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G.S. Mann: Guru Nanak’s Life and Legacy 37
became popular afterward. For discussion of these issues, see Susan
Stronge, ed., The Art of the Sikh Kingdom (London: Victoria and Albert
Museum, 1999); and B. N. Goswamy, Piety and Splendour (New Delhi:
National Museum, 2000).
48 W. H. McLeod, The Evolution of the Sikh Community, 5.
49 See his “On the Word Panth: A Problem of Terminology and
Definition,” Contributions in Sociology 12:2 (1979).
50 For an interesting discussion, see Manmohan Singh, “Bird Images in
Guru Nanak’s Hymns,” Panjab Past and Present (April 1979), 227–231.
51 Kabir refers to the authority and attitudes of the revenue collectors in
his verse Hari ke loga mo kou niti dasai patwari, GG, 793.
52 Reference to the village elders appears in the Puratan Janam Sakhi
manuscript dated 1758, folio 15.
53 The Puratan presents Guru Nanak’s critique of the politics of the time
in some detail. The Guru is presented as being deeply upset with the
prevailing corruption around the political institutions, and its author
expresses this forthrightly. It is, however, interesting to reflect on why
the Guru’s discomfort with the politics of the time is absent in the
Miharban Janam Sakhi and the Gian Ratnavali (post-1760s). Could it be
that by elaborating on this, Miharban did not want to risk annoying the
Mughal authorities with whom his family worked closely, and the author
of the Gian Ratnavali did not need to bring it into the discussion, as the
Sikhs themselves were the rulers by the time of his writing?
54 The sounds “b” and “v” are interchangeable in Punjabi, and the Vedi
Patisahu here refers to Guru Nanak’s family caste, Bedi. For an
interesting comment on the concept of the king being responsible for the
concerns of both din and dunia, see Abul Fazal, Ain-i-Akbari, tr. H.
Blochmann [1927] (Delhi: Low Price Publications, 2001), 170–172.
55 For more on the Bhatts, see Rattan Singh Jaggi, Sikh Panth Vishavkosh
(Patiala: Gur Ratan Publishers, 2005), 2: 1334–1337.
56 As for the location of Kartarpur, Sialkot was in its north (20 miles),
Kalanaur, the town where the Mughal emperor Akbar was coroneted in
the 1550s, in the southeast, (5 miles), Batala in the south (15 miles), and
Lahore in the west (20 miles).