There is a habit of describing Bhai Mardana as Guru Nanak's companion, which is true and which undersells it considerably. For something close to the whole of Nanak's travelling life — the decades of walking that took him across the subcontinent and out of it — there were two men on the road. One of them sang. The other played the rabab, and he was a Muslim minstrel from the same village, about ten years older, who had been doing it since before anyone had a word for what they were doing.
The Sikh faith begins with a duet.
Talwandi
Mardana was born around 1459 at Rai Bhoi di Talwandi, the village in the Punjab plains that is now Nankana Sahib, to Badra and Lakkho. His family were Mirasis: a hereditary community of Muslim musicians and genealogists who sang at weddings and births, kept the lineages of the families they served, and occupied a low and precarious rung of village society. It was a respected skill and a poor living.
Nanak was born in the same village about ten years later, into a Hindu Khatri household of some standing. That the two became inseparable says something about both of them, and something about the place. Village Punjab in the late fifteenth century was not a society in which the revenue official's son and the Mirasi's son were expected to spend their lives together.
Sultanpur Lodhi
The association became permanent at Sultanpur Lodhi, where Nanak had gone to work in the granary of the local governor and where his sister Bibi Nanaki had settled. Mardana came, and the two began to sing.
This is the arrangement that would last. Nanak composed and sang; Mardana played. In the traditional accounts the Guru would sometimes call for the rabab before he had any words, and the words would come. What the janamsakhis — the traditional life-narratives — describe is not a master and a servant but two men who worked, argued, went hungry and laughed together for a very long time.
Mardana is the one figure in those accounts who is allowed to be ordinary. He gets tired. He gets hungry, and complains about it. He asks the obvious question that the situation demands and that nobody else in the room is willing to ask. The narratives are fond of him in a way they are fond of nobody else, and the fondness reads as memory rather than invention.
The Road
Then came the udasis, the long journeys. The traditional accounts send the two of them east to Assam and Bengal, south to Sri Lanka, north into the Himalaya, and west through Baghdad toward Mecca — an itinerary that scholars treat with varying degrees of caution, since the sources are devotional rather than documentary and the distances are formidable. What is not in doubt is that Nanak travelled for a very long time, over a very wide area, and that Mardana went with him.
The method was consistent wherever they arrived. They would find a place to sit, Mardana would begin to play, and people would come because of the music. Then Nanak would sing. A crowd assembled by a rabab is a different crowd from one assembled by a preacher, and it is worth being precise about what the instrument was doing: it was not decoration on the message. It was the way the message got a hearing.
The first congregation of the Sikh faith was an audience that had stopped to listen to a Mirasi play.
Three Verses, and an Argument About Them
Verses bearing Mardana's name are preserved in the Guru Granth Sahib, in Raag Bihagra. Sikh scholars have differed for a long time over whether these are his own compositions or lines that Guru Nanak addressed to him and that carry his name for that reason. The manuscript tradition does not settle the question, and honest accounts leave it open.
What is not ambiguous is the fact of the inclusion. The scripture that Guru Arjan compiled contains the words of Hindu bhagats, of Muslim Sufis, of men from castes that other scriptures did not trouble to name — and of the Guru's own Muslim accompanist. Nothing in the book is there by accident.
The Last Journey
Mardana died around 1534, on the road, in old age, still travelling. The accounts differ over where: some place his death near the Kurram river in Afghanistan, others elsewhere on the western routes. They agree on what happened next, which is that Guru Nanak himself performed his last rites.
Nanak outlived him by roughly five years, dying at Kartarpur in 1539.
The Rababis
The most remarkable part of Mardana's story happened after he was dead.
His descendants and the wider Mirasi families who followed them became the rababis: hereditary Muslim musicians who performed kirtan in Sikh congregations. They sang at the Harmandir Sahib. For roughly four centuries, the singing at the holiest shrine of the Sikhs was substantially in the hands of Muslim families who traced their profession — and often their lineage — back to a Mirasi from Talwandi.
Then came 1947. The border did not merely cut through Punjab; it cut through this. The rababi families left for Pakistan with the rest of the Muslim population of east Punjab, and a musical lineage that had run unbroken from Guru Nanak's lifetime effectively ended in the space of a few months. Sikh kirtan continued and flourished, in other hands and largely on the harmonium. But the particular thread that led back to the rabab beside the Guru was cut, and efforts on both sides of the border to recover the rababi repertoire have been working against that loss ever since.
Why He Matters
It is easy to file Bhai Mardana under interfaith harmony and move on, and that flattens him. He was not a symbol. He was a working musician of low social standing who spent his adult life walking beside a man whose ideas were dismantling the categories that had kept people like him where they were — and who did the walking, in the traditional accounts, with a certain amount of grumbling about the food.
What the Sikh faith says about caste and about who is admitted, it said first by arrangement rather than by argument. Before there was a doctrine, there was a Khatri singing and a Mirasi playing, on the road, for thirty years.