Kartarpur

Guru Nanak spent much of his adult life travelling, and the accounts of those journeys have him debating with ascetics, questioning ritual and refusing to identify himself with either of the religious establishments he was born among. Around 1522 he settled at Kartarpur on the Ravi, took up farming, and spent his last seventeen years there with a community that gathered around him.

That settlement is where Sikh practice took its shape. The three obligations later stated as work, remembrance and sharing were not a slogan but a daily routine: the community farmed, gathered morning and evening to sing the compositions the guru was writing, and ate together in a single line without regard to caste, which in sixteenth century Punjab was the most socially disruptive thing about the whole arrangement. Congregation and common kitchen begin here.

So does the succession. Nanak tested his followers and appointed Lehna, whom he renamed Angad, as his successor in preference to his own sons, and had himself bow to him. Authority in the Sikh tradition therefore passed by demonstrated fitness rather than by birth, and the ten gurus are understood as one light in successive bodies.

He died in 1539. The story told of his death is that his Hindu and Muslim followers argued over cremation and burial, agreed to lay flowers on either side of the body and let the fresher garland decide, and found the body gone and both sets of flowers fresh. A shrine and a grave were built, and the river later took them.

The gurdwara Darbar Sahib at Kartarpur was rebuilt in the twentieth century after floods had repeatedly damaged the site, with funds from a Punjab ruler. In 1947 the line drawn at partition left it in Pakistan, about four kilometres beyond the frontier, while the community that venerated it was largely on the Indian side. For seventy years the usual way to see it was through binoculars mounted on a platform at Dera Baba Nanak, where pilgrims looked across the fields at a white building they could not reach.

An agreement between the two governments opened a corridor in November 2019, timed to the five hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the guru's birth, allowing Indian pilgrims to cross for the day without a visa. It is one of very few arrangements of its kind anywhere, and it exists because a religious site of the first importance to a community in one country sits inside another with which relations are difficult.

A second Kartarpur, near Jalandhar in Indian Punjab, is a different place with its own significance. A family there holds the manuscript known as the Kartarpur Bir, which many scholars and the Sikh institutions regard as the volume Guru Arjan had compiled in 1604, dictated to Bhai Gurdas. Its status has been examined and argued over, in part because access to it has been limited, and the question of what exactly the manuscript is remains contested rather than closed.