Babar Vani

Guru Nānak's hymns on Babur's 1521 invasion of Punjab

Tradition: Sikhism / Sant tradition

Guru Nānak's 1521 prophetic-witness hymns on Babur's invasion

Babar Vani ('Babur's Discourse,' c. 1521) is the small but distinctive corpus of four hymns by Guru Nānak (1469-1539) that bear witness to Babur's Mughal invasion of Punjab — the four hymns, embedded in the Ādi Granth (the Sikh scripture compiled by Guru Arjan in 1604) in the Rāgs Āsā and Tilang, constitute one of the most-historically-specific subsets of the Guru-Granth corpus and one of the foundational documents of Sikh prophetic-political witness. Babur, the founder of the Mughal Empire, descendant of both Timur and Genghis Khan, conducted four invasions of the Hindustan region from 1519 onward; the decisive 1521 campaign through Punjab — culminating in the 1526 Battle of Panipat that overthrew the Lodi sultanate and established Mughal rule — caused immense civilian suffering, particularly in the urban centres along Babur's route through what is now Pakistani and Indian Punjab. Nānak, who was living in Kartarpur in this period and who may have witnessed Saidpur (modern Eminabad) when Babur sacked it, composed the Babar Vani hymns as a direct prophetic-and-political response. The hymns combine four distinctive elements: (1) detailed observational reportage of the violence — the dragging of women, the destruction of homes, the slaughter of rulers and slaves alike; (2) religious lament for the suffering of Hindus and Muslims as fellow human beings (Nānak conspicuously refuses to make confessional distinction between the victims); (3) prophetic-political critique of both the Lodi rulers (whose corruption and moral failure had invited the catastrophe) and the invader (whose violence is described as 'a wedding-procession of sin'); (4) theological reflection on divine justice and the question of how God could permit such suffering. The hymns establish a permanent dimension of the Sikh tradition: the religious obligation to bear witness to injustice and political violence, regardless of which community is the perpetrator or the victim. This prophetic-political dimension would be intensified across subsequent Sikh history — through Guru Arjan's 1606 martyrdom, Guru Tegh Bahadur's 1675 martyrdom for defending Kashmiri Hindus, Guru Gobind Singh's 1699 Khalsa founding and the long Sikh-Mughal-and-Afghan wars — and remains foundational to Sikh political-religious self-understanding.