Guru Nanak Dev Ji

    Biography

Sri Guru Nanak Dev ji was born in 1469 in Talwandi, Lahore.As a boy, Sri Guru Nanak learned, Persian and Arabic

 along with the regional language Hindi, Urdu. He was married in 1487 and was blessed with two sons.

In 1485 he was appointed an official in charge of the stores of Daulat Khan Lodhi,

the Muslim ruler of the area at Sultanpur. It is there that he came into contact with Mardana,

a Muslim minstrel (Mirasi) who was senior in age

and became a very close friend that accompanied   Guru Nanak Dev Ji on his travels.

 Early Life (Stories)

When Guru Nanak Dev ji was 12 years old his father gave him twenty rupees and asked him to do a business, apparently to teach him business. Guru Nanak Dev Ji bought food for all the money and distributed among saints, and poor. When his father asked him what happened to business? He replied that he had done a “True business” and fed all the poor people, that were unable to fend for themselves. Later, the place where Guru Nanak Dev had fed the poor, the Sikh community made a gurdwara and named it Sacha Sauda (True Business).

1496 was the year of his enlightenment when he started on his mission. His first statement after his communion with God was “There is no Hindu, nor any Mussalman.” This declared not only the brotherhood of man and the fatherhood of God, but also his clear and primary interest in only in man and his fate. Accompanied by Mardana, he began his missionary tours.

Despite the hazards of travel in those times, he performed five long tours all over the country and even outside it. He visited most of the known religious places and centres of worship. At one time he preferred to dine at the place of a low caste artisan, Bhai Lallo, instead of accepting the invitation of a high caste rich landlord, Malik Bhago, because the latter lived by exploitation of the poor and the former earned his bread by the sweat of his brow.

This incident has been depicted by a symbolic representation of the reason for his preference. Sri Guru Nanak pressed in one hand the coarse loaf of bread from Lallo’s hut and in the other the food from Bhago’s house. Milk gushed forth from the loaf of Lallo’s and blood from the delicacies of Bhago. This prescription for honest work and living and the condemnation of exploitation, coupled with the Guru’s dictum that “riches cannot be gathered without sin and evil means,” have, from the very beginning, continued to be the basic moral tenet with the Sikh mystics and the Sikh society.

During his tours, he visited numerous places of Hindu and Muslim worship. He explained and exposed through his preachings the incongruities and fruitlessness of ritualistic and ascetic practices. At Hardwar, when he found people throwing Ganges water towards the sun in the east as oblations to their ancestors in heaven, he started, as a measure of correction, throwing the water towards the West, in the direction of his fields in the Punjab. When ridiculed about his folly, he replied, “If Ganges water will reach your ancestors in heaven, why should the water I throw up not reach my fields in the Punjab, which are far less distant ?”

Finally, on the completion of his tours, he settled as a peasant farmer at Kartarpur, a village in the Punjab.