ABSTRACT
The life of the founder of a religious tradition is often a site of tremendous creative and reconstructive activity for those that follow him or her. The Sikhs are no exception in this regard. The production and dissemination of accounts of the life of Guru Nānak provided an opportunity for Sikhs to speak to much broader issues and concerns in their day-to-day lives over time, and their immediate and more remote understandings of the past and of the places in which they lived. Auerbach's comment that, “the concept of God held by the Jews is less a cause than a symptom of their manner of comprehending and representing things” 1 is apposite here. In this paper, I will take up Sikh hagiography and its construction of the life and times of Guru Nānak and suggest that it provides a range of very useful insights into Sikh ways of “comprehending and representing things”.
