Guru Nanak in History

About the book

Guru Nanak in History is the book that made J. S. Grewal's name. Panjab University, Chandigarh, asked him to write it for the 500th anniversary of Guru Nanak's birth, and it was published by the university's Publication Bureau in 1969. It was reprinted in 1979 and again in 1998, and it earned Grewal his D.Lit. in 1971. In his Sahapedia interview, Grewal's work is described as path-breaking in its approach, and the book has never really been superseded: it is still the study historians cite when they want Guru Nanak placed in his own times.

The book's argument is in its structure. Grewal refuses to retell Guru Nanak's life as a devotional story. He treats the Guru as a figure in history, a man who was born into a particular Punjab, responded to it, and left a legacy his successors carried forward. The evidence is drawn from far beyond the Guru's own compositions, and the book is as much about the world Guru Nanak was born into as about the Guru himself.

What question does the book ask?

The question is stated in the preface: what role did Guru Nanak assume for himself, and what legacy did he leave to his successors? To answer it, Grewal first reconstructs the conditions of Guru Nanak's times, and only then examines the Guru's response to them. The two are kept deliberately apart, so that the response stands out in sharp relief against the conditions, rather than dissolving into them.

The approach was a break with the writing of the time. Most accounts of Guru Nanak began with his teachings and looked for parallels in earlier traditions. Grewal argues that this tells us little, and that a study of the Guru's response to his own milieu is more likely to bring out what was distinctive and original in his message. The foreword, by the historian S. Nurul Hasan, praises exactly this combination of erudition and objectivity, and calls the book a service to the study of Indian history.

Guru Nanak's world: the milieu

Part One of the book is called The Milieu, and it has four chapters: politics, society, Islam and Hinduism. Guru Nanak was born in 1469, when the Lodis had firmly established themselves in Punjab. His father Kalu, a Khatri of the Bedi subcaste, was the patwari of Talwandi, the village now known as Nankana Sahib in Pakistan, and the boy was taught by a pandit and a mullah. As a young man he moved to Sultanpur, where his brother-in-law Jai Ram served the Lodi administrator, and he was put in charge of the administrator's stores. There he saw the working of Lodi administration at close quarters, including the office of the qazi, and came into contact with the representatives of Islam.

Grewal's point in laying all this out is that Guru Nanak's dissatisfaction with the religion of his day did not come from ignorance of it. He knew the Hindu and Muslim traditions of his time from the inside, as a man who had lived among their teachers and officials, and his break with them was a considered response, not a rejection made from a distance.

Guru Nanak's response

Part Two, The Response, follows the Guru's answer to the world he was born into: his response to contemporary politics, to contemporary society and to contemporary religion, and then the goal and the path he set out. At about thirty he left Sultanpur and spent nearly twenty years travelling, visiting towns, markets and sacred places, debating and preaching, before settling at Kartarpur on the Ravi in the early 1520s. There he gave his beliefs their definitive expression and gathered the community that would carry them forward.

The epilogue carries the story past Guru Nanak's death in 1539, following his successors from Guru Angad to Guru Gobind Singh. Grewal's argument is that their work was itself a homage to the founder: the very existence of the Panth, and its growth into a political community, was the measure of what Guru Nanak had begun. The book closes with a bibliography and an index, and with the claim that Guru Nanak's message was meant for Hindus and Muslims alike.

ਲੇਖਕ

J. S. Grewal (Jagtar Singh Grewal, 1927 to 2022) was a Punjabi historian who helped make Sikh studies a field of its own. He took his PhD in history from the University of London in 1963 for a thesis on British historical writing on medieval India, joined the faculty of Panjab University in 1964, and wrote Guru Nanak in History five years later, at the age of forty-two. His full story is in his Kosh entry.

The book was written a year after W. H. McLeod's Guru Nanak and the Sikh Religion (1968), and the two books together remade the field: McLeod from the side of the texts, Grewal from the side of history. Grewal went on to write The Sikhs of the Punjab (1990), the volume that carries this study forward to the present day.

Reception and legacy

Guru Nanak in History was recognised at once as a landmark. It earned Grewal his D.Lit. in 1971, and its method, of studying the Guru through his times rather than through parallels with other traditions, became the standard approach in the field. Grewal himself wrote in the preface to the 1979 reprint that the scholarship published after 1969 did not induce him to revise it, and that a revision worth the name was neither necessary nor easily possible.

For a reader today, the book is the best place to start on Guru Nanak as a historical figure. It is short enough to read in a few sittings, it is built on evidence rather than devotion, and it leaves the reader with a clear sense of why a man born in a small Punjab village in 1469 still shapes the lives of millions of people.