When Guru Angad succeeded Guru Nanak as the second Sikh Guru in 1539, he inherited more than spiritual authority. He inherited a growing community that needed to be fed, housed and organized in a way that expressed the new faith's teaching rather than merely accommodating it. That task fell largely to his wife, Mata Khivi, who took direct charge of langar, the communal kitchen that served a free meal to every visitor to the Guru's court.
What made langar under Khivi's supervision distinctive was not the idea of feeding guests, which existed in various forms across South Asian religious life, but the deliberate erasure of the boundaries that normally governed who could eat with whom. Brahmin and outcaste, Hindu and Muslim, wealthy merchant and landless laborer sat in the same rows and were served the same food from the same kitchen, a direct enactment of the Guru's teaching that caste and creed carried no standing before God. Sikh tradition holds that Khivi personally attended to the kitchen's operation, ensuring the food was prepared with good ingredients and served with courtesy rather than treated as a bare obligation.
The composition of Bhai Balwand and Bhai Satta, later collected into the Guru Granth Sahib, specifically praises the khir, rice cooked richly in milk and ghee, that was distributed in Khivi's langar, a detail suggesting the institution was already recognized in her own lifetime as something more than routine charity. Later Sikh institutions inherited the practice directly: every gurdwara today maintains a langar on the same principle of free, casteless commensality that tradition traces to her kitchen at Khadur Sahib.