Rai Bularਰਾਏ ਬੁਲਾਰ

Rai Bular Bhatti, who died about 1515, was the Muslim Rajput chief of Talwandi Rai Bhoi, the village where Guru Nanak Dev Ji was born in 1469. He employed Nanak's father, Mehta Kalu, as the manager of his estate, recognised the young Nanak's spiritual stature, and gave the land on which Gurdwara Janam Asthan stands today. Sikhs remember him as the first person outside Nanak's own family to see the Divine in the child, and his descendants, the Bhatti family of Nankana Sahib, still honour that bond more than five centuries later.

Talwandi in Rai Bular's time

Talwandi stood about forty-two miles west of Lahore and eighteen miles south of the river Ravi, in the Punjab of the Delhi Sultanate. The settlement had earlier been called Raipur. Rai Bular's father, Rai Bhoi, a Rajput of the Bhatti clan whose ancestors had embraced Islam, selected the site and rebuilt the town, which took his name: Rai Bhoi di Talwandi, the Talwandi of Rai Bhoi. Rai Bular inherited the position of zamindar, or chief landholder, from his father, and he held his estate under Daulat Khan Lodi, the governor of Punjab. The bards who kept the family's records give his birth as about 1425, though some accounts say 1430, and his death as about 1515 or 1518.

The Talwandi of his day was a small place: a fort on a mound, some cultivated fields, and a wide stretch of scrub and forest around it. Its later fame came entirely from the child born there in 1469. In his lifetime it was an ordinary market town of the Punjab plains. That ordinariness is part of the story: the holiest place in Sikhism began as the home village of a local chief's estate manager.

Mehta Kalu's family and the young Nanak

Mehta Kalu, whose full name was Kalyan Das, was a well-read resident of Talwandi and Rai Bular's revenue accountant, the patwari who kept the estate's accounts. His family had come to Talwandi from the Amritsar region in search of service. In 1469 his wife, Mata Tripta, gave birth to a son, Nanak, in their home in the town. The child had an elder sister, Bibi Nanaki, five years his senior. Rai Bular came to see the newborn, and he took a liking to the boy that grew into something more.

Nanak grew up in the open spaces around Talwandi, grazing the family's cattle with the other village boys. Rai Bular watched the boy closely, and what he saw convinced him that Nanak was no ordinary child. The Janamsakhis, the early accounts of Nanak's life, say that after his sister Bibi Nanaki, Rai Bular was the second person to recognise that the boy carried something divine. The claim belongs to that tradition, and it is as tradition that it is told here.

The stories the Janamsakhis tell

The best known of the stories concerns the cattle. One day the villagers complained to Rai Bular that Nanak, who was supposed to be watching the herd, had let the animals wander into a farmer's standing crop and ruin it. The chief sent for Mehta Kalu and told him to pay for the damage. But the men sent to measure the loss reported that they could find no damage at all. Rai Bular was as surprised as the farmer, and the story passed into the Janamsakhi tradition as the first sign that the boy was under a protection beyond the ordinary.

Another story tells of a summer afternoon when Nanak lay down to sleep under a tree in the fields. Rai Bular, passing by with his servants, noticed something strange: the shadows of the other trees had moved with the sun, but the shade of the tree under which Nanak slept had stayed where it was, still covering him. In a third, a hooded cobra is said to have spread its hood over the sleeping boy to shade him, and Rai Bular, riding by, saw it with his own eyes. The Janamsakhi paintings of this scene are among the most copied images of Nanak's childhood.

Whatever these stories are read as, they agree on what they meant to Rai Bular. Returning to the town after the tree episode, he is said to have called for Mehta Kalu and told him: your son is a great man, he is the honour of my town, and you have become exalted, and so have I, in whose town such a one has been born. From then on he treated Nanak with reverence. The Sikh Encyclopedia records that Nanak never failed to visit Rai Bular between his long travels, and that when the old chief lay dying, about 1515, the Guru was by his bedside.

