This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Every Sikh Guru presents a filmmaker with the same problem: no Guru ever sat for a portrait, and Sikh teaching holds that the physical form is not what matters about them, so putting a human actor in the role has long been treated as a violation on its face. A 2003 resolution by the Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee said so directly, prohibiting human actors from playing any of the ten Gurus or their family members. Nanak Shah Fakir set out to dramatize Guru Nanak's life anyway, and its answer to the problem was technical rather than narrative: no actor was cast in the role at all. Guru Nanak appears through computer generated imagery, present in scene after scene without ever being played by a human body.
The choice did not settle the argument it was meant to end. To some Sikh viewers, removing the actor removed the objection: nobody was pretending to be the Guru, only rendering a likeness the way an illustration or a statue might. To others, the objection was never really about acting technique in the first place, it was about showing his form at all, on a screen, for an audience, in a medium built for spectacle. A computer graphics rendering is still a rendering, and still puts a specific face and posture in front of a viewer that no historical record actually describes.
The film's own producer, Harinder Singh Sikka, treated the CGI approach as a solution reached in good faith and consultation with Sikh religious authority before release. What followed shows how contested that judgment remained: approval, then a ban, then approval again, then a second ban three years later, from bodies that were each trying, and repeatedly failing, to reach a lasting answer.