Thinkers Timeline

Guru Nanak (1469-1539) was the founder of Sikhism, whose teaching and poetic hymns established a distinctive religious tradition in the Punjab region of South Asia. He was born on 15 April 1469 at Rai Bhoi ki Talwandi — today Nankana Sahib, in Pakistan — to a Hindu family of the Khatri merchant caste. His father Mehta Kalu was an accountant for a local Muslim landlord; his mother Mata Tripta raised him in a household that was traditionally Hindu but exposed to the Muslim cultural world of early-sixteenth-century Punjab. He showed unusual religious sensitivity from childhood, and traditional accounts describe incidents in which he departed from expected conventions — refusing at eleven to wear the sacred thread (janeu) that marked Hindu caste identity unless it had deeper meaning, using money given for trade to feed hungry holy men rather than make a profit. He worked for several years as a clerk in a Muslim administrator's household in Sultanpur. At around thirty he had a transformative religious experience, which he later described as a direct encounter with the divine: he disappeared into a river for three days, and on emerging declared na koi Hindu, na koi Musalman (there is no Hindu, there is no Muslim). From that point he devoted his life to religious teaching. Over the following two decades he made four long journeys (udasis) — south to Sri Lanka, north to Tibet, west to Mecca and Baghdad, east through much of the Indian subcontinent — conversing with religious teachers of many traditions and composing the hymns that would form the core of Sikh scripture. In his last years he settled at Kartarpur on the Ravi River, where he established a community that combined devotional practice, manual labour, and shared meals crossing caste and religious lines. He named Bhai Lehna — renamed Guru Angad — as his successor rather than his own sons, establishing the principle of spiritual rather than hereditary succession. He died at Kartarpur on 22 September 1539. His followers preserved and expanded his hymns, which became the foundation of the Guru Granth Sahib, the scripture and ultimately the eternal Guru of the Sikh tradition.