Mardana is the counter-example to every reading of Sikhism as a Hindu reform sect. He was a Muslim Mirasi — a hereditary bard from a caste that made its living at other people's weddings — from Nanak's own village of Talwandi, and he travelled with him for close to thirty years, playing the rabab while Nanak sang. The janamsakhis do not idealise him: he complains about hunger, gets frightened, and asks awkward questions, which is much of why the stories work. Two of his own saloks are in the scripture. His descendants, the rababi families, were the hereditary musicians of the Harmandir Sahib until 1947, when Partition removed almost every Muslim from Indian Punjab and the rababi tradition was effectively broken — a loss that Punjabi musicologists on both sides of the border have spent the last two decades trying to document and revive.