Every Sikh reveres the ten Gurus. Every Sikh reveres Sri Guru Granth Sahib — the embodiment of the eternal, living Guru. And by extension, every Sikh deeply respects the Bhagats, the Bhatts, and the other spiritually illumined souls whose Bani has been enshrined within its sacred pages. Bhagat Sheikh Farid Ji, Bhagat Kabir Ji, Bhagat Namdev Ji, Bhagat Ravidas Ji (regarded by millions as Guru Ravidaas Ji) — their compositions appear in Sri Guru Granth Sahib not as additions or supplements but as an act of divine recognition by Guru Arjan Dev Ji himself — as voices that had already touched the same eternal truth, and deserved to be enshrined for all time. The Guru’s house has always been a large house.
Yet there is one figure who sits at the very edge of that house — inside it in love, outside it in lineage — who has been relatively overlooked within the mainstream Sikh traditions. His name is Baba Sri Chand, the elder son of Guru Nanak Dev Ji, founder of the Udasi order, a scholar of extraordinary range, and an author of devotional literature that deserves far wider study than it currently receives.
I. The Question of His Position
Let us first be clear about what this article does not argue. It does not claim that Baba Sri Chand was a Guru. He was not. Guru Nanak Dev Ji chose Bhai Lehna — who became Guru Angad Dev Ji — as his spiritual successor, and that choice was divinely ordained. Bhai Gurdas, whose authority in matters of the Sikh tradition is beyond question, is frank: Baba Sri Chand’s ego was a disqualification. The guruship passed through the river of seva and selfless surrender, not through biological lineage.
But his standing as a holy man, a devoted son, and a scholar of the first order is entirely separate from the question of succession. Sri Guru Granth Sahib itself includes the compositions of figures who were not Gurus. The Bhatts — court poets of the Guru’s darbar — contributed Swayyeas in praise of the Gurus that are sung in Nitnem to this day. Bhatt Bal, Bhatt Gyand and their fellow poets offered their praises of the Gurus with complete humility, making no claim to spiritual authority of their own. Their compositions are not Gurbani in the sense of the Guru’s own revealed word, yet they carry spiritual weight and liturgical standing within Sri Guru Granth Sahib.
Baba Sri Chand’s literature warrants a similar spirit of discernment — appreciated for what it is, the testimony of a devoted and extraordinarily learned son, without being confused with what it is not. It should be studied with the respect due to sincere devotion and with the curiosity owed to first-rate scholarship. Nothing more, nothing less.
II. Who Was Baba Sri Chand?
Born on 8 September 1494 at Sultanpur Lodhi to Mata Sulakhani and Guru Nanak Dev Ji, Baba Sri Chand was the elder of two sons. By his own temperament and vocation, he became an ascetic from youth. He underwent the sacred thread ceremony — a reflection of his immersion in the Vedic scholastic tradition he would later seek to transcend — studied Vedic literature under Pandit Hardayal, and then proceeded to Srinagar at the age of eleven to study Sanskrit literature and scriptures at the gurukula of Acharya Purushottam Kaul — a scholar of sufficient standing that his own father had entrusted his formative years to him.
He was, in short, a man of learning before he was a man of renunciation. He mastered yogic discipline, debated the Siddhas, and established the Udasi order — a tradition of ascetic wanderers who travelled across the subcontinent, deeply influenced by the philosophy of Guru Nanak Dev Ji, reaching places where the organised Sikh Panth had not yet taken root. The very name Udasi carries a spiritual charge: one who is udas, indifferent to the world, absorbed in the longing for the Divine, sorrowful until the final merging.
His relationship with successive Sikh Gurus was warmer and more cooperative than popular history credits. He advised Guru Ram Das Ji to name the sacred pool’s surrounding settlement Amritsar. He contributed the opening line of the seventeenth Ashtapadi of Sukhmani Sahib on Guru Arjan Dev Ji’s request. He preserved handwritten manuscripts of Guru Nanak Dev Ji’s Bani and handed them over for the compilation of Sri Guru Granth Sahib. When Guru Hargobind Sahib Ji was imprisoned at Gwalior, Baba Sri Chand is believed by Udasi tradition to have interceded with Emperor Jahangir on his behalf — though Sai Mian Mir, the revered Sufi saint of Lahore, is also credited with this intervention in other accounts.
He safeguarded his father’s physical legacy too. When the Ravi flooded and swept away the shrine at Kartarpur, Baba Sri Chand is believed to have retrieved the urn containing his father’s ashes and ensured a proper resting place — the site that became Dera Baba Nanak.
