Bhai Gurdasਭਾਈ ਗੁਰਦਾਸ

Early life

Gurdas Bhalla was born in 1551 in the Punjab of the sixteenth century, near what is now Amritsar. His father, Bhai Ishar Das Bhalla, was a cousin of Guru Amar Das, the third Sikh Guru. Gurdas lost his mother when he was three and his father when he was twelve; the young orphan was taken in and raised by Guru Amar Das himself. At Goindwal and Sultanpur Lodhi he listened to the scholars and travellers who streamed through the towns on the Delhi–Lahore road, and he was later sent to Varanasi, where he studied Sanskrit and the Hindu scriptures. He mastered Sanskrit, Braj Bhasha, Persian and Punjabi, becoming one of the most learned men of his generation. Guru Ram Das sent him to Agra as a missionary, and in 1577 he joined the Sikh sangat in excavating the sacred pool at what would become the Harmandir Sahib.

Career

Under Guru Arjan, Bhai Gurdas found his life’s work. The Guru chose him as the amanuensis for the great project of compiling the Sikh scripture, and Bhai Gurdas wrote out the entire Adi Granth under Guru Arjan’s direction, completing it in 1604. When Emperor Akbar questioned whether the new scripture contained anything hostile to Islam, Bhai Gurdas was among those who recited its hymns to the emperor, who left satisfied. Guru Hargobind, the sixth Guru, placed Bhai Gurdas in charge of the newly raised Akal Takht — he was its first head — and sent him to preach Sikhism across Kabul, Kashmir, Rajasthan and Varanasi, and even to Sri Lanka. He served six Gurus, from Guru Amar Das to Guru Hargobind, taught the young Guru Tegh Bahadur the ancient classics, and never married, giving his whole life to the Guru’s mission.

Major works

Bhai Gurdas’s literary legacy is the forty Vars (ballads) known as Varan Bhai Gurdas — long Punjabi poems that explain the Sikh faith, narrate episodes from the Gurus’ lives and answer the questions of the sangat. The first Var contains an account of Guru Nanak’s life that Bhai Mani Singh regarded as the only true janamsakhi tradition. He also composed the Kabit Sawaiye, 675 stanzas in Brij Bhasha on spiritual discipline, still sung in congregations. Guru Arjan is said to have advised Sikhs to read Bhai Gurdas’s writings before the scripture itself — and to this day the Vars are called the ‘key to the Guru Granth Sahib,’ one of the very few non-scriptural works permitted in Sikh worship.

Legacy

Bhai Gurdas died on 25 August 1636 at Goindwal, at the age of eighty-four or eighty-five, after thirty years as head of the Akal Takht. He had devoted his entire life to the Guru’s mission, refusing marriage and dedicating his scholarship, his poetry and his labour to the Sikh cause. His Vars remain the classic exposition of Sikh theology: Guru Arjan’s contemporaries called them the key to the scripture, and four centuries later they are still studied, sung and recited — among the only non-scriptural compositions ever permitted in Sikh worship.