The village of Sarai Naga

In the flat, canal-fed farmland of Sri Muktsar Sahib district stands the village of Sarai Naga, known in older records as Matte di Sarai. On 31 March 1504 a son was born there to a trader named Pheru Mal and his wife, remembered in Sikh tradition as Mata Ramo. The boy was called Lehna. He belonged to a Trehan Khatri family of ordinary means and ordinary expectations, and for the first three decades of his life there was little to mark him out beyond an unusually earnest religious temperament. Yet the village that raised him would come to be counted among the most significant birthplaces in Punjab, because Lehna became Guru Angad Dev, the second of the ten Gurus of the Sikh faith, and the man who gave that faith a script, a kitchen and a school.

The family did not remain at Sarai Naga. Unsettled conditions in the region persuaded Pheru Mal to move, and the household eventually settled at Khadur, a village beside the Beas river that would later become inseparable from Angad's name. In January 1520 Lehna married Khivi, and the couple had four children: two sons, Dasu and Datu, and two daughters, Amro and Anokhi. Through these years Lehna was known locally as a devotee of the goddess Durga. He tended a shrine, led groups of villagers on pilgrimage into the hills, and by every account took his devotions seriously rather than casually. That sincerity, rather than any dissatisfaction, is what carried him to the encounter that redirected his life.

From Lehna to Angad

Sometime in the early 1530s Lehna heard verses composed by Guru Nanak, the founder of the Sikh path, who was then living at Kartarpur on the banks of the Ravi. The language of those compositions was direct and unpriestly, addressed to ordinary people in their own tongue, and it stayed with him. On his next pilgrimage he made a detour to Kartarpur to meet their author. The conversation that followed ended his journey. He never reached the shrine he had set out for, and instead remained where he was.

What came next was roughly six or seven years of plain service. Lehna carried loads, worked in the fields, cleaned, cooked and listened. Sikh tradition preserves a series of episodes in which his willingness to serve without complaint or calculation was measured against the expectations of Nanak's own sons, who assumed the succession would fall to them. Nanak's judgement went the other way. He renamed his disciple Angad, from the word ang, meaning a limb or part of the body, signalling that the two were no longer separable. On 14 June 1539 Angad was chosen as successor, and on 7 September of that year he was formally installed. Nanak died a fortnight afterwards, on 22 September 1539.

Khadur Sahib: the kitchen, the school and the wrestling ground

Rather than remain at Kartarpur, where Nanak's family held influence, Angad withdrew to Khadur. From that unremarkable village he shaped the practical character of the young community for the next thirteen years, and his instincts were consistently those of an organiser rather than a theorist. He inherited a set of ideas and turned them into habits that ordinary households could keep.

He took the shared kitchen, or langar, which Nanak had begun as a standing rebuke to caste separation, and made it a fixed institution attached to every Sikh place of worship: a free, simple meal offered to anyone who came, eaten seated in a single row without regard to birth, wealth or faith. His wife, Mata Khivi, ran the Khadur langar herself, and did so with such generosity that she is named with warmth in the Guru Granth Sahib, one of very few women recorded there by name.

Angad also opened a school for the village children and taught in it himself. And in a decision that says a good deal about his understanding of religious life, he established a mall akhara, a wrestling arena where young men trained in physical exercise and traditional martial skills. He spoke against tobacco and in favour of bodily fitness, treating the health of the body as part of spiritual discipline rather than a distraction from it. Athletics, plain food, honest labour and communal prayer were pieces of a single scheme, and he saw no tension between them.

Gurmukhi and the guarding of Nanak's word

Angad's most enduring contribution is bound up with writing. Sikh tradition credits him with Gurmukhi, the script in which Punjabi is written in India to this day. Scholars generally describe his role more precisely as one of standardisation: writing systems related to Gurmukhi already circulated in the region, and what Angad did, around the 1530s, was to regularise and settle them into a usable, teachable form. The practical effect was the same either way. The community now possessed a script of its own, unattached to Sanskrit or Persian learning, in which the language people actually spoke could be written down and read by anyone willing to master a few dozen letters. Literacy stopped being the property of a scholarly class.

He put the script to immediate use. He gathered the hymns of Guru Nanak, preserving them from the drift and corruption that oral transmission invites, and he composed sixty-two or sixty-three saloks of his own, which were later included in the Guru Granth Sahib. Following a practice his successors also observed, he signed these compositions in Nanak's name rather than his own, presenting himself as a continuation of the founder's voice rather than a rival to it. He further commissioned an account of Nanak's life, an early instinct towards keeping documented memory of the tradition's beginnings.

Humayun, succession and afterlife

One episode from around 1540 has passed into the standard telling. The Mughal emperor Humayun, defeated in battle and travelling as a fugitive, arrived at Khadur expecting to be received. Angad was teaching and did not break off at once, which offended the emperor. The reply attributed to the Guru was that a sword drawn against a teacher was of little use to a man who had failed to draw it against his enemies. Later accounts add a blessing for the emperor's eventual return. Whatever the precise words were, the episode was remembered because it captured something true about him: a village teacher who did not rearrange himself for power.

Angad applied Nanak's precedent to his own succession. Passing over Dasu and Datu, he nominated a devoted older disciple, Amar Das, as the third Guru, confirming for a second time that authority in the Sikh line would follow merit and service rather than blood. Guru Angad Dev died on 29 March 1552. When his sons pressed their claim to the family property at Khadur, the community's centre shifted to Goindwal, and the tradition went on growing along the lines he had drawn.

For Sarai Naga the connection remains a living one, marked by pilgrims who stop in Sri Muktsar Sahib district on their way between the great shrines of Punjab. It is a modest place that produced neither a warrior nor a king, but a schoolteacher, a patron of scribes and wrestlers, and the husband of a woman who fed whoever walked in. Between them they made a young faith practical enough to endure.