Guru Nanak's treatment of haumai did not arise in isolation; it draws on and sharpens a critique of egotism already current in the wider North Indian devotional (bhakti) and Sant tradition of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and the Guru Granth Sahib's inclusion of poets from that tradition makes the connection textually explicit rather than merely historical.
Kabir, the fifteenth-century weaver-poet whose compositions the Guru Granth Sahib incorporates directly, repeatedly attacks ahankar, the term for egotism closely related in sense to haumai, using much the same rhetorical strategy: relentless attack on outward religious performance, whether Hindu or Muslim, as a disguise for continuing self-assertion rather than its cure. Kabir's couplets describe the ego as a wall or veil separating the seeker from the divine in language that anticipates the scripture's own imagery of the wall of falsehood that hukam breaks down, and scholars of the Sant tradition generally treat Guru Nanak's teaching as continuous with, rather than derived wholesale from, this shared devotional vocabulary current across Hindu and Muslim popular religion in Punjab.
Where Sikh teaching sharpens the inherited critique is in tying haumai systematically to a complete theological structure, hukam, naam, gurmukh and manmukh, that gives the diagnosis a correspondingly worked-out cure, whereas the Sant poets tend to state the same insight in aphorism and image without developing it into so integrated a system. The inclusion of Kabir, Namdev, Ravidas and other Sant-tradition figures within the Guru Granth Sahib itself is the clearest evidence the tradition offers of its own continuity with, rather than rejection of, this broader devotional current.