Guru Nanak

Sikhism is unusual among world religions in that the founder's compositions survive in a scripture compiled by his own successors, in his own language, with a manuscript tradition that can be traced. This makes the distinction between what he said and what was said about him unusually clean.

The Guru Granth Sahib contains 974 hymns attributed to Nanak, including the Japji Sahib that opens it and the Mul Mantar that opens that. The compilation was made by Guru Arjan, the fifth Guru, in 1604, and there is a manuscript tradition running to the Kartarpur volume. Pashaura Singh and others have worked on the textual history in detail, and the process was one of deliberate editorial selection, which is itself informative.

The biographical material is a different order of evidence. The janamsakhis, birth stories, are hagiographies compiled from the seventeenth century onward, well after his death in 1539, and they are full of miracles, long journeys, and encounters with named figures. Several traditions of janamsakhi exist and they disagree with each other. The claim that Nanak travelled to Mecca, Baghdad, Sri Lanka and Tibet comes from these, not from his own writings.

The best-known single story, that he disappeared into a river for three days and emerged saying there is no Hindu, there is no Muslim, is janamsakhi material. It captures something the hymns genuinely support, but it is not a record of an event.

Sikh scholarship has debated the historicity of the janamsakhis openly and sometimes bitterly, and it is an internal argument as much as an external one.

The most persistent external description of Sikhism is that Nanak synthesised Hinduism and Islam, taking the best of each. Sikhs reject this consistently, and the rejection is well founded.

The claim usually rests on surface features: a formless God, opposition to caste and to idol worship, use of vocabulary from both Sanskritic and Persian sources. But Nanak's hymns are not eclectic. They set out a position and criticise both traditions from it, and the criticism is directed at ritual, at caste, at renunciation and at religious professionals of every kind. He rejects the sacred thread, the Muslim and Hindu ritual calendars, pilgrimage as merit, and asceticism. He also does something neither tradition does: he insists that liberation is available within ordinary life, in a household, doing honest work.

The Sant tradition of north India, and figures such as Kabir and Ravidas, whose compositions are also included in the Sikh scripture, form the milieu he belongs to. Situating him there is historically defensible and is quite different from calling him a synthesiser.

The institutional distinctness came later and deliberately. The line of ten Gurus ends with Gobind Singh, who in 1699 founded the Khalsa with its initiation and its five articles, and who before his death in 1708 vested authority in the scripture itself as the Guru Granth Sahib rather than in a living successor.

Indian constitutional law has at various points classified Sikhs under a broader Hindu heading for particular statutory purposes, and this has been a live grievance.

Nanak's teaching can be entered through the words that open the scripture he began: Ik Onkar, "One", the assertion that there is one reality, one God, formless and beyond birth and death, present in all things and knowable through the guru's word.

Around this he set a practice rather than a philosophy. Its centre is naam simran, the remembrance and repetition of the divine Name, by which the self turns from haumai, the "I-am-ness", self-centredness, toward the divine. He rejected the machinery of merit he saw in the religion around him: pilgrimage, fasting, ritual bathing, the sacred thread, idol worship, and the authority of priests and their sacred languages, holding that none of it reaches God and that outward observance without inward change is empty.

What he put in its place was strikingly ordinary. Liberation, he taught, is found not by renouncing the world but within it, as a householder, doing honest work and sharing its fruits. The tradition later crystallised this as three principles: Naam Japna (remembrance), Kirat Karo (an honest living), and Vand Chhako (sharing with others). The institution that embodies it is the langar, the free communal kitchen attached to every gurdwara, where all sit in a single row and eat together regardless of caste or rank, a standing, deliberate refusal of the hierarchy Nanak rejected.

He also did something with lasting structural effect: he appointed a successor in his own lifetime, choosing a disciple over his sons, and so turned a teaching into a continuing community.

Nanak was the first of ten Gurus, and Sikhism as it now exists was built across their two centuries of succession, each Guru named by the last.

The line gave the community its institutions. The second, Angad, is associated with the Gurmukhi script in which the scripture is written; the fourth founded the city of Amritsar; and the fifth, Arjan, compiled the Adi Granth in 1604, gathering the hymns of the Gurus before him together with those of Hindu and Muslim bhakti poets such as Kabir and Ravidas. Arjan was executed under the Mughal emperor Jahangir in 1606, the first of two Guru martyrdoms; the ninth, Tegh Bahadur, was executed in Delhi in 1675, in the tradition's account for defending the religious freedom of Hindus whose faith he did not share.

The tenth Guru, Gobind Singh, gave the community its most visible form. In 1699 he founded the Khalsa, an order of initiated Sikhs bound by a code and marked by the five articles of faith, uncut hair, comb, steel bracelet, sword and prescribed undergarment, commonly called the five Ks. And before his death in 1708 he ended the line of human Gurus, declaring that authority would pass not to a person but to the scripture itself, thereafter revered as the Guru Granth Sahib, the living and eternal Guru of the Sikhs.

From Nanak's teaching there grew, in this way, a community of some twenty-five to thirty million today, concentrated in the Punjab but present worldwide, whose central act of worship is the reading and singing of the words his successors preserved.