Bhai Mardana

The rabab

Mardana was born at Talwandi — Nankana Sahib — about ten years before Guru Nanak, into a family of Muslim mirasis, hereditary musicians and genealogists. The two knew each other as boys in the same village.

When Nanak began the journeys the tradition calls the udasis, Mardana went with him and stayed for roughly four decades, across an itinerary that the janam-sakhis extend from Assam to Mecca. His instrument was the rabab, a plucked lute; Nanak composed, named the raga each composition belonged to, and Mardana played. The formula the accounts repeat — Mardana, strike the rabab, the Word is descending — is the tradition’s own image of how the hymns came into the world: as music, before they were text.^1,2,3

What this made

That partnership set the pattern for kirtan, the sung scripture that is still the central act of worship in a gurdwara. The Guru Granth Sahib is organised by musical measure rather than by author or theme — a structural fact that goes back to compositions made to be sung, with a musician present.

Three of Mardana’s own verses were later included in the scripture, under Guru Angad’s compilation and carried into the Adi Granth of 1604. He died around 1534, at Kartarpur or on the road near Kurram, and Nanak is recorded as performing his last rites.^1,2,3

The point usually made about him

Nanak’s closest lifelong companion was a Muslim, and remained one; there is no account of his conversion, and his verses sit in the Sikh scripture as they are. For a faith whose founding utterance was there is no Hindu, there is no Musalman, the forty-year working partnership at the centre of it is not incidental detail.^1,2,3