ਨਾਨਕਾਇਣਨਾਨਕਾਇਣ

About the book

Nanakayan is a Punjabi epic poem by Mohan Singh that tells the life of Guru Nanak, the founder of Sikhism. Punjabi University, Patiala commissioned the work to mark the 500th birth anniversary of Guru Nanak, and the Encyclopaedia of the Sikhs describes how the poet built it: from medieval sources such as the Puratan Janam Sakhi, Meharban's Janam Sakhi and the first Var of Bhai Gurdas, supplemented by newer research, including Dr Karuna Ratan's work on Guru Nanak's visit to Sri Lanka, an account preserved at Anuradhapura Bhavan in Sri Lanka. The result runs to 224 pages.

SikhiWiki calls it the final epic of a fifty year career, published in 1971 after eight volumes of verse that began with Saave Pater in 1936. That position matters. The love poet who became Punjab's great romantic progressive ended his long journey through modern Punjabi poetry with the oldest and largest subject his tradition holds: the life of Nanak, told whole, from Talwandi to Kartarpur, in verse a modern reader could follow.

What is Nanakayan about?

The epic is planned in six parts, each named for a place in the Guru's life. The first, Talwandi, takes its name from the village where Guru Nanak was born and covers his early life. The second, Sultanpur, is named for the town where he worked as a steward for Daulat Khan Lodi. The third, fourth and fifth parts follow the three great journeys: east as far as Manipur and then south through Orissa to Sri Lanka; north through Kashmir toward Sumer Parbat; and west to Mecca and Baghdad. The sixth and last part tells of his settling at Kartarpur, the new town he founded on the Ravi.

A rational telling of a sacred life

The hardest problem in the book is the miracles. The Janam Sakhis record supernatural happenings, and a modern poet who simply repeated them would strain a discerning reader, while a poet who cut them would offend the orthodox. The Encyclopaedia of the Sikhs notes Mohan Singh's solution: he keeps the episode and attributes it, saying in effect, so says the writer of the Janam Sakhi. His approach, the Encyclopaedia concludes, remains consistently rational and modern. He also wove Guru Nanak's own hymns from the Guru Granth Sahib into the narrative, and varied his metres, breaking the monotony of the Upma Chhand that his predecessor Kirpa Sagar had used in the long narrative poem Lakshmi Devi.

He had trained for exactly this task. Years earlier he had translated Edwin Arnold's epic The Light of Asia, the life of Gautama Buddha, into Punjabi verse, and Sant Singh Sekhon judged in his history of Punjabi literature that the translation was as good as the original, at places more lyrical, according to the genius of the Punjabi language. Nanakayan is where that training met its real subject.

The Guru Nanak it presents

The Encyclopaedia's reading stresses a Guru who is both human and divine. This is the teacher who began his ministry by announcing that there is no Hindu and no Musalman, that all are human beings; who taught his followers to labour hard, earn honestly and share their earnings with others; who held an active life superior to a life of sheer contemplation. He is shown as a dutiful son, a fond sister's brother, an affectionate husband and a loving father. The famous episodes carry the teaching: the young Nanak who used his father's trading money to feed and clothe the needy and called it the most worthwhile investment, and the pilgrim at the Ganga who splashed water westward toward his fields in Punjab, asking why water offered to ancestors could reach the sun millions of miles away if his could not travel a few hundred miles.

ਲੇਖਕ

Mohan Singh (1905 to 1978) was born in Mardan, now in Pakistan, and belonged to Dhamial, his ancestral village near Rawalpindi. He took a master's degree in Persian and from 1933 to 1939 taught Persian at Khalsa College, Amritsar, where Teja Singh, Sant Singh Sekhon and Gurbachan Singh Talib became his friends. He founded the monthly Panj Darya in 1939 and ran his own firm, Hind Publishers, moving it from Lahore to Amritsar and then Jalandhar after the Partition of 1947. He later taught at Khalsa College, Patiala, and was appointed Professor Emeritus at Punjab Agricultural University, Ludhiana, where he died on 3 May 1978. His Wadda Vela won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1959.

Reception and legacy

The book was received as an act of devotion as much as of scholarship. Kirpal Singh Narang, then Vice-Chancellor of Punjabi University, wrote in his introduction to the work that it was through reading it that his devotion found expression in tears. The Encyclopaedia of the Sikhs closes its account by calling the epic a rich bill of spiritual fare in the poet's hands, praising a story told with remarkable devotion and passion, in which intricate doctrinal questions from the Guru's debates become simple in lucid presentation. For readers of Mohan Singh, Nanakayan is the summit his other books point toward: the romantic of Saave Pater and the progressive of Wadda Vela, spending his mastery on the life that stands at the source of Punjab's faith and letters alike.