He lived, by most accounts, to extraordinary old age. He died at Kiratpur, bequeathing leadership of the Udasis to Baba Gurditta, the eldest son of Guru Hargobind Sahib Ji — a gesture that ensured the Udasi order remained intertwined with the Guru’s family and the Sikh mainstream.
III. The Literature: A Body of Work That Awaits Readers
Baba Sri Chand’s literary corpus falls into several categories.
The Aarta Sri Guru Nanak Dev, popularly known as the Aarta, is the crown of his output and the work that every Sikh ought to know. It is a ten-verse composition of devotional praise in the aarti tradition — but an aarti unlike any other, for it envisions the entire cosmos as the priest performing worship at Guru Nanak Dev Ji’s feet. The sun and the moon are his lamps. Mountains of flowers are his garlands. Crores of gods chant his praises. The wind is his ceremonial fan. The saints and sages are his contemplatives. The bells ring out the tone of Onkar.
The opening invocation sets the register immediately: Aarta Keejai Nanak Shah Patshah Ka, Har Har Deen Dunia Ke Shehan Shah Ka — “Let us perform the aarti of the King of kings, Guru Nanak, the Emperor of all worlds, spiritual and temporal.” The closing verse is Baba Sri Chand’s personal signature of surrender: Srichand Bakhaney Satgur Nanak, Poota Agam, Agad, Adol, Awdhuta — “Srichand declares of the Satguru Nanak: He is unattainable, unfathomable, unshakeable, the great Avadhuta.” And then, with complete humility: Saran Parey Ki Rakh Dyala, Nanak Tumrey Bal Gopala — “Oh Nanak, protect those who seek your shelter; we are but children at your feet.”
The theological scope of the Aarta is remarkable. Baba Sri Chand, steeped in Vedic cosmology, places the entire Vedic pantheon — its deities, its cosmological figures, its sages — in prostration before Guru Nanak Dev Ji. He is not affirming the Vedic framework; he is transcending it by subordinating all of it to the Guru’s light. At the same time, the universality of the composition reaches toward the recognition — shared across the great traditions — that the same divine reality underlies all creation. It is a civilisational statement disguised as a hymn of filial devotion.
The Matravani (Matra Shastra) is the theological foundation of the Udasi order. Structured as a dialogue between Baba Sri Chand and the Siddhas — echoing, unmistakeably, Guru Nanak Dev Ji’s own Sidh Gosht — it sets out the Udasi philosophy of naam simran, detachment from the world, and the pursuit of salvation through the Guru’s word. The Siddhas ask: who are you, young man, and who has initiated you? The answer is unambiguous: Satigur Mundia, Lekh Mundiaya, Gur Ka Bhejia Nagri Aya — “The Satguru has initiated me; it is the Guru who has sent me to this city.”
The Guru Gayatri is a hymn addressed to his spiritual preceptor — his father — in the Gayatri metre, thus bridging the Vedic literary tradition with the Sikh devotional register.
The Sahasranama catalogues a thousand names of the Supreme Being, a genre familiar from Sanskrit devotional literature, here reoriented around the non-dual, formless God of the Guru’s theology.
The Panchadeva-shatakam comprises eight hymns to five deities, reflecting Baba Sri Chand’s training in Vedic literature while maintaining his Nanak-centred spiritual core.
Taken together, this body of work represents what might fairly be called a bridge literature — composed by an extraordinary scholar who stood at the intersection of the Vedic and the Sikh intellectual worlds, and who used his mastery of the former to illuminate the greatness of the latter’s founder.
IV. Why This Literature Is Overlooked — And Why That Must Change
The neglect of Baba Sri Chand’s literature is partly theological, partly political, and partly the product of historical contingency.
The theological reservation is understandable: the fear that studying his works might blur the line between Sri Guru Granth Sahib and secondary devotional literature. But this is an unnecessary anxiety. The Sikh tradition already has a well-developed capacity for hierarchical discernment. We distinguish Gurbani from the Sakhis. We distinguish the canonical scripture from the vast Sikh literary tradition that surrounds it. Bhai Gurdas’s Vaars — described by Guru Arjan Dev Ji as the key to Sri Guru Granth Sahib, and holding the singular distinction of being the only compositions outside Sri Guru Granth Sahib permitted to be recited within a Gurdwara — are studied and revered without anyone confusing them with Gurbani itself. Bhai Nand Lal’s Ganjnama and Zindagi Nama, the devotional Urdu and Persian of Guru Gobind Singh Ji’s court, are studied and sung without anyone confusing them with Sri Guru Granth Sahib. Indeed, even the compositions of Guru Gobind Singh Ji himself — the Dasam Granth, held in the highest reverence — are not accorded the status of Shabad Guru, since they do not form part of Sri Guru Granth Sahib. The tradition has always been capable of honouring without equating.
