Every September, Sikhs around 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 be 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 invites us to confront the plural roots of Punjab’s identity.
Born in Nankana Sahib, just 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 surpassed ritual, caste hierarchies, and sectarian boundaries. His institution of langar—a communal kitchen where all, regardless of status, ate together—embodied this egalitarian ethic.
More than a social reformer, Guru Nanak was also a poet. He composed hymns that later became the foundation of the **Guru Granth Sahib**, the central holy scripture of Sikhism. He was a traveler, journeying from Bengal to Baghdad, from the Himalayas to Sri Lanka, taking the spirit of Punjab to places few had ventured before. Above all, he was a teacher of everyday discipline: through *kirtan* (devotional music), *sewa* (service), and an insistence that *kirat karo* (honest labour) itself was a form of worship.
These practices were not confined to Sikh spaces. 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 would later inspire freedom fighters in anti-colonial movements.
Lahore, in particular, was a place where these values took root. The *janamsakhis* (narratives of Nanak’s life) were copied and circulated in the city’s literary networks. Shrines and gatherings in and around Lahore welcomed Muslim, Sikh, and Hindu audiences alike, blurring the boundaries of devotion. Poets and chroniclers invoked Nanak not as a figure of sectarian separation 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 on an egalitarian idiom reminiscent of Nanak’s insistence on human dignity.
However, commemorating Nanak’s death anniversary from Lahore’s vantage point also 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 repurposed as government offices, shrines fell silent, and manuscripts scattered. Today, much of Lahore’s public memory tilts heavily towards its Mughal and Islamic heritage, often overlooking how Sikhism once shaped the city’s rhythms.
To recall Nanak is to recover that plural inheritance and acknowledge that Lahore’s story is incomplete without its Sikh chapter.
Nanak’s relevance goes beyond history. In a South Asia fractured by sectarian politics, his teachings remind us that religious and cultural identities are not meant for conflict. His insistence that the divine resides in everyday labour, compassion, and the rejection of hierarchy challenges 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 point to a history of solidarities that complicate neat religious binaries.
Some of the freedom struggles of the 19th and 20th centuries bear traces of this shared inheritance. Punjabi revolutionaries, both Sikh and Muslim, found common ground in resisting colonial authority, their idioms echoing Nanak’s emphasis on justice and equality.
Commemorating his death anniversary this month is, therefore, less of 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 how its historical identity is built on multiple legacies. To tell Lahore’s story only 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 verses and a Sikh could revere a Sufi’s shrine.
Questions of identity and belonging are no strangers to us, whether in curricula, public monuments, or polarized debates. Nanak’s anniversary offers a pause. It invites us to remember a time when the city was porous, solidarities were possible, and 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
