Chapter 31: The Udasi Sampradaya: Shrichand, Son of Guru Nanak, and the Sanatan Dharma–Sikh Ascetic Bridge

Few institutions illustrate the porous, historically negotiated boundary between Sanatan Dharma and Sikhism as clearly as the Udasi sampradaya, an ascetic religious order founded not by a Sanatan Dharma teacher adopting Sikh elements, but by the biological son of Guru Nanak, the founder of Sikhism itself — an order that began as an offshoot within the earliest Sikh community and gradually, over subsequent centuries, drifted into practices, beliefs, and institutional roles more closely resembling mainstream Sanatan Dharma Shaiva and Vedantic asceticism than orthodox Sikh doctrine.

1. Sri Chand: life and character

Sri Chand (also spelled Srichand or Shrichand), born 8 or 9 September 1494 at Sultanpur Lodhi in present-day Punjab, was the elder of Guru Nanak’s two sons, born to Nanak’s wife Mata Sulakhani. From an early age Sri Chand showed a contemplative, ascetic temperament markedly different from his father’s chosen successor and from the householder-centered ideal Guru Nanak himself generally taught for ordinary Sikh practice; at age eleven he traveled to Kashmir to study Sanskrit texts under Pandit Purushottam Kaul and later studied yoga under Avinasha Muni, giving him, unusually for an early Sikh figure, a substantial grounding in classical Sanatan Dharma Sanskrit and yogic learning alongside his inherited Sikh identity.

2. Passed over for succession, yet founding his own order

When Guru Nanak came to designate his spiritual successor before his death in 1539, he chose not his own son but a devoted disciple, Bhai Lehna, who took the name Guru Angad and became the second Sikh Guru — a decision consistent with the broader early Sikh principle that spiritual authority passed through demonstrated devotion and readiness rather than hereditary bloodline. Rather than simply accepting a subordinate role within the mainstream Sikh community that formed around Guru Angad and his own successors, Sri Chand instead gathered his own following of disciples who, like him, renounced householder life for asceticism, and traveled with them across much of the Indian subcontinent, establishing what became known as the Udasi order (from Sanskrit udasin, meaning one who is detached from or indifferent to worldly attachment) — the term udasi had also earlier been used within Sikh tradition itself to describe Guru Nanak’s own four great preaching journeys, giving Sri Chand’s chosen name for his ascetic order a resonance directly tying it back to his father’s own missionary example.

3. Relations with the Sikh Gurus and gradual religious drift

Sri Chand’s relationship with the successive Sikh Gurus who followed his father remained, according to the sources, notably amicable rather than hostile despite his having been passed over for succession; the Sikh Encyclopedia records that he sent ceremonial turbans marking his recognition of Guru Arjan’s succession in 1581, and that near the end of his own extraordinarily long life — traditional sources place his death in 1629, at an age reported by different sources as either 134 or 135 years old — he asked the sixth Sikh Guru, Guru Hargobind, to give him one of his sons to continue the Udasi order’s leadership; Guru Hargobind’s son Baba Gurditta duly became Sri Chand’s formally appointed successor and is regarded as the patriarch of the organized Udasi sampradaya thereafter. Despite this consistently amicable institutional relationship with the mainstream Sikh Guru lineage across several generations, the Encyclopaedia Britannica’s academic entry on the Udasi order notes plainly that many later Udasi beliefs, devotional practices, and modes of living came to stand in clear opposition to mainstream Sikh doctrine, reflecting ascetic and image-venerating dispositions generally identified as Sanatan Dharma rather than Sikh — including, over time, the adoption of practices such as idol worship, matted hair and ash-smearing reminiscent of Shaiva ascetic practice, and a broadly Vedantic rather than strictly Guru-Granth-centered theological orientation, even as Udasis continued, per their alternate name Nanakputras (“sons of Nanak”), to revere the Guru Granth Sahib and to identify their own lineage as a continuation of Guru Nanak’s mission.

