Nanakmata, Reetha Sahib and the eastern trail

The janamsakhi accounts of Guru Nanak Dev Ji's eastern travels place him at a series of sites that are now gurdwaras across northern India and beyond: Nanakmata in Udham Singh Nagar, Reetha Sahib in Champawat, Guru ka Tal at Agra, sites in Bengal, Assam, Odisha and as far as Dhaka.

Nanakmata was a Nath jogi centre where the tradition places an exchange between the Guru and the Siddhas. Reetha Sahib is named for a soapnut tree whose fruit the account says turned sweet.

Beyond India the trail runs to Sri Lanka, to Baghdad, where an inscription said to record his visit exists and is disputed, and to Mecca and Medina.

The historicity of the individual sites varies from likely to unsupported. Most were identified as gurdwara sites in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries or later.

What the trail does show, whatever its accuracy in detail, is that within a few generations Sikhs across a very large area believed the founder had been there, and built accordingly.

Nanakmata in Udham Singh Nagar district was a Nath establishment where the tradition places a confrontation, and it became a gurdwara afterward.

Reetha Sahib in the Kumaon hills is where soapnuts are said to have turned sweet, and the tree there is part of the account.

The eastern travels are the least documented of the udasis. The sites exist in a line running through Uttarakhand and toward Nepal and Bengal, and no through route connects them for a traveller.

What we don't know

  • The historicity of most of the individual sites and of the Baghdad inscription.

Where to check this

  1. Janamsakhi traditions. Janamsakhi literature (Puratan, Bala, Miharban) - Panjab Digital Library ↗

Named but not linked. These are real, findable documents. This project has not consulted them for this page.

  • Gurdwara records at the sites named.

This page has not yet been read through by the editor. Treat it with more caution than the rest.

How this page was written. The text is compiled from the standard published histories and reference works, not from a document held in hand. Nobody from this project has visited the place or read the archive. The list above is where a reader can go to check it, not a record of what was consulted line by line. Dates and figures are the received account. If you hold something better, write in and it will be corrected.

This is one of 130 accounts in The Ten, the chapter of this site covering the Gurus, from 1469 to 1708.