The case for Baba Sri Chand’s literature is more modest still. His Aarta makes no claim to the authority of Gurbani. It is the devotional outpouring of a learned son in praise of his father, the first and eternal Guru. That it should be read, studied, and appreciated — in its own right, on its own terms — is all that this article asks.
The political reservation — a residue of old tensions between the Udasi-managed Gurdwaras and the Singh Sabha reformers of the early twentieth century — is historically explicable but currently irrelevant. The Singh Sabha needed to reclaim Sikh shrines from a management that had allowed certain non-Sikh practices to creep in. That battle is long concluded. It need not permanently exile the literature of a man who spent his long life inspired by, and immersed in, his father’s philosophy.
The contingency factor is simpler: the Udasi order is numerically small, its scholars few, and its literature composed largely in Sanskrit and old Punjabi registers that require specialist training to access. The work of translation and commentary that would bring the Aarta and the Matravani to a general Sikh audience has barely begun.
That is the gap this article seeks to identify. The Aarta of Baba Sri Chand is not Gurbani. It is not claimed to be. But it is the testimony of a profoundly learned son — schooled in Vedas and Upanishads, trained in the Siddha tradition, conversant with the philosophical currents of his age — who looked at his father and saw the Supreme Lord of the Universe reflected in him. It is contemporaneous literature. It is literature composed by someone who knew Guru Nanak Dev Ji personally, who sat at his feet, who travelled extensively as his father travelled, and who understood, and deeply absorbed, what he saw.
No son who sang thus of his father should be left unread.
V. A Note on the Aarta in Liturgical Practice
The Aarta is still sung by the Udasi sampradaya and by several other traditions, including some Nihang deras. Its opening line — Aarta Keejai Nanak Shah Patshah Ka — is among the most sonically powerful invocations in the entire spectrum of Sikh devotional music. Those who have heard it rendered by a trained ragi in the Udasi style will not easily forget the experience.
There is a beautiful tradition surrounding Baba Sri Chand’s contribution to the seventeenth Ashtapadi of Sukhmani Sahib. When Guru Arjan Dev Ji, having completed sixteen Ashtapadis, humbly requested Baba Sri Chand to continue the composition, the latter declined to compose original Bani — insisting that the privilege of composing Gurbani belonged to the Guru alone. Instead, out of deep humility, he recited the Salok of his father, Guru Nanak Dev Ji, that follows the Mool Mantar in Japji Sahib:
ਆਦਿ ਸਚੁ ਜੁਗਾਦਿ ਸਚੁ ।।
ਹੈ ਭਿ ਸਚੁ ਨਾਨਕ ਹੋਸੀ ਭਿ ਸਚੁ ।।ਯ਼।।
Aad sach, jugaad sach. Hai bhi sach, Nanak hosee bhi sach —
“True in the beginning, True through the ages; True even now, O Nanak, shall remain ever True.”
Udasi tradition holds that Baba Sri Chand consciously altered two vowels in reciting this verse — subtle diacritical shifts in the Gurmukhi — so that the words of the Satguru his father would not be directly attributed to himself. It was an act of theological precision as much as humility: a learned man signalling unmistakably that he was transmitting another’s light, not generating his own. Guru Arjan Dev Ji thereupon placed this Salok at the head of the seventeenth Ashtapadi, where it remains to this day.
That gesture of selflessness — of an extraordinary scholar choosing to subordinate himself entirely to the Guru — is itself a lesson in nimrata that Sikh pedagogy ought to teach more widely.
VI. Conclusion
The Sikh tradition has never been a narrow house. It has always had room for the devoted, the learned, and the sincere — provided the hierarchy of the Shabad Guru remains clear and undisturbed.
Baba Sri Chand disturbs nothing. He claimed nothing. He built a dharamsala in the courtyard of his father’s legacy — a place of study, devotion, and remembrance — and from that courtyard he sang praises with a learning and a love that few in any tradition have equalled.
His Aarta is available to us. His Matravani awaits translation and commentary. His life — a life of ascetic dedication, institutional bridge-building, and filial devotion — is a chapter in Sikh history that demands more than a footnote.
Read him not as a Guru. Read him as a son. That, as any parent will confirm, is more than enough.