1 - The Turko-Afghan Rule

Summary

Babur's invading army in the eyes of Guru Nanak was a ‘marriage-party of sin’. Not even the ladies of the nobles were spared dishonour. With heads once of luxuriant tresses and partings adorned with red, they suffered now the shears of brutality; their throats were filled with choking dust; they wandered forlorn, away from the places that had sheltered them. No longer were there the sports of the nobles themselves, and gone were their horses and stables, their trumpets and clarions, their scarlet tunics and sword belts, their mansions and palaces, and their seraglios with soft beds and ‘beautiful women whose sight banished sleep’. Rocklike buildings were razed to the ground and princes were trampled into dust. ‘It is Babur who rules in their place now’.

Guru Nanak's sharp response to Babur's invasions underlines the most important political development during his life, the transition from Afghan to Mughal rule in the Punjab and in northern India. The first fifty years of Guru Nanak's life had been marked by a period of peace in the Punjab. At the time of his birth in 1469 the Punjab was a part of the Sultanate of Delhi under Bahlol Lodhi. The major conquest of Bahlol and his successors was that of the Sharqi kingdom of Jaunpur. Their battles for minor political or territorial gains were fought in Rajasthan. There were only a few insignificant revolts in the Punjab during a period of about seventy years.