This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
After years of travel that had carried his teaching across long distances with no fixed base, Guru Nanak settled on the west bank of the Ravi river, where the local governor Duni Chand donated land and Nanak founded the town of Kartarpur, the first settled Sikh community. It was a deliberate change of life: rather than continuing as a wandering teacher, Nanak became a working farmer who taught daily from a fixed place, giving the young faith a settled centre it had not had through all his years of travel.
At Kartarpur, Nanak introduced langar, the communal kitchen open to all regardless of caste or status, a practice that has remained central to Sikh worship ever since and that first took shape in the daily life of this one settled town. Before his death there in September 1539, he appointed Guru Angad as his successor, ensuring the community he had founded would continue under a chosen leader rather than dissolve with its founder, its teaching and its farming both, once he was gone.
What this changed for Sikhism's spread was the creation of a place, and a set of practices, a scattered following could gather around rather than a religion existing only in one teacher's travelling ministry. Langar and the settled community life Nanak built at Kartarpur outlived his own death, carried forward by the succession he had arranged before he died there, a transition planned rather than left to chance.