Guru Nanak, founder of the Sikh faith, was born in 1469 CE in the village of Talwandi, in the Punjab region of the Indian subcontinent, in present day Pakistan, a village later renamed Nankana Sahib in his honor and now an important Sikh pilgrimage site. He was born into a Hindu family of the Khatri merchant caste, and traditional accounts describe him from childhood as unusually contemplative, drawn to religious questions and the company of holy men rather than to the family's expected trade.
As a young man Nanak married, had children and worked for a time as an accountant in the service of a local Muslim official, before experiencing, according to Sikh tradition, a profound spiritual transformation after disappearing into a river for three days and emerging with the teaching that would define his mission: that there is no Hindu, there is no Muslim, a declaration understood to announce a path transcending the religious divisions of his time and place.
Nanak subsequently traveled widely across South Asia and, by some accounts, into the Middle East, teaching devotion to one formless God, equality across caste and gender, honest livelihood, and communal worship through hymn, before settling at Kartarpur and establishing a community around his teaching that would develop, under his successors, into the organized Sikh faith.