed five copper coins and a coconut in front of him, and named him Angad, 'my own limb'. The Guru's sons never accepted it.

To avoid conflict Guru Angad moved to Khadur on the Beas. There he gave Sikhs a script of their own. He refined the Gurmukhi alphabet, 'from the mouth of the Guru', from the Landa scripts used by Punjabi traders, so that the hymns could be written exactly as they were sung, and opened schools to teach children to read it. He collected Guru Nanak's hymns and probably commissioned the first account of his life.

With his wife Mata Khivi he made the langar a pillar of the community. Mata Khivi ran it, and the Guru Granth Sahib remembers her by name for the rich kheer she served. Guru Angad also encouraged wrestling and physical exercise, building a wrestling arena, the Mall Akhara, at Khadur, because a disciple's body too should be strong.

He wrote 62 or 63 saloks. When the emperor Humayun, fleeing Sher Shah, came to Khadur and, kept waiting while the Guru was absorbed in music, reached for his sword, Guru Angad is said to have told him he should have used it against Sher Shah. As his own successor he passed over his sons and chose the aged Amar Das, who had carried water for him every day for twelve years. He died in 1552.