The Janamsakhi Tradition: An Analytical Study

Record summary

Janamsakhi narratives about Guru Nanak include encounters with supernatural, celestial, demonic, and morally intermediary figures, alongside journeys, debates, and miracle motifs. Modern critical studies treat the corpus as layered hagiography transmitted through competing recensions rather than as a straightforward biography. This makes it useful for comparing how religious communities use intermediary beings to authorize teaching, mark sacred geography, or criticize ritual power. The exact episode, manuscript family, and publication should be specified, since “the Janamsakhis” do not constitute one uniform text.