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Biography

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Guru Nanak (1469–1539) was the founder of Sikhism and the first of the ten Sikh Gurus. He was born in the village of Rai Bhoi Ki Talwandi in the Punjab region of the Delhi Sultanate, a site now known as Nankana Sahib in Pakistan. His father, Mehta Kalu (Kalyan Das Bedi), served as a village accountant under the local landlord Rai Bular Bhatti, and his mother was Mata Tripta. He belonged to a Hindu Khatri family and had an elder sister, Bebe Nanaki, who according to Sikh tradition was among the first to recognize his spiritual gifts. Later biographical collections called janamsakhis portray him as a child who questioned caste custom, empty ritual, and religious hypocrisy; these texts were written generations after his death and blend historical memory with hagiography, so details of his childhood cannot be independently confirmed from contemporary records.

As a young man Nanak married Mata Sulakhani of Batala; they had two sons, Sri Chand and Lakhmi Das. He spent a period employed as a storekeeper in Sultanpur Lodhi. Sikh tradition recounts that around the mid-1490s, after immersing himself in the Kali Bein river, he was missing for three days and then declared that there is neither Hindu nor Muslim, pointing to one Creator beyond communal labels. He subsequently undertook long preaching journeys known as udasis, which later Sikh sources describe as reaching across the Indian subcontinent and beyond, including the Himalayas, Mecca, and Sri Lanka. Independent fifteenth- and sixteenth-century documentation of these itineraries is scarce, but his surviving hymns show familiarity with diverse religious communities, social injustice, and the political turmoil of the late Delhi Sultanate and the early Mughal invasions under Babur.

Nanak composed hymns in Punjabi and related north Indian languages, signing them with his own name. These compositions reject idolatry, caste privilege, and mechanical ritual, and they call for truthful living, earning by honest work, sharing with others, and constant remembrance of the divine Name. They form a major portion of the Guru Granth Sahib, compiled in the early seventeenth century. In later life he founded a settled community at Kartarpur on the river Ravi, where followers practiced a communal kitchen (langar) open to all and a disciplined round of prayer and labor. Rather than passing authority to his sons, he chose Bhai Lehna, a devoted disciple, as successor; Lehna became Guru Angad. Sri Chand later established the Udasi order of ascetics.

Guru Nanak died at Kartarpur in 1539. According to a well-known traditional account, Hindu and Muslim followers disputed whether he should be cremated or buried; when the covering was removed the body was gone and only flowers remained, which the two groups then divided. A shrine grew at the site, today Gurdwara Darbar Sahib Kartarpur in Pakistan. His teaching became the foundation of a distinct religious path that nine successor Gurus developed over the next two centuries. Sikhs commemorate him on Guru Nanak Gurpurab, observed in the Nanakshahi calendar in mid-April and also on the lunar date of Kartik Purnima.

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