Guru Nanak: The Poet-Saint Whose Bani Founded a Tradition
Quick answer: A craft study of Guru Nanak's bani for writers: raga structure, the rahau refrain, everyday metaphor in Japji Sahib, and how to read his hymns as poetry.
Some founders leave doctrines. Guru Nanak left poems, nearly a thousand hymns, and asked that they be sung. Born in 1469 at Talwandi, the town now called Nankana Sahib, and passing away in 1539 at Kartarpur, he composed across a long life of travel and teaching, and his bani forms the opening and the spine of the Guru Granth Sahib. For Sikhs these compositions are scripture in the fullest sense, the living word of the Guru, and this page approaches them with that respect while asking a writer's question: how do these poems work, and what can anyone who writes learn from them?
The answer turns out to be a great deal. Nanak solved problems every poet still faces: how to compress the infinite into a few syllables, how to structure a long poem so it climbs rather than sprawls, how to make a refrain carry a whole composition, and how to speak about the highest things in the vocabulary of farmers, traders and weavers. Few bodies of poetry anywhere repay craft attention so richly.
The poem
Aad sach, jugaad sach
Hai bhi sach, Nanak hosi bhi sach
Guru Nanak, sloka from Japji Sahib, Guru Granth Sahib; the lines affirm the One as true in the beginning, true through the ages, true now, and true forever
A Poet Who Travelled With a Musician
The first fact of Nanak's poetics is that it was musical from birth. Tradition records that he travelled on his long journeys, the udasis, with Mardana, a Muslim rabab player, and composed hymns to be sung on the spot: to seekers, to yogis, to ordinary households. Every composition of his in the Guru Granth Sahib is assigned to a raga, a melodic frame that sets its emotional temperature, from the dawn gravity of Asa to the monsoon longing of Malhar.
Writing for melody disciplines a poet in ways silent writing never does. Lines must breathe where a singer breathes. Syntax must survive being stretched across a phrase. Meaning must arrive even when a word dissolves into melisma. Nanak's lines have the load-bearing simplicity of things built to be carried by the voice, and that is the first quality a modern writer should study: he composed for the ear and the breath, never merely for the page.
The Mool Mantar: Compression as Theology
The Guru Granth Sahib opens with Nanak's Mool Mantar, a string of compressed epithets beginning with Ik Onkar, One Creator, that states an entire vision of the divine in barely a breath: one, truth by name, creative, without fear, without enmity, timeless, unborn, self-existent. There is no verb of argument anywhere. The composition works by naming, each epithet placed like a stone in an arch, and the density is such that commentaries run to volumes.
For a writer, the Mool Mantar is the outer limit of an exercise worth attempting: define the largest thing you believe in a single breath, using only attributes, no explanations. The discipline exposes how much of our writing is scaffolding. Nanak also favoured the negative attribute, naming what the One is free from, fear and enmity, and negation remains one of poetry's most underused tools for describing what exceeds description.
Japji Sahib: Architecture for a Long Poem
Japji Sahib, recited by devout Sikhs every morning, is Nanak's masterwork of structure: an opening sloka followed by 38 stanzas called pauris, literally rungs, and a closing sloka. The ladder metaphor is exact. The stanzas ascend through repeated questions and deepening answers, using techniques any poet of sequences should study: anaphora that builds incantatory momentum, numbered litanies, a question posed early, how to become true, whose answer unfolds across the whole poem, and a final image of the world weighed in the workshop of a smith.
The craft point is that long poems need load-bearing architecture, not just accumulation. Japji climbs. Each pauri does work the previous one made possible, and recurring words gather meaning as they return, the way a fugue subject does. If you are drafting a poem sequence, read a translation of Japji Sahib once purely as a structural blueprint: notice where it repeats, where it turns, and how early its ending is prepared.
The Rahau: A Refrain That Carries the Thesis
Most hymns in the Guru Granth Sahib contain a line marked rahau, meaning pause or refrain, and in performance it returns between verses. Scholars of gurbani read the rahau as the central statement of the hymn, the line all other verses orbit. Nanak in effect places his thesis in the refrain, so that repetition is not decoration but the repeated striking of the poem's one essential note while the verses examine it from successive angles.
Modern songwriting rediscovered this principle as the chorus, but usually with less rigour. Try the rahau discipline directly: write the single line your poem exists to say, mark it, and let every stanza approach it from a different direction, returning to it between approaches. The form guarantees unity, and it forces you to know what your poem's one essential note actually is, which is harder than it sounds.
Metaphors From the Working World
Nanak's imagery comes overwhelmingly from work. The body is a field: make good deeds the farming, effort the water, and let the true Name be the seed. The trader is told to deal in the true merchandise. The smith, the potter, the weighing scale, the ferry across the river, all become figures for the spiritual life. He spoke to farmers and merchants in the grammar of their own labour, and the hymns in Asa di Var turn social observation, including a famous passage honouring women, into the same plain music.
He also mastered inherited folk forms and turned them inward: the Barah Maha in Raga Tukhari follows the twelve months of the Punjabi year, transforming a folk calendar of seasons into a map of the soul's longing, and Sidh Gosht stages a long dialogue with yogis as a debate poem in verse. The lesson runs one way: take the forms and vocabularies your community already lives inside, and load them with your deepest content. Nanak never asked his listeners to learn a new language; he sanctified the one they had.
Reading Him Well
Start with a good translation of Japji Sahib, then Asa di Var and the Barah Maha, and if possible listen to the compositions sung in their assigned ragas, since the music is half the meaning. Complete English translations of the Guru Granth Sahib exist, and many gurdwaras and online projects provide verse-by-verse renderings with the original Gurmukhi alongside.
Read with the awareness that for Sikhs this is not a text about the Guru; it is the Guru. Approach it as you would enter someone's home, and the tradition is generous with sincere readers. What you will find, beyond the spiritual content, is a poet of the first rank: structurally inventive, sonically exact, radically plain in diction and completely certain of his one essential note.
What poets can take from this
- Compose for breath and melody; read each line aloud and mark where a singer would breathe.
- Attempt a one-breath definition of the largest thing you believe, using only attributes.
- Use negation to describe what exceeds description: say what it is free from.
- Give a long poem architecture that climbs; every stanza should stand on the last.
- Place your poem's thesis in a refrain and let each stanza approach it from a new angle.
- Draw metaphors from the work your readers do with their hands.
Try it yourself
Write a poem structured around the twelve months of the year in your home region, letting each month carry one stage of a single longing, in the spirit of the Barah Maha. Keep every image local and every line singable.
Questions
How many hymns did Guru Nanak compose?
The Guru Granth Sahib preserves nearly a thousand of his hymns, traditionally counted at around 974, all assigned to specific ragas for singing. Major compositions include Japji Sahib, Asa di Var, the Barah Maha and Sidh Gosht. They form the foundational bani of the Sikh scripture.
Can Guru Nanak's bani be read as poetry?
For Sikhs it is scripture first, the living word of the Guru, and any literary reading should honour that. Within that respect, the compositions display extraordinary poetic craft: raga-based structure, the rahau refrain, working-world metaphor and disciplined compression. Many scholars study gurbani precisely at this meeting point of devotion and poetics.
What language did Guru Nanak write in?
Primarily in old Punjabi mixed with the shared devotional idiom of North India sometimes called Sant Bhasha, written today in Gurmukhi script. The diction is deliberately accessible, built on the speech of farmers, traders and householders. Words from Persian and Sanskrit traditions appear naturally within it.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated September 2026.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the September contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.