This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Nanak Shah Fakir first reached Indian cinemas on 17 April 2015, and lasted only days. Sikh groups objected to any dramatization of Guru Nanak reaching a mass audience, and Punjab's state government suspended the release under the pressure of the protests. The producers appealed, and India's Supreme Court cleared the film for release on the strength of its certification by the Central Board of Film Certification, the body legally responsible for approving films for public exhibition. The film went ahead, but the underlying religious objection had never actually been resolved, only overridden by a court decision about certification.
The Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee, the elected body that administers Sikhism's historic gurdwaras, took its own look at the film after further edits and approved it in 2016, a decision that briefly looked like the closest thing the controversy had to a settled outcome. It did not hold. In 2018, planning a re-release timed to the Vaisakhi festival, the SGPC reversed itself and wrote to India's Prime Minister asking that the film be prohibited outright. The Akal Takht, the highest seat of Sikh temporal authority, separately declared the film banned that same year. Producer Harinder Singh Sikka proceeded with the release regardless, on 13 April 2018, and the Akal Takht responded by excommunicating him.
No source consulted for this entry records what happened to either the ban or the excommunication after that point. The film's three-year swing between approval and prohibition, by the same institutions revisiting the same question, is itself the clearest evidence that Nanak Shah Fakir never resolved the disagreement it was built to settle. It only kept restarting it.