4. Institutional role: guardians of Sikh shrines

The Udasis’ institutional significance extends well beyond their own numbers. Following Guru Gobind Singh’s abolition of the earlier masand system of regional Sikh preacher-representatives in the late 17th century (a reform undertaken partly because some masands had grown corrupt or disloyal), much of the practical, on-the-ground responsibility for maintaining Sikh shrines (gurdwaras) and continuing local preaching of Guru Nanak’s teaching fell, for well over a century, to Udasi mahants (custodian-preachers), who by the mid-18th century operated at least twenty-five Udasi centers in Punjab, a number that grew to over one hundred as Sikh political power expanded under Ranjit Singh’s Sikh Empire in the 19th century (Britannica, “Udasi”). Udasi custodians continued to control many major Sikh historical shrines, including sites associated with Anandpur, Hazur Sahib, and the Golden Temple complex at Amritsar itself, for well over a century, until a formal, and at times contentious, Sikh reform movement in the early 20th century — the Singh Sabha and later Akali movements — progressively transferred control of Sikh gurdwaras from Udasi and other non-orthodox custodians to reformed, doctrinally standardized Sikh management committees, a process formalized by the Sikh Gurdwaras Act of 1925. The Udasi order today survives as a considerably smaller ascetic tradition, its historical role as de facto guardian of the Sikh tradition’s most sacred physical sites now a largely closed but historically consequential chapter — one of the clearest documented instances in this book of an institution whose own identity sits genuinely and durably between the categories “Sanatan Dharma” and “Sikh” rather than comfortably inside either.

5. Historical context, evidence, and interpretation

The subject of The Udasi Sampradaya: Shrichand, Son of Guru Nanak, and the Sanatan Dharma–Sikh Ascetic Bridge needs to be approached at more than one level. A religious tradition is not only a collection of doctrines; it is also a record of texts, institutions, practices, places, memories, and changing interpretations. The same word may carry different meanings in different centuries, and the same institution may change while retaining its name. For that reason, the discussion in this chapter distinguishes, wherever the evidence permits, between what a primary source says, what a later community remembers, and what historians infer from comparing independent evidence. This distinction is especially important when a tradition describes its own origins in sacred or idealized language.

Chronology is another safeguard. Dates in South Asian religious history are often approximate because manuscripts are later than the compositions they preserve, oral traditions can predate their surviving written forms, and legendary biographies may combine historical memory with theological purpose. A date attached to a text should therefore not automatically be treated as the date when every idea in that text first existed. Conversely, uncertainty about an exact date does not make a source useless. Linguistic change, intertextual references, material culture, inscriptions, manuscript relationships, and the geographical distribution of traditions can all help establish relative sequence. The result is a history that sometimes has to use ranges and probabilities rather than false precision.

Regional diversity is equally significant. Sanatan Dharma traditions developed across languages and political regions, and religious vocabulary moved between Sanskrit, Prakrits, Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, Bengali, Marathi, Hindi, Gujarati, and many other languages. A practice described in a Sanskrit normative text may not have been followed in the same form by every community. Conversely, a practice absent from a particular Sanskrit text may be important in a local tradition. Historians therefore compare textual sources with inscriptions, temple records, poetry, ritual manuals, oral histories, archaeology, and ethnography when those sources are available. This approach avoids treating elite textual traditions as a complete record of ordinary religious life.

The chapter's topic also demonstrates why the categories used in modern scholarship should be handled carefully. Terms such as “Sanatan Dharma,” “sect,” “orthodox,” “reform,” “tradition,” “modern,” and “folk” are analytical tools, not neutral labels that existed in exactly their present meanings throughout history. A community may understand itself through lineage, deity, village, language, caste, monastic order, philosophical school, or several of these at once. Modern institutions can preserve older practices while introducing new organizational forms, technologies, educational programs, or global networks. Describing such developments as either pure continuity or complete rupture usually misses the more interesting historical process of selective adaptation.

