Gurdwara Nanak Jhira at Bidar in Karnataka marks a visit by Guru Nanak Dev Ji during his southern travels. The account is that the area had no drinking water and that a spring came at the place he indicated. The spring still runs and the gurdwara is built around it.
Bhai Sahib Singh Ji, one of the Panj Piare, was a barber of Bidar. Bhai Mohkam Singh Ji was a calico printer of Dwarka and Bhai Himmat Singh Ji a water carrier of Jagannath Puri.
That three of the five men who constituted the Khalsa at Anandpur in 1699 came from Karnataka, Gujarat and Odisha is the single strongest piece of evidence that the early Panth was not a regional formation.
Jinvara near Bidar is where Mai Bhago Ji settled after 1708 and where her gurdwara stands.
There is a settled Sikh community in the Bidar and Nanded region descended from the eighteenth century, and it is Punjabi-speaking in a Kannada and Marathi-speaking country.
Bidar was a sultanate capital with a fort, a madrasa and a set of tombs, and the town the Guru is recorded as having reached was one of the larger cities of the Deccan at that date.
Bhai Sahib Singh Ji, one of the Panj Piare, came from Bidar, which ties the town to Anandpur across two centuries and a thousand miles.
The gurdwara is a major stop on the southern circuit with Nanded, and its sangat includes local Kannada-speaking families.