The land gift and Gurdwara Janam Asthan

Rai Bular's most lasting act was the gift of land. According to the family's old revenue records, he gave 247 marabbas, a marabba being about twenty-five acres, for the gurdwara marking Nanak's birthplace, Janam Asthan, with an annual grant of 9,996 rupees. He gave a further 220 marabbas for Gurdwara Bal Lila, which marks the field where Nanak played as a child, and 290 marabbas for Gurdwara Mal Sahib. In all, the gift came to 757 marabbas, about 18,750 acres, though some accounts round the figure to 18,500 acres. It was, by any measure, an extraordinary gift from a Muslim chief to the memory of a boy from his own town.

On the land he gave stands Gurdwara Janam Asthan, built on the spot where Mehta Kalu's home stood and Nanak was born. A shrine was first raised there by Baba Dharam Chand, the Guru's grandson, before the end of the sixteenth century. The present building, a square domed sanctum with a pavilion in front, was built on the orders of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, who renovated the shrine in 1819 and 1820. The town itself took a new name from the child: Nankana, from Nanak da ana, the coming of Nanak, and it is as Nankana Sahib that the world knows it today.

The estate is still there. Today the Nankana Sahib Estate covers about 16,962 acres, managed by the Evacuee Trust Property Board of Pakistan and leased to the farmers and residents of the town. Almost every house in Nankana Sahib stands on land that was once Rai Bular's gift. The gurdwaras of the town, Janam Asthan, Bal Lila, Patti Sahib, Mal Ji and the rest, draw pilgrims from around the world, and the land beneath them is the chief's legacy.

His descendants and the Bhatti family

Rai Bular's descendants, the Bhatti family, have kept the bond with Nanak's memory for nineteen generations. They remained in the Talwandi region through the centuries, Muslim in faith and devoted to Guru Nanak, whom they still call Babaji. The family counts among its members Rai Issa Khan, of the fifteenth generation, whom Maharaja Ranjit Singh honoured with the title of Rai Bahadar, and Rai Hadayat Khan, of the seventeenth, who led the Sikh procession at Nankana Sahib for the five hundredth anniversary of Guru Nanak's birth.

Rai Hadayat Khan's sons, Rai Aslam and Rai Akram, received Sikh pilgrims at their home and conducted them to the gurdwaras, and the family is given the honour of leading the religious processions at Nankana Sahib each year for Guru Nanak's birth anniversary. They took part in the tercentenary celebrations of the Khalsa at Anandpur Sahib in 1999. During Partition, Rai Hussain, the father of Rai Bashir, is believed to have escorted more than a thousand Sikhs to safety, and to have died in 1948. In 1994 Rai Bashir laid the foundation stone of the Nankana Sahib Foundation on ten acres donated by his nephews, Rai Sarwar Khan and Rai Ahmed Khan, though the trust was never permitted to function.

The family's present public face is Rai Mohammad Saleem Akram Bhatti, the nineteenth generation descendant of Rai Bular and a lawyer at the Lahore High Court. He has said that the family owes its place in the world to the grace of Baba Nanak, and that for them Nanak is a father figure.

Why is Rai Bular remembered today?

In October 2022 the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee installed a portrait of Rai Bular in the Central Sikh Museum in the Golden Temple complex at Amritsar. His descendants in Pakistan were invited to attend the ceremony on 15 October, but they were not granted visas, and they asked the SGPC to go ahead without them.

He is remembered because his story crosses the line that usually divides communities. A Muslim Rajput chief recognised a Hindu boy as a divine soul, gave his best land so that the boy's birthplace would be honoured for all time, and his Muslim descendants still serve the pilgrims who come to that place. For Sikhs, Rai Bular is proof that Nanak's message was seen and honoured from the very beginning. For the Bhatti family, he is the ancestor whose blessing has carried them for five hundred years.