Great Guru Nanak Was An Angry Young Man

#GuruNanak550
 
Today November 12 2019 is Guru Nanak Jayanti

Sunil Khilnani, TheTimes of India, March 18 2016:

“…I found so many venerable, staid old women and men of Indian history were actually rebellious, angry, upstart young people! Guru Nanak was extraordinary with radical ideas about women, food, dress. He was an angry young man! But the history we’re taught drains out the human interest to produce a single-file procession of figures leading to the end-point of the nation. I’m saying, instead of this neat orderly line, what we have is a rabble of critiques, dissent – we’re a nation of rabblerousers! That’s why we had great moments of challenge and reform, because people were reckless enough to say, i’m not going to put up with this now. We underplay that individuality to produce this conformist past…”

Sunil Khilnani, 'Incarnations: A History of India in Fifty Lives', 2016:

“Indian religions love their wandering heroes. There’s the Buddha, who wandered for six years; Mahavira, who doubled that; and the many saints and yogis of Hinduism who meander homeless all across the Indian past. The fifteenth-century founder of the Sikh religion, Guru Nanak, also took to the road—for some twenty-three years. He made it as far afield as Mecca and Medina, and to the mythic mountain Sumeru, meeting emperors and carpenters, sages and thugs along the way—or so say the Janam Sakhis, a collection of hagiographical stories about his life.

But there’s a crucial difference between Nanak and the Buddha or Mahavira, who renounced their families and communities to find spiritual truth. After Nanak achieved enlightenment, he returned to the fertile fields of his homeland, the Punjab, and made room in his religious life for members of his previous, unenlightened domesticity. For him, devotion did not require asceticism, renunciation, or an attachment to holy men and their institutions, but what scholars of the Sikh religion have called a “disciplined worldliness.”...” 

 

Guru Nanak:

"The Creator, fearless, without rancour,

Timeless, unborn, self-existent

By God’s grace he is known

Meditate on Him

He was true

In the beginning, in the primal time …"

Guru Nanak with his companions Bhai Mardana and Bhai Bala.

Courtesy: Roland and Sabrina Michaud / akg-images