Every September, Sikhs across the world remember the passing of Guru Nanak, the founder of Sikhism who died in 1539. His ideas remain deeply etched in Punjab’s cultural and spiritual fabric.
In Lahore, a city often celebrated for its Mughal grandeur and colonial legacy, Guru Nanak’s presence might seem less visible. Yet, his teachings continue to echo through the city’s streets, its literature, and its layered history of coexistence. Commemorating his death anniversary is, therefore, an opportunity to confront the plural roots of Punjab’s identity.
Born in Nankana Sahib, a short distance from Lahore, Nanak grew into a reformer whose message of equality transcended caste and creed. He sang of a divine unity that went beyond ritual, caste hierarchies, and sectarian boundaries. His institution of langar—a communal kitchen where all, regardless of status, ate together—embodied this egalitarian ethic.
Guru Nanak was much more than a social reformer. He was a poet who composed hymns that later became the bedrock of the Guru Granth Sahib, the central holy scripture of Sikhism. He was also a traveller, journeying from Bengal to Baghdad, and from the Himalayas to Sri Lanka, carrying Punjab’s spirit to places few others did.
Above all, he was a teacher of everyday discipline: through kirtan (devotional music), through sewa (service), and through an insistence that kirat karo (honest labour) itself constituted a form of worship.
These practices were not confined to Sikh spaces alone. Across Punjab’s villages and cities, including Lahore, Nanak’s words mingled with Sufi poetry and oral traditions, promoting vocabularies of justice and inclusion that later inspired freedom fighters in anti-colonial movements.
Lahore, in particular, became a place where these values took root. The janamsakhis (narratives of Nanak’s life) were copied and circulated within the city’s literary networks. Shrines and gatherings in and around Lahore welcomed Muslim, Sikh, and Hindu audiences alike, blurring boundaries of devotion. Poets and chroniclers invoked Nanak not as a figure of sectarian division but as part of a shared Punjabiyat—a regional culture that resisted narrow definitions of identity.
Centuries later, Lahore’s reformist press and revolutionaries drew upon an egalitarian idiom reminiscent of Nanak’s insistence on human dignity.
Commemorating Nanak’s death anniversary from Lahore’s vantage point draws us into the complexities of memory and erasure. The Partition uprooted Sikh communities from the city, leaving behind poignant traces. Many of Lahore’s gurdwaras were converted into government offices, shrines fell silent, and manuscripts scattered. Today, much of Lahore’s public memory focuses on Mughal and Islamic heritage, often overlooking how Sikhism once shaped the city’s rhythms.
To recall Guru Nanak is to recover this plural inheritance and acknowledge that Lahore’s story is incomplete without its Sikh chapter.
Nanak’s relevance extends beyond history. In a South Asia fractured by sectarian politics, his teachings remind us that religious and cultural identities need not be sources of conflict. His insistence that the divine resides in everyday labour, compassion, and the rejection of hierarchy continues to unsettle dominant structures of power.
For Muslims in Punjab, Nanak was never a distant “other.” Historical records show Muslim fakirs attending his gatherings, Punjabi Muslims quoting his verses, and reformers drawing parallels between his critique of ritual and Islamic reformist thought. These overlaps reveal a history of solidarities that challenge neat religious binaries.
Some of the freedom struggles of the 19th and 20th centuries still bear traces of this shared inheritance. Punjabi revolutionaries—Sikh and Muslim alike—found common ground in resisting colonial authority, their rhetoric echoing Nanak’s emphasis on justice and equality.
Commemorating his death anniversary this month is thus less a sectarian gesture and more a reminder of how religious ethics infused the region’s political imagination.
What would it mean for Punjab in 2025 to truly commemorate Guru Nanak? Beyond ritual observance, it would require Lahore to recognize its historical identity as built on multiple legacies. To tell Lahore’s story solely through Mughal domes and colonial gardens is to flatten its richness.
Bringing Nanak back into the conversation restores balance and recalls a Punjab where the sacred and the civic intertwined—where a Muslim could recite Nanak’s verse and a Sikh could revere a Sufi’s shrine.
We are no strangers to questions of identity and belonging—whether in curricula, public monuments, or polarized debates. Nanak’s anniversary offers a vital pause. It invites us to recall a time when the city was porous, when solidarities were possible, when the divine was imagined as accessible to all.
His egalitarian ethos remains both a historical fact and a future horizon. Punjab’s heritage cannot be reduced to sectarian memory; it lives in Nanak’s insistence that truth lies in humility and shared humanity.
As he taught:
_Awal Allah Noor Upaya, Qudrat Kay Sab Banday.
Ek Noor Tay Sab Jag Upjeya, Kaun Bhalay Ko Manday._
(First, God created the Light; from this Light, all beings were born.
From the same Light came the entire universe, so who is good, and who is bad?)
To remember Nanak, then, is to remember that our histories and futures are illuminated by the same light.
https://www.thenews.com.pk/tns/detail/1345126-guru-nanak-and-punjabs-shared-past