Primary sources deserve particular attention because they constrain what can responsibly be said. Where the chapter discusses a scripture, the strongest evidence is the text itself in a reliable critical or scholarly translation. Where it discusses an institution, inscriptions, legal records, institutional constitutions, archival documents, court records, or contemporary statements can be more probative than later summaries. Secondary scholarship remains indispensable for chronology, context, translation, and historiographical disagreement, but it should be possible for a reader to trace important claims back toward the underlying evidence. Where evidence is disputed, the text should identify the disagreement rather than manufacture certainty.

Finally, interpretation should remain proportionate to evidence. Similar symbols do not necessarily prove direct historical borrowing; theological similarity does not by itself establish institutional descent; and a later community's claim about antiquity is evidence for that community's self-understanding, not automatically proof of the claimed chronology. These cautions do not diminish the significance of religious traditions. They make the history stronger by allowing sacred claims, scholarly hypotheses, archaeological evidence, and modern institutional narratives to be distinguished rather than conflated. The aim of this chapter, as with the book as a whole, is therefore not to settle every contested question but to give readers enough evidence and context to understand why the questions remain meaningful.

Udasi history and Sikh–Sanatan Dharma boundary

The Udasi case is especially useful for understanding why modern religious labels should not be projected too rigidly backward. Scholarship on Sikhism emphasizes that the early Sikh community developed in a plural religious environment and that Guru Nanak articulated a distinctive path while engaging with Brahmanical, ascetic, Islamic, and sant traditions. That context does not make Udasis simply “Sanatan Dharma communities who became Sikhs,” nor does it make every later Udasi practice representative of Sikhism as a whole. Rather, it shows how communities sharing teachers, sacred places, vocabulary, pilgrimage networks, and social worlds could develop different institutional identities over time. Oxford scholarship on Sikh interactions with other religions similarly stresses both affinity and differentiation. This is important because historical interaction is not the same thing as theological identity. A shared devotional vocabulary or an overlapping ascetic technique may indicate a common religious environment without proving direct borrowing. The later history of Udasi custodianship of Sikh shrines also illustrates how institutional authority can change without requiring a simple story of doctrinal replacement. The twentieth-century gurdwara reform movement progressively redefined Sikh shrine management and community representation, making questions of custodianship part of the modern formation of Sikh institutional identity. Anne Murphy’s work on gurdwara reform is useful here because it shows how historical precedent, property, community definition, and colonial governance became intertwined. For this reason, the chapter treats the Udasi tradition as a historically changing ascetic community whose relationship with Sikh and Sanatan Dharma worlds must be reconstructed period by period rather than reduced to a single origin story.

Udasis and the fluidity of early North Indian religious worlds

The Udasi tradition is associated in later memory with Sri Chand, traditionally regarded as a son of Guru Nanak. Historically, the relationship between early Udasis, Sikh institutions and wider Sanatan Dharma ascetic traditions is complex and changed over time. Udasi ascetics became associated with itinerant religious life, monasteries and establishments, and they interacted with both Sikh and Sanatan Dharma communities. Their history is therefore valuable precisely because it complicates rigid modern boundaries between religious identities.

The term “Sanatan Dharma–Sikh bridge” should nevertheless be used carefully. It can describe social and institutional overlap, but it should not imply that Sikh and Sanatan Dharma traditions were historically indistinguishable. Sikh scripture, theology and institutions developed their own distinctive trajectories. At the same time, early and medieval North India contained multiple forms of devotional, ascetic and sectarian interaction. Ascetics moved across pilgrimage routes, patrons supported institutions with overlapping constituencies, and religious vocabulary circulated across languages and communities.

The Udasi case also illustrates why institutional history matters. A lineage may preserve teachings through monasteries, property, pilgrimage centers and hereditary or initiatory structures rather than through one canonical text. Modern identities can then reinterpret older institutions in light of contemporary categories. Studying Udasis therefore requires attention to hagiography, institutional records, regional histories and the changing relationship between Sikh and Sanatan Dharma communities rather than relying on a single origin story.