Guru Nanak Jayanti (Gurpurab) Countdown

Guru Nanak Jayanti, also known as Gurpurab or Prakash Utsav, is the Sikh festival honouring the birth of Guru Nanak, the founder of Sikhism and the first of the ten Sikh Gurus. It is observed on the full moon of the month of Kartik, usually falling in November. That observance date is long established and universally kept; the month of Guru Nanak's birth is a separate question on which the janamsakhi traditions and later scholarship differ. Among the most cherished days in the Sikh calendar, the Gurpurab is marked with prayer, processions and shared meals.

History

Guru Nanak was born in 1469 in the village of Rai Bhoi ki Talwandi, later renamed Nankana Sahib in his honour. From an early age he was remembered for a contemplative nature and a questioning mind, and as a young man he began to travel widely, composing hymns and sharing teachings centred on the oneness of the divine, the equality of all people, honest work and the constant remembrance of God. Gathering a community of followers around these ideas, he came to be regarded as the first of the ten Gurus who would shape the Sikh tradition. The commemoration of his birth grew over the centuries into the festival now called Gurpurab, from gur, meaning Guru, and purab, meaning day or festival. It is observed on the full-moon day of the lunar month of Kartik, which usually falls in November, so its date shifts a little each year against the common calendar. In time a distinctive pattern of observance took shape, including a continuous forty-eight-hour reading of the Guru Granth Sahib known as the Akhand Path, completed on the morning of the anniversary. The day on which the Gurpurab is observed and the date on which Guru Nanak was born are two separate questions, and the second has been debated within Sikh scholarship for more than a century. The Bhai Bala janamsakhi, the tradition behind the widely kept Kartik dating, places his birth on the full moon of Kartik. Other janamsakhis, among them the Puratan, Miharban, Gyan-ratanavali and Vilayat Vali accounts, place it on the third day of the bright fortnight of Vaisakh, in April, and the historian Karam Singh argued for that reading at length in his 1912 study Katak ke Visakh; other writers have defended the Kartik tradition, and the question has never been settled to general agreement. The year of his birth, 1469, is not in dispute, and neither is the observance: Sikh institutions, including the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee, keep the Gurpurab on Kartik Purnima, and it remains one of the few Sikh anniversaries still reckoned by the traditional Bikrami lunar calendar rather than fixed in the Nanakshahi calendar. As Sikh communities settled in many parts of the world, Gurpurab travelled with them and is now marked wherever they have made their homes. In the days beforehand a Nagar Kirtan procession moves through the streets, led by the Panj Pyare and accompanied by hymn-singing, music and displays of the Gatka martial art. On the day itself, gurdwaras hold prayers and hymns from dawn, langar meals are served freely to all, and in the evening many homes and buildings are lit with candles and small lamps.

Meaning

For those who observe it, Gurpurab is a day of gratitude and reflection, an occasion to return to the teachings of Guru Nanak and to the values at the heart of the faith: devotion to the one divine, the equality of all people, humility and honest living. The hymns sung and read throughout the day keep those ideas close. The festival also renews the bonds of community. Through langar, where everyone is served side by side regardless of background, and through the shared work of preparing and hosting, people express the principles of service and selflessness that Guru Nanak taught. For many families it is a warm, joyful time to gather, welcome others, and pass cherished traditions on to the next generation.