Guru Nanak Dev

Nanak was born in 1469 in Talwandi Rai Bhoi, a village in the bar country west of Lahore that is now called Nankana Sahib. His father, Mehta Kalu, was the village accountant, a Khatri of the Bedi clan; his mother was Mata Tripta, and his elder sister Nanaki was the first person to believe in him. The janamsakhis, the old life-stories, remember a boy who asked his teachers questions they could not answer, who refused the sacred thread at his investiture because a thread of cotton would rot and he wanted one of compassion and contentment, and who, sent to trade with twenty rupees, spent them on feeding hungry holy men and called it the true bargain.

As a young man he went to Sultanpur Lodhi, where his sister's husband found him work as storekeeper to the governor Daulat Khan Lodhi. He married Sulakhni of Batala and had two sons, Sri Chand and Lakhmi Das. Every dawn he bathed in the little river Vein. One morning, around 1499, he went into the water and did not come out; for three days he was given up for drowned. When he reappeared he was silent, and when at last he spoke his first words were: there is no Hindu and there is no Muslim. He had been taken, he later sang, into the court of God and given the cup of the Name to drink. The opening of the Japji, the Mul Mantar, sums up what he brought back: one God, whose name is truth, the creator, without fear and without enmity, timeless, unborn, self-existent, known by the Guru's grace.

Then he walked. For over twenty years, in four great journeys called udasis, he travelled with Bhai Mardana, a Muslim minstrel, and sometimes with Bala: east to Hardwar, Banaras and Assam, south to Sri Lanka, north into the Himalaya and Tibet, west to Mecca and Baghdad. Everywhere the stories are the same: he met people at their holy places and turned their rituals inside out. At Hardwar he threw water towards the west, to his fields in Punjab, since the pilgrims were throwing it east to their ancestors. At Mecca, told not to sleep with his feet towards the house of God, he asked to be shown a direction where God was not. At Saidpur he refused the rich official Malik Bhago's feast and ate the coarse bread of Lalo the carpenter, saying that one was squeezed from the blood of the poor and the other from honest sweat.

He saw history too. When Babur's army sacked Saidpur in 1521 he was there, and was taken prisoner. His four hymns on the invasion, the Babarvani, are among the earliest eyewitness accounts of the Mughal conquest and among the boldest protests ever addressed to God: the women whose hair was shaved, the young men cut down, the kings who had forgotten their duty, and the cry, 'Did you feel no pain, Lord, when so many were crying?'

Around 1522 he settled at Kartarpur on the bank of the Ravi and became a farmer again. Here the community took shape: the day began and ended with singing; people of every caste ate together in the langar; everyone worked. Three principles summed up the life he taught: naam japna, remembering God; kirat karni, earning by honest labour; and vand chhakna, sharing what you have. He wrote 974 hymns, all set to ragas, which are the foundation of the Guru Granth Sahib.

Before his death in 1539 he tested his followers and chose not either of his sons but his devoted disciple Lehna, whom he renamed Angad, 'my own limb', and before whom he bowed. The light, the Sikhs say, passed from one body to another. Legend says that when he died his Hindu and Muslim followers quarrelled over whether to cremate or bury him, and when they lifted the sheet they found only flowers. Both took their half. At Kartarpur, on the Pakistani side of the border, a gurdwara and a grave stand side by side to this day.

One janamsakhi story, told in a manuscript at the British Library, has him hand a rich moneylender of Lahore a needle and ask him to return it in the next world. When the man protested that nothing could be carried beyond death, the Guru asked what then was the use of all his hoarded wealth. The moneylender gave much of it away. The earliest illustrated lives of the Guru, the B-40 Janamsakhi of 1733 and the Vilaitvali Janamsakhi, are among the British Library's Sikh treasures.